chapter 6

The Troubled State of Irrigation in Southwestern Saskatchewan: The Effects of Climate Variability and Government Offloading on a Vulnerable Community

Jim Warren

Introduction

Irrigation has facilitated the development of agriculture in many of the world’s drier regions. It is often associated with areas where agricultural production would be difficult or impossible without the water resources and infrastructure that allow for the delivery of water to land that receives inadequate precipitation to support crops. Similarly, in areas such as the Palliser Triangle, the driest region in the Canadian Prairies, where precipitation can be unreliable, irrigation purportedly allows for crop production in those years when rainfall is scarce. The ability to irrigate in a region that experiences periodic severe droughts might reasonably be considered to be the consummate adaptation to drought. However, the experience of farmers and ranchers in the southwest corner of Saskatchewan demonstrates that investment in irrigation infrastructure alone does not always ensure drought resilience.

The history of irrigation in this region underlines the importance of context when considering the utility of various strategies for enhancing drought resilience. In Chapter 5 on min till in this volume, we observe how the adoption of new farming practices and machinery has reduced the impact of drought on crop yields and soil health in the context of dryland annual field crop production. The adoption of min till practices was attributed in part to the adaptive proclivities of dryland farmers and local machinery manufacturers. However, climate and soil conditions in portions of the southwest corner of Saskatchewan are frequently different from those areas where min till farming is predominant. In the southwest, cattle ranching is the dominant agricultural activity, partly because local conditions are frequently considered too dry to facilitate dryland crop production. Thus, the adoption of grazing-based agriculture stands as one of the principal long-term adaptations to drought in the region. Dry conditions also limit the ability of ranchers to produce dryland hay to feed their cattle over winter. Irrigation is attractive since irrigated hay land typically produces yields that are 200% or more above those available from dryland hay production. Furthermore, irrigation supposedly ensures that hay crops will not fail due to the moisture deficits normally associated with agricultural drought.

Notwithstanding the purported drought resilience available through irrigation, the fortunes of irrigation agriculture in Saskatchewan’s dry southwest have been frustrated by three consecutive decades of hydrological drought—reflected in low streamflows and reservoir levels. From 1979 until 2010, there were several years when irrigation farmers in the southwest of the province struggled with reductions in the amount of water available for irrigation and, in some years, had to contend with a total lack of water (RCAD 2012: 23–29; Warren and Diaz 2012: 124–49, 322–30). The changing availability of water illustrates the impact of a significant reduction in the value of natural capital available to ranchers in the region.

Infrastructure improvements, which promised to compensate for reduced water availability in the 1990s and 2000s, have not been made (Warren and Diaz 2012; PFRA 1992). The effects of this irrigation infrastructure deficit have been exacerbated by the Canadian government’s decision to end its six-decade history of financial and technical support for irrigation infrastructure in southwest Saskatchewan. It is uncertain whether the necessary investments in infrastructure enhancement can be made without support from senior government. This situation reflects a significant decline in the institutional capital available to producers in their efforts to deal with drought.

The experience of irrigators in Saskatchewan’s southwest presented in this chapter also demonstrates how understanding drought through the lens of appropriate definitions (as discussed in Chapter 1 of this volume) is beneficial in appreciating its impacts on communities. The previous chapter on min till shows how changes in tillage technology moderated the impacts of agricultural drought under dryland farming conditions. However, we find that irrigated forage production in southwest Saskatchewan is primarily vulnerable to hazards associated with hydrological drought, such as low streamflows and reservoir levels. Indeed, there have been many years in which well-timed precipitation allowed for normal grazing and average dryland farming yields in the region, yet at the same time irrigation activity was reduced. Later in this chapter we will see how the failure of a government support program to extend assistance to producers under a 2010 drought support program was in part a failure to adequately consider the effects of hydrological drought on forage production.

The previous chapter emphasized the resilience-enhancing benefits of a culture of innovation on the capacity of dryland farmers to adapt to drought. That process demonstrated the importance of human capital for communities adapting to drought. The innovations associated with min till were attributed in large part to local farmer innovators and machinery manufacturers on the Prairies. These innovations were not driven primarily by the institutions and agencies of government. While governments occasionally supported the adoption of min till, they also put barriers in the path of innovators in the form of crop insurance penalties.

In the case of irrigation in southwest Saskatchewan, government agencies assumed responsibility for most infrastructure development after the 1930s (SIPA 2008a, 2008b; Saskatchewan AgriVision 2004). Systems that had been developed by farmers and ranchers without government assistance in the first decades of the twentieth century were largely absorbed into the government-managed irrigation projects. The assessment presented in this chapter suggests that government involvement, while necessary for the creation of many projects, did not require producers to engage in self-reliant innovation to the same degree as their dryland counterparts. Some observers suggest that this may have contributed to an unhealthy dependency, which is now inhibiting the development of producer-driven solutions to the region’s irrigation problems. Producer reliance on government support for irrigation is especially troublesome today, as Canada’s governments reduce financial support for primary agricultural production.

