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In July, three years after Cowichan Valley farmer Katy Ehrlich applied to get her farm's well licensed, provincial officials visited her farm. "They had an order with them that said that we had to stop diverting groundwater for commercial purposes. And we were like shocked," said Ehrlich, who had thought everything was fine with her application for a non-domestic groundwater licence, a requirement under the B.C. Water Sustainability Act (WSA).
The Bolduc family has been farming and ranching near Stavely, Alta., for generations and this year will be remembered for its scorching heat, lack of rain, parched fields, reduced yields and water restrictions. It's something their family and many others have seen before, but it doesn't make it any easier as they look to harvest whatever they can from their barley, alfalfa and corn fields.
Sean Stanford's wheat farm just south of Lethbridge, Alta. falls within the far left corner of Palliser's Triangle — an expanse of prairie grassland encompassing much of southeast Alberta, a swath of southern Saskatchewan, and the southwest corner of Manitoba. The area is named for explorer Capt. John Palliser, who in 1857, famously declared the entire region a wasteland — so hot and arid that no crops would ever grow.
Most canola crops are grown without requiring irrigation in the Prairies, the nation's agricultural heartland spanning nearly 1.8 million square kilometers (695,000 square miles). But the region is sensitive to droughts, whose frequency and severity have been steadily increasing. In this region, explains Phillip Harder, a hydrology researcher at the University of Saskatchewan, in Saskatoon, "crop production relies on water that accumulates throughout the year." In other words, snow that accumulates over winter and soaks into the ground during the spring thaw. But howling winds over fields that stretch as far as the eye can see have been blowing away much of that snow of late.
Sunshine Coast brothers Gord and Geoff Sloan wrestle a 9,000-litre water tank — the size of a small car — into position behind a rural home in Sechelt, B.C., until the empty metal cavern tips into place with a resounding boom. The new owner of this massive metal tank hopes rain will fill it with enough to supply months of water for plants. The brothers' year-old business, RainCatchers, is booming as more hot, dry weather arrives after a parched spring in a region dogged by drought for the past few years.
Much of Alberta and Saskatchewan relies on water from melting snow in the Rocky Mountains for replenishment of waterways in the summer. But John Pomeroy — director of the University of Saskatchewan's Coldwater Laboratory in Canmore, Alta. — told CBC that this past winter provided one of the lowest snowpacks he's seen. The snow also melted about six weeks earlier than anticipated, fuelled by the unseasonably warm weather.
In 1967, when the Gardiner Dam backed up the South Saskatchewan River to create the 200-km-long Lake Diefenbaker in the middle of Saskatchewan, the plan was to irrigate 500,000 parched acres. To this day, the giant T-shaped lake — named after Saskatchewan politician and Canada’s 13th Prime Minister, John George Diefenbaker — irrigates only 100,000 to 150,000 acres. “The Dief” is, one might say, an untapped resource, a ’60s-era feat of engineering stuck in vaporization mode. (It is said the lake loses more water to evaporation each year than it gives up for crop watering.)
Researchers at the University of Lethbridge (U of L) have received funding for new work focused on potatoes. Through the Agriculture Funding Consortium, the U of L researchers are getting nearly $250,000 to improve sustainable potato production. They will do this by looking at ways to reduce disease in the field and in storage, and to increase production while minimizing the use of resources.
The Alberta government is partnering with the Municipal District of Acadia, the Special Areas board and the Canada Infrastructure Bank to continue planning a large-scale irrigation project for east-central Alberta. A total of $7 million is being invested in a two-year study that will explore the feasibility of the project, which proposes to increase water storage by pumping water from the Red Deer River into new reservoirs.
The Milk River looks great right now, according to farmer Elise Walker. It's high, it's flowing and it's fairly clean. For now, she and about 30 to 40 other families in southern Alberta can continue using the water to irrigate their farms, helping to get them through a very dry spring. In fact, Walker already started to irrigate her 607 hectares (1,500 acres) of land at the end of March — the earliest ever.
