Season 2, Episode 9: The History of Irrigation in Southern Alberta
Co-hosted by Bob Morrison with Professor Shannon Stunden Bower and Jordan Christianson
Season 2, Episode 9, is also the first episode of a mini-series. This first episode introduces a series on water, featuring co-host Bob Morrison and guests discussing irrigation, environmental stewardship, and future challenges. Co-Host Bob Morrison is a retired planner with expertise in water management. Shannon Stunden Bower rejoins us (Season 1, Episode 18), an associate professor of history specializing in environmental history, and Jordan Christiansen, former chairperson of the Special Areas Board are our guests. The conversation delves into the historical and current challenges of irrigation, the role of government agencies like the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (PFRA), and the socio-economic impacts on rural communities. You receive highlights like the importance of defining public interest and efficiency in agricultural practices, considering indigenous perspectives, and balancing economic and environmental needs. The discussion underscores the need for collaborative efforts and thoughtful use of state resources to achieve sustainable development.
Introductions to Bob Morrison, Jordan Christianson, and Shannon Stunden Bower
Jenny (00:00):
Welcome to the Gravity Well Podcast. I am Jenny Ami. I host the Gravity well to celebrate and share the stories of people looking to empower others with the knowledge and skills required to reestablish stability in our communities and ecosystems. Our mission is to work through heavy issues in conversation and process in order to lighten the load. I acknowledge that I live on the traditional territories of Treaty seven, and in Metis districts five and six, the treaties in self-governance agreements established by indigenous peoples were created to honour the laws of the land, maintain balance with nature by giving back and uphold reciprocal relationships. This knowledge and intention are what guide the Gravity Well conversations. I ask for genuine dialogue, real hearts, and openness to different perspectives. This is your invitation to find common ground with me. This podcast is dedicated to the natural world, our children, nieces, nephews, grandchildren, and all future generations.
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Thank you all for being here. I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve got a co-host for the next series of conversations that I’m hosting on The Gravity. Well, we are talking about water in Southern Alberta over the next hopefully seven or eight weeks. Why are we talking about this? We’re hoping to reach out to the general public. We want to help people that are involved in water management, have people understand the work that you do. That’s what we have for two guests with us today, and as well as an introduction of the series of conversations. We want to cover irrigation, the environment, stewardship, and the future. Just to remind you both, it’s very nice to see you again, Shannon.
I’m a geophysicist by background. Jordan and I worked in the oil and gas industry for 22 years, and I’ve been looking out at it from the outside now for three. And water has become a central concern of mine. The way we use water with respect to resource development, the concerns around continuing that in some regards, and then also just looking at limits and where we need to start thinking differently in Southern Alberta. That’s my introduction. Bob, if you wouldn’t mind taking a little bit of time telling people a bit about yourself and what brought you to this conversation with me. Thank you.
Bob:
Sure. I’m Bob Morrison and I’m a planner now retired by profession and I’ve worked in transportation, water management, and since my retirement in municipal issues here in Calgary. And I’m still very interested in water, even though that’s in my past career because it’s becoming increasingly important for Southern Alberta and the rest of the world. There is a need out there for serious education about where we are, how we got there, and where we need to be going in the future because we can take many directions towards the future. And those have to be made with a lot of understanding, again about what our situation is and how we can make it better. The important thing for me is how to keep the things that are good and then deal with those things that maybe do not work so well. Thanks, Jenny, back to you.
Jenny:
Excellent, thank you. Again, this conversation is focused on irrigation. Really pleased to have Shannon back. Shannon has a, well you can get into it for us, but has just recently written a book all about the history of agriculture, and if anybody has been following the show, Shannon was a part of our conversation last year in episode 18. We spoke about drought in the prairies and the history of that issue over the last hundred years or more. And Jordan is from the Special Areas, he’ll be introducing himself shortly. And we also reached out to a few other people that we would’ve liked to have represented in this conversation. The Alberta Irrigation District Association, the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation, as well as the Ministry of Environment and Protected Areas. Bob’s going to fill us in a little bit on some of those spaces that we would like to include in this conversation, but let’s start with your introductions please. Shannon, would you mind reintroducing yourself or our audience please?
Shannon:
Thank you. Of course. It’s a pleasure to be here. I’m an associate professor of history at the University of Alberta. I work in the environmental history of the Canadian Prairie West with particular attention to issues related to water. Too much, too little questions of equity.
Jenny:
Excellent. And Jordan, please your background as well.