In summary, this chapter describes how drought resilience of irrigation farmers in southwestern Saskatchewan has declined due to a combination of forces, including hydrological drought, infrastructure deficits, poor system management, low cattle prices, rising input costs, and the unwillingness of senior governments to provide ongoing support for irrigation. It also suggests measures that could enhance the coping capacity of irrigators in the region. Furthermore, it contends that the mixed success of irrigation in the region underlines the importance of incorporating long-range climate records and forecasts into adaptation planning.

The chapter relies on a substantial store of ethnographic field research data produced in association with the Rural Communities Adaptation to Drought (RCAD) project (RCAD 2012) and the Institutional Adaptation to Climate Change project (IACC 2009), and collected by Warren and Diaz (2012).

Historical and Climatic Context

When the Canadian federal government responded to a succession of severe droughts on the Prairies during the 1930s, the development of irrigation infrastructure was one of the pathways it took to increasing the drought resilience of farmers. In 1935, a new federal government agency, the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (PFRA), was established to ameliorate the combined effects of a succession of years that featured low prices for farm commodities and crop failures due to drought (Gray 1967; see also Chapter 8 by Marchildon in this volume). Over the course of the next six decades, the PFRA developed and operated 11 irrigation projects in southwestern Saskatchewan, providing irrigation opportunities for hundreds of farmers and ranchers. However, in 2007, the PFRA informed the producers who rely on these projects that it intended to abandon its irrigation responsibilities and turn the project infrastructure over to the irrigators (Warren and Diaz 2012: 322–30). The impacts of that departure are described later in this chapter, following a brief overview of the development of irrigation agriculture in Saskatchewan and Alberta.

Irrigation before PFRA

Prior to the megadroughts of the 1930s, farmers, ranchers, and farmland speculators had developed a number of individual (single farm) irrigation systems as well as larger, multiple-user projects (Warren and Diaz 2012: 245; SIPA 2008a, 2008b; Saskatchewan AgriVision 2004). Two natural conditions prompted development of irrigation systems on the Canadian Prairies. First, these systems tended to emerge where conditions were driest—areas such as the Palliser Triangle, where even in years when moisture conditions were average, crop yields were low compared to less dry portions of the Prairies (see Chapter 8 by Marchildon in this volume). Second, development relied on the availability of readily accessible source water. An area with an especially dry climate adjacent to a reliable stream was the most likely sort of neighbourhood to acquire an irrigation system (SIPA 2008a, 2008b; Saskatchewan AgriVision 2004).

Agricultural pioneers on the Prairies of what would become southern Alberta had access to several reliable streams originating in the Rocky Mountains and their foothills. In southern Alberta, farmers and ranchers choosing to irrigate sometimes developed individual private systems, but more often, they partnered with neighbours to share the cost of constructing and maintaining the necessary “works”—the infrastructure required for irrigation such as dams, reservoirs, canals, and ditches. Real-estate speculators, including the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), also invested in the development of multiple-user irrigation projects. The CPR anticipated that the availability of irrigation would attract immigrants and traffic to some of the drier regions traversed by its rail lines. As the surrounding communities became settled, the railway’s irrigation infrastructure was transferred to producer-operated district irrigation associations (Warren and Diaz 2012: 245; Brownsey 2008; SIPA 2008a, 2008b, 2000; Saskatchewan AgriVision 2004).

Irrigation developed at a much slower and more erratic pace in the section of the Prairies that became the province of Saskatchewan. In the drier regions of Saskatchewan, where investment in irrigation made the most agronomic sense, reliable supplies of source water were far less abundant than was the case in southwestern Alberta (SIPA 2008a, 2008b; Saskatchewan AgriVision 2004). Exceptions included lands transected by the South Saskatchewan River and streams originating in the Cypress Hills. One of the first multiple-user irrigation projects in Saskatchewan was developed in 1903 by the Richardson and MacKinnon families along Battle Creek between the Cypress Hills, where the creek originates, and the boundary with the United States (SIPA 2000: 8, 9).

The creation of the PFRA facilitated a significant increase in irrigation development on the Canadian Prairies. Federal funds and engineering expertise were directed at expanding and intensifying irrigation activity in Alberta and Saskatchewan. In Alberta, new project areas were brought on-stream with PFRA support, including those near the communities of Rolling Hills and Brooks (Gray 1967: 199; see also Chapter 8 by Marchildon in this volume). From the late 1930s on through the 1940s and 1950s, the PFRA built dozens of dams and reservoirs in Alberta and Saskatchewan, along with 11 flood irrigation projects in the dry southwestern corner of Saskatchewan (SIPA 2008a; 2000).

Most of the PFRA’s irrigation projects in southwestern Saskatchewan were supplied by streams originating in the Cypress Hills. Flows on these streams were assumed to be reliable enough to support irrigation, and until 1979, they essentially were (Warren and Diaz 2012: 124–49, 322–30). Streamflows in the southwestern corner of Saskatchewan are considerably smaller than those that supplied irrigators in southwestern Alberta. Consequently, the total area irrigated in southwestern Saskatchewan was much smaller than in Alberta. The difference in the scope of irrigation activity in the two provinces has persisted to the present. Approximately 1.3 million acres of land is irrigated in Alberta compared with just 350,000 acres in Saskatchewan (SIPA 2008a, 2008b; Saskatchewan AgriVision 2004).

