CENTRAL BUTTE, Sask. – Bookkeeping is her occupation, but irrigation is her preoccupation.
And for Sandra Bathgate, it all begins with the vivid memory of her childhood, on the day her father drilled a deep well and the water came shooting out of the ground.
“I could see what irrigation does,” she said.
“I can see the potential of what irrigation can do in this province.”
That potential, said Bathgate, includes expanding the types of crops grown, ensuring a crop even in drought years and creating spin-off jobs from related processing activities in rural communities.
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As well, irrigation tends to attract younger progressive farmers looking for alternatives and higher cash crops, she said, which bodes well for sustaining rural communities in the future.
“The benefits to the community are far greater than to the irrigator,” said Bathgate, citing input requirements for crops such as irrigated potatoes that can run up to $2,000 an acre.
Bathgate was a founding board member with the then-fledgling Saskatchewan Irrigation Projects Association more than a decade ago.
After completing three terms on the board, she was asked to remain as the group’s secretary-administrator.
“It was hard for me to walk away from it,” she said. “I’m not out there in the field but I have a feeling for what they’re doing.”
Bathgate lives in Central Butte near the family farm where she grew up, which her father still operates.
She manages the books for the family’s millwork business and a cattle feeder co-operative and serves as administrator for the Grainland, Thunder Creek and Riverlake irrigation districts.
She has little doubt that she would be irrigating if she farmed today. Although she and her husband don’t own a farm, her husband works on one and rents grain land.
Bathgate believes the irrigation industry needs a long-term funding strategy and “one-door shopping” for interested farmers.
“There’s a lot of hoops,” she said of what it now takes to get irrigation onto farmland.
Irrigators need a central agency that can help them get started, crop insurance to lower their risks, access to three-phase power to operate the pivots, financing to launch such improvements and improved roads to transport products to market.
Bathgate said long-term programs and funding would stabilize the industry, help complete infill on existing projects and provide incentives for younger farmers to get into the industry.
“Somehow we need to have government and people with more than a four-year mandate.”
Bathgate said it is also important to keep research and development centres focused on irrigated crop production, such as the irrigation diversification centre in Outlook, Sask.
As well, she said it’s important for the irrigation projects association to continue sharing information with similar organizations in Alberta and Manitoba.
The association past-president James Harvey said Bathgate’s knowledge and questioning nature has proved a big help to the association.
“She knows what’s going on with irrigation and how it affects a lot of families in the areas around (Diefenbaker) Lake.”
