LAKE Diefenbaker is an oasis in the semi-arid plains of central Saskatchewan. When playing on its beaches or sailing its sun-glinted waters fed by the South Saskatchewan River, you’d never know a merciless drought grips farms and ranches to the west.
The reservoir created by Gardiner Dam provides water to irrigate about 100,000 acres, protecting them from the neglect of Mother Nature this year. But the full potential of the dam and reservoir, completed in 1967, has never been realized.
The plan was to irrigate more than half a million acres. But the last significant addition to the irrigated area was in the 1980s and almost no development has taken place in the last 15 years.
Read Also
Agriculture needs to prepare for government spending cuts
As government makes necessary cuts to spending, what can be reduced or restructured in the budgets for agriculture?
A recent announcement of $5.3 million to make water available to another 15,000 aces was welcome, but far more must be done, as was documented in a major report released late last year by the Saskatchewan Irrigation Projects Association (SIPA).
It outlines the benefits of adding about 500,000 acres to the Lake Diefenbaker irrigation region and developing other water sources to eventually have two million acres irrigated in Saskatchewan.
The cost would be about $3 billion over 20 years, which is expensive but would generate many billions more in farm income and value-added processing.
The benefits of irrigation are clear from the experience of many agricultural regions, including that of neighbouring Alberta whose southern irrigation zone not only stabilized agricultural production from the vagaries of rainfall, but created a value chain that includes feedlots, slaughter plants, crop diversification, potato, sugar beet and canola processing plants.
This has generated thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in economic activity.
The four percent of Alberta croplands that are irrigated generate about 14 percent of the farm cash receipts in the province, 11 percent of the agricultural value-added and 19 percent of the direct agricultural employment. Developing such an irrigation zone in Saskatchewan would have similar benefits of increased stability, new jobs, income and economic activity.
The SIPA study says the water investment could lead to another $12 billion of household income, $33 billion of gross domestic product, $58 billion of sales and over 288,000 person years of employment.
Irrigation would also mitigate the effects of global climate change that are expected to generate more volatile prairie weather, including more frequent droughts.
Irrigation would help preserve farm incomes during droughts and reduce payouts from government funded crop insurance and farm income support programs.
The one benefit of waiting to develop Lake Diefenbaker’s potential is that irrigation technology has improved so that irrigators today use only half the amount of water per acre that they did in the late 1960s.
The SIPA report says the reservoir has more than enough water to accommodate 600,000 irrigated acres. The requirements would use only one fifth of the available water supply in a year of extreme drought and only three percent in a wet year.
The time for expanded irrigation development has come. We have the water and the world needs more food. Only the political will is lacking.
Bruce Dyck, Terry Fries, Barb Glen, D’Arce McMillan and Ken Zacharias collaborate in the writing of Western Producer editorials.