As far back as the 1930s, it was widely assumed that the amount of irrigated land in Saskatchewan would expand exponentially if infrastructure was developed to provide farmers with access to flows on the South Saskatchewan River. Since that river originates in the Rockies, its flows are less vulnerable to drought than streams that originate in the Palliser Triangle. PFRA planners supported by powerful political champions of Prairie agriculture envisioned a massive dam and reservoir project on the South Saskatchewan River as a means to launch much larger irrigation projects in Saskatchewan (Herriot 2000; Archer 1980). Construction work on the South Saskatchewan River Dam project (now Gardiner Dam and Lake Diefenbaker Reservoir) began in 1959, and by the early 1970s, infrastructure was in place to facilitate the development of Alberta-size irrigation projects in Saskatchewan. By the close of the 1980s, over 20,000 acres of land were under irrigation in the Outlook area (SIPA 2008a).

Nonetheless, irrigation proponents were disappointed in the rate of irrigation uptake by farmers who had access to Lake Diefenbaker water. There was far more water and irrigation infrastructure available for use in the Lake Diefenbaker area than farmers willing to use it. Low uptake was attributed, in part, to the fact that irrigation works associated with Lake Diefenbaker were located in an area that straddled the northern boundary of the Palliser Triangle, where moisture conditions allowed for the production of acceptable crops using less capital-intensive dryland methods (Suderman 1966).

Notwithstanding the disappointing growth in the number of farmers irrigating, the Lake Diefenbaker projects provided irrigators with highly reliable water supplies. Producers were essentially able to apply as much water as they wanted whenever they wanted it. This was not the case for the PFRA projects in the southwestern corner of Saskatchewan (RCAD 2012; Warren and Diaz 2012).

The PFRA Projects in Southwestern Saskatchewan

Following construction of the infrastructure supporting the PFRA’s projects in southwestern Saskatchewan, individual producers were encouraged to purchase flood irrigation plots on approximately 10,000 available acres. Purchasers would be required to pay an annual fee for the delivery of water to their plots. Under normal operations, water would be delivered twice annually—allowing participants to harvest two irrigated hay crops per year. The PFRA retained responsibility for the maintenance of system infrastructure, including dams, reservoirs, ditches, and gates. As well, PFRA employees performed “ditch riding” functions—managing the canals, ditches, and gates that distributed water to each participant’s plot.

As of 2010, approximately 300 producers had plots on the PFRA projects or on projects reliant on PFRA infrastructure—there are approximately 1,200 irrigators in the whole of the province (Warren 2013; SIPA 2008a, 2008b; Saskatchewan AgriVision 2004). Individual plot sizes on the various projects supplied by PFRA infrastructure in the southwest range in size from as little as 20 acres to 320 acres.

Map 1. Irrigation districts in the Palliser Triangle

Sources: The boundaries of the Palliser Triangle were derived from Spry (1995).
The location of irrigation districts in Saskatchewan were derived from Thraves et al. (2007: Plate 39). The location of irrigation districts in Alberta were derived from Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development (2013).

Irrigation was a welcome development in the dry southwestern corner of Saskatchewan. During drought years, such as those experienced in the 1920s and 1930s, it had been virtually impossible to grow winter feed for the region’s beef cattle herds using dryland methods. Not surprisingly, interest in irrigation was relatively high; there were more producers requesting access to water for irrigation than there was water to allocate. As of today, streamflows in southwestern Saskatchewan are deemed fully allocated, whereas only 11% of the water available for use in Lake Diefenbaker is being used (Warren 2013: 214). In the southwest, irrigation appeared to provide a welcome assurance that feed could be grown locally, even during especially dry years. And from the early 1950s until 1979, the projects generally met producers’ expectations.

Map 1 locates the multiple-user irrigation projects and districts in the Palliser Triangle described above.

The Impact of Three Dry Decades

The year 1979 marked a major turning point in the operation of irrigation agriculture in the southwestern corner of Saskatchewan. It was the first in a succession of years extending to 2009 when the availability of water for irrigation became unreliable (RCAD 2012; Warren and Diaz 2012). It was the last year that irrigators on three of the largest projects in the southwest (the Consul, Vidora, and Eastend projects) could count on two full water allocations per year. PFRA managers determined that there simply was not enough water available in streams and reservoirs to flood fields twice per season. Making matters worse, in some years there was only enough water available to irrigate half the available land once per year on some of the projects. Worse yet, there were some years during the three-decade period when water supplies were too low to allow for any irrigation at all. The inability of producers to irrigate all of their land twice per year and the complete lack of water in some years had significant economic implications for the region’s ranchers.