Jordan:
Thanks Jenny, and I appreciate the invite to join in on this conversation here this morning. I’m Jordan Christiansen. I was the chairperson for the Special Areas Board up until the end of March. It’s kind of a unique role. Special areas is a unique organization in the province. We’re kind of around Hanna Concert, oy. We really function as a rural municipality, but we kind of have a dual role. Part of our primary role is provision of municipal services. We also act as a public land manager, there’s about two and a half million acres of public land within our region that the board also manages, and we lease that out for various uses throughout the Special Areas, and that’s kind of where this chairperson role sits. It is a provincial appointment through an ordering council by cabinet. As I said, I was the chair for the past 10 years. My term expired after 10 years, we’re in a transition right now, but I still am currently with Special Areas doing just some project work and helping the board with some of the other priority initiatives their interest in pursuing at this point in time. Glad to be here.
Jenny:
Thank you. Excellent. Glad to know you have 10 years of leading this work that you have a broad experience, I’m sure, to share with us today. Okay, let’s let Bob do a little bit of an overview for us. Here we go.
An overview of Irrigation in Southern Alberta
Bob (6:03):
Okay. This is because the people from the Irrigation Districts Association and from the Provincial Government weren’t able to join us today. This is a very brief cursory overview of irrigation in southern Alberta. Irrigation is big business in southern Alberta, and this chart shows how irrigation compares to the other uses in the basin. I can’t use my pointer, I’ll just have to talk about it. If you look at the light blue area, that is what irrigation is about, and it’s broken up into four basins in the south here, the Red Deer sub-Basin, which flows through Red Deer and then on into and by the Special Areas. Then the Bow basin, which goes through Banff Canmore, Calgary and on down towards Medicine Hat the Old Man basin, which is in the Lethbridge area. And then there’s a small chunk of the basin called the South Saskatchewan Sub-Basin, which starts when the Bow and the Old Man join up near Medicine Hat.
The distribution of use is very much different in the basins. You can see in the Red Deer irrigation accounts for only 21% of the total allocation, whereas in the bow and the old man, you’re talking about 80% of the water that’s allocated goes to irrigation, and then you’ve got a small chunk of it down in the Medicine Hat area. The big difference though is what’s in red there. The total allocation you’ll see in the Red Deer Basin, the total allocation is like 270,000 acre feet, but you move to the bow and it’s got 2 million acre feet of water allocated. The old man is similar at 1.8 million, and then they’ve got a little bit of allocation down in the sub basin that’s just down in Medicine Hat. Even though those circles look the same when you talk about acre feet, the old man and bow circles would be much larger.
Now, in terms of where you find this irrigation, there are two kinds of irrigation in southern Alberta. One is through irrigation districts, and that’s the little map on the left hand side. There are 13 of those irrigations and they’re all marked in those coloured areas, whether it’s kind of grey up by Calgary, where the Western irrigation district is kind of that brown area, which is the Eastern irrigation District, the yellow area running kind of way across the prairies there, which is the St. Mary’s Irrigation District. They are actually organized to provide irrigation to farmers. They have their own works, many of which are supplied by provincial projects, provincial waterworks. Then on the right you can see individual irrigation licences. You can see them spread all the way through there and you really can’t see it very well, but kind of in the right hand side in the center and above that, that’s where the Special Areas is.
You can see some private irrigation in the Special Areas. These private irrigators generally just take water straight out of the river. Sometimes they are associated with irrigation districts in some fashion, but aren’t necessarily rate payers. You’ve got an extensive amount of people who in one way or another are dedicated and depend upon irrigation. Now, in terms of the total acreage overall, there’s about 1.8 million, maybe a little bit more because this is from 20 23, 1 0.8 million acres of irrigation, which as Jordan said, two and a half million of acres that the Special Areas Board manages. The irrigated area in total in southern Alberta is coming pretty close to that magnitude of land. If you look at the bottom, that green line going across, hopefully it showed up green on your screens, that is private irrigation. Most of the irrigation in terms of the acres irrigated is coming from these irrigation districts as opposed to private irrigation. That gives you a general sense of what irrigation is like in the Southern South Saskatchewan River Basin. It’s kind of giving the end of discussion before we actually talk about how we got there, but I figured people needed that kind of perspective. Thanks.
A History of the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Program (PFRA)
Jenny (10:35):
Okay. Shannon, your latest book, transforming the Prairies is a history of the PFRA. That is the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration. The PFRA’s total overall objective was to make adjustments to agriculture primarily in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Can you describe for us the agricultural challenges that led to the formation of the PFRA?
