As a result of improvements in irrigation water-use efficiencies, irrigation districts will expand by approximately 12 per cent in 2025, Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development wrote in a 2014 report.
Sask. 'moving forward' with $1.15B Lake Diefenbaker Irrigation Project despite incomplete feasibility study
Robert Halliday, a leading water resource engineer who has extensively studied the Saskatchewan river basin, says the lack of transparency has him worried.In April 2021, the province asked the accounting firm KPMG to do a feasibility study on the Lake Diefenbaker Irrigation Project, which is aimed at providing expanded irrigation to mitigate the effects of climate change.
He's also concerned that the government has, so far, failed to do any detailed work examining potential environmental impacts. He pointed out that spending $1.15 billion to irrigate 90,000 acres means a per acre cost of $12,778, or more than $2 million per quarter section. Back in 2020, the province announced the three-phase $4-billion Lake Diefenbaker Irrigation Project, which it said would irrigate 500,000 acres of farmland.
In a news release this past March, Premier Moe announced that the province was "moving forward with constructing the early works of the first 90,000 acres." Late last month, the provincial government awarded a $12-million contract to engineering firms Stantec and MPE to design and cost-out Phase 1. "I suspect that the ones that would benefit tend to be larger farms and more prosperous farms," he said.Aaron Gray, a farmer and board member of Irrigation Saskatchewan, said his organization will insist that anyone tapping into this new system pay a "significant" fee.
He said irrigation is beneficial for farmers, though the value varies wildly from year to year based on his own experience. Patrick Boyle with the Water Security Agency says the feasibility study has to be adjusted because Ottawa has not offered grant funding for the irrigation project. However, much of that value was based on the assumption that water flows generated by the project would spur the construction of two new potash mines in the area. The mines would, hypothetically, contribute about $14 billion of the total $20 billion in new tax revenue.
"In terms of irrigation, we are 100 years behind Alberta," Jillian Brown. from the Saskatchewan Irrigation Producers Association, said in a 2023 Canadian Agri-food Policy Institute report.Boyle said more irrigation will lead to better yields and more specialty crops, which will mean higher GDP for Saskatchewan and presumably more tax revenue.
Dave Marzolf said this seems overly optimistic, given that so little of the currently irrigated land in Saskatchewan is being planted with potatoes or other specialty crops. Marzolf said he wonders if this project is just a pricey way of subsidizing a handful of farmers to improve their wheat or canola crop.
Aaron Gray says irrigation will transform the economy in the Lake Diefenbaker area, creating spinoffs that will benefit the whole province.
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