Comments provided by a rancher who relies on irrigated hay for overwintering her cattle reflect those of most RCAD interviewees who rely on PFRA irrigation infrastructure:

When Cecil and I were first married, we used to get two full irrigations. And we’ve been married since 1977. Now we’re lucky if we get to irrigate half our land once a year. Last year we had no irrigation at all and we had just a single half-irrigation during each of the four years prior to that. The problem is there’s just been no water. Cypress Lake [reservoir] was drained down to where we couldn’t pump from it last year. It used to have a lot of water but the weather has become drier and the lake doesn’t provide adequate storage, because it is so shallow. There has been less snow and less runoff—we haven’t had two full irrigations since 1979 . . . So the end result of reduced irrigation is that we’ve been buying feed. And we’re pretty well at the end of our rope with that option. You can’t sustain a cow-calf and backgrounding [feeding calves over their first winter] operation down here if you are buying feed. The prices you pay for the feed and having it hauled don’t match what you get at the market for your cattle . . . We probably spent $30,000 on feed last year. If there was any profit to be made with the cattle, that pretty well used it up. And we’re not alone. I mean, everybody who counts on irrigation down here is using every strategy they can think of to make ends meet. They’re trying to get the banks to increase their operating loans—just to try and get through to next year. (Warren and Diaz 2012: 126)

The principal culprit identified by irrigators and government water managers was a multi-decadal decline in the depth of the region’s annual winter snowpack, which resulted in reduced spring runoff and streamflows. However, irrigators and water managers also identified system design and management flaws as contributing factors. By the mid-1980s, irrigators and PFRA officials had concluded that the development of additional reservoir capacity could solve much of the problem produced by drier conditions. During the 1980s, PFRA engineers worked on plans for three major infrastructure projects to increase water storage capacity. These included a new dam and reservoir on Battle Creek, a new dam at Cypress Lake Reservoir, and the enlargement of the Eastend Reservoir on the Frenchman River. As of 2013, the only project to proceed to completion was an enhancement of the Eastend Reservoir. However, that project fell short of the original design specifications, resulting in minimal water supply benefit for irrigators (Warren and Diaz 2012: 328).

The seriousness of the problem varies between projects and the various streams with which they are associated. RCAD respondents reported that a few individual irrigators along the Frenchman River were able to irrigate at least once per year every year between 1979 and 2010. At the other extreme, some irrigation systems on the south slope of the Cypress Hills rarely provided water for two irrigations over the three dry decades. One of the RCAD respondents with a privately owned and operated irrigation system described this situation:

We have a 70-acre parcel of land . . . that is irrigated in theory. In the 20 years that Dad had it he only missed irrigating one year—just one year without water. After Lou and I took it over in 1974 there have only been about four years when we have had enough water to irrigate it . . . Yes, there were only four or five years out of 35 years that we got enough water to irrigate that piece. That is no kidding. That is how things have changed. There hasn’t been any snowpack to speak of for a lot of winters. It is as simple as that. (Warren and Diaz 2012: 115)

Irrigators were also critical of ineffective management of streamflows on the part of the Saskatchewan Watershed Authority (SWA) and PFRA water managers. RCAD respondents reported that allocation management was haphazard. There were people who regularly irrigated without having an official allocation or having to pay for the water they used, while at the same time, there were irrigators who received no water at all despite making annual infrastructure upkeep payments (Warren and Diaz 2012: 135–37). Irrigators questioned the competence and capacity of senior water managers located in distant cities to supervise the water management decisions of PFRA employees located onsite at the irrigation projects. Producers also suspected that provincial and federal water managers were far more committed to meeting treaty obligations requiring that 50% of the flows on transboundary streams be available to the United States than they were to supporting Canadian irrigators (Warren and Diaz 2012: 26–30, 124–141, 322–30).

The Challenge of Uncertainty

Irrigators on the PFRA projects were presented with additional frustration and uncertainty in 2007 when the PFRA announced it intended to transfer responsibility for its irrigation projects to patrons effective 2017. Patrons were concerned that a number of infrastructure components were in need of upgrading and wondered if they could afford to make the necessary enhancements. They also wondered how they would be able to finance system improvements, such as the three new dams that had been planned by the PFRA in the 1980s and 1990s (Warren and Diaz 2012: 124–49, 322–30; PFRA 1992). In addition, the PFRA informed patrons that when they assumed ownership they would become legally responsible for any environmental cleanup associated with the projects that provincial or federal environmental authorities might require. This prospect was troubling given that many of the irrigation works built by the PFRA incorporated creosote-treated timbers. When the works were constructed, creosote was not deemed as environmentally harmful as it is today. Some irrigators worry that the cost of environmental rehabilitation could exceed the actual value of the existing works. Furthermore, the economic condition of the area’s agricultural producers has been compromised by successive years when they have been required to purchase feed due to irrigation restrictions. Problems with the irrigation systems coincided with perennially increasing input costs and years of depressed cattle prices, including the price collapse associated with the 2003–7 bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) crisis.

According to several RCAD respondents from Saskatchewan’s southwest, insult was added to injury in 2010 when they discovered they would not be eligible for assistance under a federal-provincial drought relief program. The program was intended to assist producers affected by drought in parts of southeastern Alberta and southwest Saskatchewan in 2008–9. Apparently, government officials applied standard agricultural drought indices to determine which municipalities had suffered drought. As was discussed in Chapter 1 of this volume, agricultural drought is closely associated with low soil moisture conditions, especially at the time of seeding and early crop development. Apparently most dryland farmers in the southwest had received adequate moisture at the right time. Irrigation agriculture in southwest Saskatchewan, on the other hand, principally depends on accumulations of snow over winter and a well-timed runoff. Since hydrological conditions in the southwest did not enter into the program eligibility equation, irrigators did not receive drought support despite the fact that many of them were unable to irrigate in 2009.

An RCAD respondent commented on the apparent irrationality of program eligibility requirements and the frustrations felt by producers:

I can tell you that we’ve had problems getting senior levels of government to recognize that we’ve been affected by drought in this area. This latest drought assistance program [2010 Canada-Saskatchewan Pasture Recovery Initiative] didn’t include producers from RMs 51 and 111 [the RMs in the southwest corner of the province]. After four years of restricted irrigation you think we’d have been included within the drought disaster area. Going into this year they didn’t think we were going to be able to irrigate anything again. We had no water whatsoever [in 2009] and still we weren’t included. (Warren and Diaz 2012: 127)

This situation underlines the importance of applying the appropriate definitions of drought and understanding how drought affects producers using different production models. There is probably no one-size-fits-all model that will improve drought resilience in all contexts. Indeed, the economic success of agricultural producers using different production models on the Canadian Prairies is often at cross purposes. For example, when grain prices are higher than average, dryland farmers can generate higher-than-average gross incomes. However, higher grain prices often translate into lower calf prices for ranchers since the cost of finishing cattle to slaughter weight (by feeding them grain) increases. Similarly, there are occasions when dryland farmers may experience drought (perhaps due to low springtime precipitation), yet at the same time, irrigation agriculture can operate at near optimal levels. Again, reservoir levels often depend on factors such as winter snow accumulations or precipitation occurring outside the Palliser Triangle along the east slope of the Rockies. If dryland producers across a wide portion of the Palliser Triangle experience drought-induced crop failures due to low early growing season precipitation, there can be shortfalls in the supplies of commodities such as livestock forage and feed grain and a corresponding spike in prices. If irrigators are still able to water their crops during such a drought, they can take advantage of the associated price increases.

Chapters 13 and 14 in this volume, which discuss drought in Chile and Argentina, similarly describe how drought can sometimes produce both winners and losers depending on local conditions and the production models involved. In Chile, below-average moisture conditions can improve some fruit qualities desired by certain grape growers while causing harmful yield reductions for others. In Argentina, improved irrigation has mitigated the impact of drought for irrigators at higher elevations while at the same time causing adverse effects for downstream goat ranchers.

Another frustration for irrigators in the southwest is criticism of the agronomic and hydrological practices used on the projects. Government agrologists and water managers, as well as irrigators, operating on the larger districts associated with Lake Diefenbaker are generally critical of flood systems, seeing them as wasteful of water. Furthermore, the projects in the southwest had been situated on land that was suited to gravity-flow flood irrigation (the principal irrigation method available at the time) but did not necessarily have soils that were optimally suited to irrigation. Consequently, hay yields on the PFRA projects tend to be lower than yields obtained by irrigators in other areas where mechanical pivots apply water on better-suited soils. In conjunction with the widespread adoption of sprinkler pivot irrigation in most of western Canada in the 1970s and 1980s, agronomic best practices evolved to suggest water should be conveyed from its source to the most appropriate soils available.

Irrigators from the southwest have responded to critics of their flood systems and soil conditions:

Sure, we don’t have the best land in the world, but we’re still getting a lot more production out of it than we would if it wasn’t irrigated. We feed a lot of cows in the wintertime out of this project [Eastend project]. People count on it. Just think about how much dryland it would it take to replace all that irrigation production in a dry year . . . Right now, our project works off gravity. Mother Nature’s doing all the work. So I wonder if they take that into account when they say flood irrigation isn’t environmentally friendly. If we went to pivots we’d be using a whole lot of energy and that leaves a footprint too. Currently, the energy footprint for this system is about zero. I think that’s a reasonable trade-off; we might be using more water than we would with pivots, but we’re not consuming any electricity. (Warren and Diaz 2012: 325, 327)

One of the most daunting issues for irrigators on the PFRA projects is that the SWA has not yet agreed to transfer the water allocation currently awarded to the PFRA to the producers should they agree to assume ownership of the projects (Warren and Diaz 2012: 324). Producers face the prospect of taking over projects in need of costly infrastructure upgrades (and potential environmental cleanup costs), with no assurance that they will be allocated the water required to irrigate. Irrigators are uncertain about precisely why the allocation has not been guaranteed. Some suspect it is because provincial water managers are reluctant to endorse flood irrigation on suboptimal land. Others imagine that provincial authorities are reluctant to become involved because the province does not want to incur additional financial responsibilities. The uncertainty has led some producers to argue that the PFRA should simply buy out existing irrigators, compensating them for paying premium prices for irrigated land that the PFRA is no longer prepared to irrigate (Warren and Diaz 2012: 138–139).

The Return of Snow and Rain

Three decades of relatively dry years were followed by a year of record flooding in the Cypress Hills region in 2010. Indeed, since the spring of 2010, snowfall and runoff levels have increased, and area reservoirs are full. Unfortunately, the 2010 flood damaged irrigation works supplying irrigators on the northern slope of the Cypress Hills. A PFRA weir essential to the operation of the Maple Creek irrigation project washed out and, as of 2015, has not been repaired. No flood irrigation has occurred on the Maple Creek flats portion of the project since 2010, although above-average precipitation from 2011 to 2014 has allowed ranchers to produce hay using dryland methods. The PFRA was disbanded in 2010, and officials from other sections of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada now have responsibility for the projects. Officials from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada have not indicated whether the government will replace the weir prior to transfer of the system to the producers. Irrigators who offered to hire their own contractor to repair the weir were informed that this would not be allowed since Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and Saskatchewan’s watershed authority would still require that any repairs would have to be managed according to government engineering parameters, which the locals were apparently deemed unable to meet (SSFIG 2013). Yet the government agencies concerned have not, as of November 2015, offered to provide the necessary engineering support. This is an instance in which the irrigators endeavoured to develop their own self-reliant, innovative response to their circumstances but have been prevented from doing so by government.

The Changing Role of Governments

From the mid-1930s until just recently, Canada’s federal government subsidized the development and maintenance of irrigation on the Canadian Prairies. That being said, the PFRA’s longstanding involvement in irrigation in southwestern Saskatchewan was something of an anomaly. The management of major projects in Alberta, and the Lake Diefenbaker projects, which initially received considerable federal financial and engineering support, were turned over to provincial authorities and irrigator associations decades ago. As the level of financial and technical support available from the federal government waned, provincial government support was stepped up—particularly in Alberta. The Government of Alberta has entered into long-term funding agreements with irrigation district associations. Under the current agreement, the irrigation districts receive 50% or more of the funds required to upgrade system components from the province (Warren and Diaz 2012: 279; Saskatchewan AgriVision 2004: 10–11).

In Saskatchewan, support from the province has been less generous and less dependable. A number of prominent observers contend that the lack of consistent financial support from the province has retarded irrigation development in Saskatchewan, particularly in the Lake Diefenbaker area (SIPA 2008a, 2008b; Saskatchewan AgriVision 2004). On the other hand, as noted above, some observers attribute the slower than anticipated pace of irrigation development in the Lake Diefenbaker area to the fact that moisture conditions in that region generally allow for the production of acceptable crop yields under dryland methods.

Proponents of irrigation enhancement and expansion in Saskatchewan maintain that the economic benefits associated with increased crop production and the development of added-value food processing and livestock feeding associated with more densely concentrated irrigation agriculture far outweigh the initial investment in infrastructure made by governments (SIPA 2008a, 2008b; Saskatchewan AgriVision 2004). The Alberta government apparently agrees and continues to make significant investments in irrigation infrastructure. The high level of added-value processing and employment associated with Alberta’s irrigation districts is interpreted as evidence of the economic multiplier effect that concentrated irrigation agriculture can generate. Saskatchewan’s governments have behaved more erratically. Some governments have actively promoted the expansion of irrigation, only to be followed by new administrations that were less enthusiastic (SIPA 2008a: 4; Saskatchewan AgriVision 2004: 125).

Supporters of expanded irrigation in Saskatchewan, including the Saskatchewan Irrigation Projects Association (SIPA) and Saskatchewan AgriVision Corporation—an agri-business think tank—contend that increasing the amount of irrigated land in the province from the current 350,000 aces to 500,000 acres (with the increase occurring primarily in the Lake Diefenbaker area) would generate a benefit-cost ratio of 14:1. It is assumed that a government investment of $2.9 billion in new infrastructure would generate direct and indirect benefits totalling approximately $60 billion (SIPA 2008a: ii). SIPA contends that the multiplier effect of additional irrigation would generate tax revenues that would more than offset the government’s investment.

A 1991 PFRA study by Kulshreshtha (1991) assessed the economic return on the federal government’s investment in the irrigation projects in southwestern Saskatchewan and indicated that the projects have not generated the revenues required to fully offset costs. Kulshreshtha (1991: i) reports that even when ancillary benefits such as the use of water by urban municipalities and for recreation are taken into account, the projects have not paid for themselves. He identifies a benefit-cost ratio of 0.85. That being said, Kulshreshtha’s analysis does not consider the possibility that low economic productivity on the projects could be significantly enhanced by additional investment in infrastructure. According to the irrigators, increasing reservoir capacity would have resulted in higher yields and revenues over the relatively dry 1970–2010 period. Notwithstanding the modest net deficit he identified, Kulshreshtha underlined the importance of the PFRA projects to the sustainability of cow-calf ranching and communities in southwestern Saskatchewan. This argument is echoed by participants in the projects.

The Impacts of Offloading on the Irrigation Community

The decision by the PFRA to abandon its irrigation responsibilities is just one example of a wider pattern of declining federal government support for Prairie agriculture and the offloading of responsibilities onto provincial governments and producers. In 2010, just three years after the PFRA announced that it was giving up its irrigation responsibilities, the PFRA itself was disbanded. And, in 2011, the federal government informed the provinces that it would cease operating the community pastures and tree nursery formerly managed by the PFRA. Federal officials have indicated that the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta and/or pasture patrons (as is the case for irrigation project patrons) have the opportunity to operate the pastures if they wish but without financial support from the federal government. A concern for pasture patrons and irrigators in Saskatchewan is that the provincial government has been reluctant to assume responsibility for the ongoing operations of the pastures and irrigation projects. This reluctance is evidenced by the SWA’s (since renamed Saskatchewan Water Security Agency) failure to promise that the water allocations will be awarded to the patrons.

Irrigation project patrons are worried that without greater government support the projects could cease to operate. The loss of access to irrigation is a daunting prospect for the irrigators who rely on it for winter feed. It could also accelerate the decline of the few urban communities that survive in the southwestern corner of Saskatchewan. One of the irrigators interviewed by RCAD project researchers expressed concern over the potential loss of access to irrigation:

Without irrigation many of us would simply not be able to survive as cow-calf ranchers. Maybe we could survive by switching to straight grazing operations. Sell off our cows and run calves raised by someone else on our land as yearlings but that would involve a big reduction in a rancher’s income. Irrigation is one of the few things that has kept Consul [the only remaining village in Rural Municipality #51] going… I don’t know how they expect us to survive down here. There aren’t that many of us left and if we can’t irrigate there will be even fewer of us. (Warren 2013: 241)

Journalist Sheri Monk, who frequently writes on issues affecting agriculture in southwestern Saskatchewan, recently posted the following comments regarding the PFRA’s demise:

Whether intentional or merely the inevitable result of catastrophic policy decisions, the area [southwestern Saskatchewan] is being depopulated. Piece by piece, all the pillars of economic sustainability are being removed. Sure the federal government may be motivated by their economic ideology, but it’s the people who are going to suffer for it. Even the staunchest libertarians will admit that maybe it wasn’t the government’s place so many decades ago to create the framework and infrastructure for the PFRA projects, but now that it’s here, ripping it away from the people who have built generations of lives around it is criminal. (Monk 2013)

Some government water managers suggest that the PFRA’s operation of irrigation projects in southwestern Saskatchewan resulted in counterproductive dependency and complacency on the part of patrons. For example, patrons did not incorporate their own district irrigation associations until after the PFRA announced its plans to transfer the projects. However, there are irrigators participating in several multiple-user projects in the southwest who have been operating without PFRA management and operational support for decades (these systems are referred to as provincial projects). The producers on provincial projects have always had their own district associations, and with the exception of some major works such as dams and reservoirs (which are managed by the province or PFRA), they look after the full cost of system maintenance and operations. It was not until 2008 that irrigators on the PFRA projects hired their own “ditch riders” (the technicians who manage water distribution on the projects).

Federal officials have reported that the government has been operating the projects in the southwest at a loss (Warren and Diaz 2012: 167). The fees that producers are charged for water and system maintenance do not cover actual costs. Irrigators counter that costs incurred by the PFRA include unnecessarily high head-office staff costs, redundant local employees, and gold-plated engineering and construction costs. Furthermore, the inconsistent delivery of water and the relatively low yields achieved on some projects warrant fees that are somewhat lower than those paid by irrigators on more reliable projects. Indeed, some irrigators interviewed held that some of the PFRA’s charges were inordinately excessive. One respondent noted that the PFRA charged participants on the Middle Fork project a system maintenance fee in years when no water was available for irrigation, and no one from the PFRA appeared to have even visited the project over the course of those years (Warren and Diaz 2012: 144, 145).

Some producers speculate that if patrons were required to invest more of their own money in system improvements, they might recognize the value of making yield-increasing improvements on their plots. Indeed, PFRA and SWA officials, as well as some producers interviewed in association with the RCAD project, held that many patrons on the PFRA projects were not regularly renewing hay stands (by reseeding) or applying fertilizer in conformity with widely recognized best management practices.

Notwithstanding the potential benefits of increased producer investment, patrons find themselves locked into a classic “Catch-22” scenario. Given decades of low yields and restricted irrigation, their bottom lines have been stressed. Yields and water availability would probably improve if they invested in new infrastructure and more intensive plot management. But given their experience under existing economic and hydrological conditions, they lack the financial resources required to improve their situation. For example, the construction of a dam across the Cypress Lake Reservoir would allow for deeper, more drought-resistant water containment and would most likely allow for more efficient conveyance of reservoir water to the Consul, Vidora, and Govenlock irrigation projects (Warren and Diaz 2012: 30). Current cost estimates run at up to $4 million. Shared among the approximately 100 irrigators on these projects, the investment per irrigator would be $40,000. Given that some patrons are incurring significant costs to purchase feed when irrigation is restricted (over $30,000 annually for some producers), $40,000 to ensure more regular irrigation might appear to be a good investment. However, this conclusion assumes that producers have access to the required capital. Based on the RCAD interviews, it is apparent that some lack either the savings or access to credit that would be required. And borrowing money to enhance irrigation infrastructure in the absence of a guaranteed water allocation is something that both lenders and borrowers would no doubt finding troubling.

Conclusions

The research suggests a number of preconditions need to be in effect before significant system improvements can be entertained. First, patrons need assurance that the water allocations currently held by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada will be transferred to the district associations. Second, the transfer of assets to the irrigators should be free of pre-existing environmental cleanup liabilities. If the federal government is prepared to consider its investment in infrastructure a sunk cost, it seems reasonable to treat environmental costs similarly. Third, to make the sort of infrastructure improvements that could enhance the drought resilience of the projects, the producer associations will require access to government grants and/or the sort of patient financing that would forego significant upfront cash contributions by producers (many simply do not have the cash or borrowing capacity today), allowing for the repayment of loans over an extended period of time. However, even with these measures in place, uncertainty about future climate conditions presents planning challenges. Some irrigators see value in “doubling down” on past investments in infrastructure by increasing reservoir capacity in anticipation of the next dry period. But, should future climate conditions exceed past patterns of variability, it is possible that enhanced reservoir capacity could still prove insufficient (see Chapter 3 by Wheaton et al. in this volume). Under this sort of scenario, making additional investments in infrastructure would be a costly mistake.

At the same time, some proponents of expanded irrigation in Saskatchewan take a more optimistic view, speculating that climate change could bring a warmer and longer growing season to the Canadian Prairies. Under irrigation, such conditions could facilitate production of higher-value crops such as corn, sugar beets, and soybeans, which are not particularly well suited to current climate conditions in Saskatchewan (SIPA 2008a, 2008b; Saskatchewan AgriVision 2004). This line of thinking underlines the idea that a changing climate could generate beneficial as well as adverse outcomes depending on the social and geographical context being affected—a notion that Hadarits et al. touch on in Chapter 13 of this volume.

What we are reasonably certain about is that climate change forecasts currently indicate that the Palliser Triangle region will experience more intense droughts in coming decades than have been experienced over the course of the twentieth century (Sauchyn 2010; St. Jacques et al. 2010; Sauchyn and Kulshreshtha 2008; Lemmen et al. 1997; see also Chapter 3 by Wheaton et al. in this volume). Notwithstanding forecasts based on anthropogenic global warming scenarios, paleoclimatic research suggests that the droughts experienced in the Palliser Triangle during the period of agricultural settlement (from approximately 1885 until today) were a virtual walk in the park compared to some of the severe, decades-long droughts of preceding centuries (Sauchyn 2010: 35–37; see also Chapter 2 by Sauchyn and Kerr in this volume).

Planning for the future of irrigation in southwestern Saskatchewan would clearly benefit from additional climate change research that reduces the level of uncertainty (RCAD 2012: 48). Nonetheless, some features of the planning problem seem reasonably certain. For example, most observers assume it is relatively safe to predict that severe multi-year droughts will occur over the course of coming decades, making irrigation both more necessary and more difficult (especially given current infrastructure limitations). It is also reasonable to predict that intense precipitation events, such as the Maple Creek flood of 2010, could reoccur over coming decades. Infrastructure needs to be designed and/or modified accordingly (see Chapter 3 by Wheaton et al. in this volume). Academic assessments of the vulnerability of communities to climate change indicate that resilience is a function of the levels of adaptive capacity available to a given community (Department for International Development 2009; IPCC 2001). The RCAD project found that agricultural communities in the Palliser Triangle had considerable access to certain forms of adaptive capital—forms of capital that tend to be far less accessible to people in less developed parts of the world. Notwithstanding these regional advantages, irrigators in the southwestern corner of Saskatchewan are experiencing an increase in vulnerability. Their coping capacity has been impacted along three principal dimensions. First, changing climate conditions have frustrated their ability to irrigate. Second, they have experienced a decades-long economic struggle, whereby increases in the income they receive for the products they produce have often lagged behind increases in input costs. Indeed, difficult economic conditions in agriculture have contributed to a significant decline in the number of farmers and viable communities in southwestern Saskatchewan (Diaz et al. 2003; Stabler and Olfert 2002). The Rural Municipality of Reno, where three of the PFRA irrigation projects are located, is the largest rural municipality in Saskatchewan, yet it has only 154 farms, down from over 300 in the 1970s (RCAD 2012: 52–53). Long-term trends have more recently been exacerbated by drought and the BSE crisis. These challenges have reduced the amount of capital available to producers for withstanding losses caused by climate hazards and for investing in resilience-enhancing infrastructure. Third, Canada’s federal government has walked away from its longstanding commitment in support of irrigation in southwestern Saskatchewan, and the provincial government is apparently reluctant to assume responsibility for the functions abandoned by Ottawa.

The decline in government involvement in management and financial support is symptomatic of a wider process of offloading on the part of Canada’s federal government. Under Prime Ministers Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin, and Stephen Harper, the role of the federal government in supporting agriculture on the Canadian Prairies has significantly declined (Warren 2013; Conway 2006; Diaz et al. 2003). Conway (2006), among others, contends that Canadian federal and provincial governments, including New Democratic Party governments in Saskatchewan, have increasingly become associated with neo-liberal economic maxims since the 1980s (see also Brown et al. 1999). A symptom of the neo-liberal turn of governments is the wide acceptance of balanced budget orthodoxy, low taxes, and minimal government, which has limited government’s willingness to fund new initiatives and has encouraged cost cutting across a range of programs, including the decommissioning of the PFRA in 2013 and the elimination of the Canadian Wheat Board’s marketing monopoly in 2012 (see Chapter 7 by Fletcher and Knuttila in this volume).

Oddly enough, in supposedly conservative Alberta, the provincial government has responded to declining federal government support, ensuring that the province’s irrigation sector remains viable. Governments in Saskatchewan have typically been far less active in supporting irrigation agriculture (SIPA 2008a; Saskatchewan AgriVision 2004). Without stronger support from the province and/or the federal government, it is questionable whether irrigation projects in southwest Saskatchewan can survive, let alone prosper.

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