Shannon:
Sure. The Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration was a federal government agency that was created in the mid 1930s, 1935, to deal with a range of difficult circumstances in the agricultural Prairie West. These difficult circumstances included the consequences derived from extremely low prices for farm commodities like wheat related to the international economic crisis of the Great Depression, the problems in the 1930s that led to the creation of the pre FRA also included the effects on farms and farmers of lower than anticipated rates of precipitation, dry conditions, what people in what’s now Southern Alberta saw as dry conditions. And they also included things like the accumulating consequences of unsustainable farming practices that were part of the early effort to establish colonized agriculture in the Prairie West at the end of the 18 hundreds and into the 19 hundreds. Another aspect that I think is worth considering when we’re thinking about southern Alberta is that southern Alberta is part of a dry land landscape, and dry land landscapes are evident globally. It fits into this international set of environments that share certain features. And one of the global commonalities among dryland environments is that they’ve often been misunderstood and misused typically by colonial powers without a rich understanding of these environments and their affordances. Some of the circumstances that led to the PFRA are really specific to this region, but they also play into broader global patterns that I think are worth appreciating.
Jenny:
Yeah, absolutely. And do you see that happening in different waves, Shannon? Meaning today it seems that we, as Bob just showed in terms of that map, that we’re still growing in terms of our water use in an area that you would describe as a dry land landscape.
Shannon:
Certainly irrigation and various ways of trying to use water for agricultural purposes are part of efforts to adapt to seek something like compromise between these dry land landscapes and the goals of settler agriculture.
Jenny:
Right. Okay. Thank you for that. Okay, Jordan, for you, the collapse of dry land farming in the 1920s and thirties was particularly devastating in the areas around Hanna and Oyen, and it wasn’t just farmers that were going broke the entire economy and social structures were under threat. Can you outline the formation of the Special Areas as a response to that damage that occurred, please?
The Formation of the Special Areas and Comparisons to the PFRA
Jordan (13:35):
Sure, thanks Jenny. And I think you could just take the comments that Shannon had just made on the creation of the PFRA and really the creation of the Special Areas board, I’d say in many ways parallels the creation of that federal agency, the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration. I think one of the key differences was that obviously the Special Areas Board, it’s a provincial crown agency, but it was created in response to much of the same issues that really resulted in the formation and the creation of the PFRA. But really what had happened was in the early days of European settlement in Western Canada, you had a federal government that had these grand ambitions to have settlers come and homestead on every quarter section of the west. And that was really in blatant disregard to the recommendations of a gentleman named Captain John Palliser, who when he surveyed the area in the late 18 hundreds, said that part of this area in southeastern Alberta that Shannon referenced as being extremely arid.
I think he clearly outlined to the federal government of the day that this area was really not, I think his quote was not suitable for mad nor beast, and he didn’t think that it should be settled. And the federal government’s disregard to that recommendation brought in thousands and thousands of European sellers. And in fact, the irony to me today in what is the current boundary of the Special Areas, our population actually peaked in the late 1920s, about 1929, and we had just about 30,000 residents in this area, whereas today we’re barely over 4,000 rural people. We add the populations of the urban settlements like the town of Hanna, the Village of Consort and Hanna, and then we have a couple other villages, Youngstown, veteran Empress. We might be at a regional population of about 10,000 within the area, but the population actually peaked here in the late twenties and then through successive droughts.
And then in the financial collapse of the 1930s, what had happened was that it created a situation where a lot of the settlers were going broke themselves, they couldn’t even afford to pay their property taxes at the time. Then that resulted in approximately 37, I’ll say rural municipalities or local governments, they couldn’t meet their cash obligations and they went into basically bankruptcy because they had no cash. At that point, in the mid to late thirties, the government created this organization to stabilize that region and they created the Special Areas board. And what they did was they took those 37 municipalities that had gone broke. And again, the area of the Special Areas has consolidated since the late thirties. It used to stretch all the way through Vulcan County north of Lethbridge. Now it’s kind of centered around the communities of Hanna, Consort, and Oyen, but consolidated those local governments into one governing organization.
They took all the land that had been taken back under tax recovery proceedings and basically gave that to the Special Areas board, and then all the provincial crown land that was in the region, they basically, I’ll say, loaned that to the board and said, here, take these land holdings just because of the air conditions is impractical for settlers to make a living on a single quarter section. The objective of the board was to create these larger farm and ranch units that were more sustainable and more economically viable by providing them with more land. It was really those conditions that led to the formation of the Special Areas. And again, we still exist as a provincial Crown organization with a dual role of providing municipal services, but still maintaining that other core function of being a public land manager and supporting producers in this area by providing leases and dispositions for public lands to carry out farm and ranch activities on. Again, like the creation of the PFRA and the Special Areas followed very similar trajectories, and they were in response to many of the same conditions.
Jenny:
That is fascinating. It’s fascinating to think the population was nearly 10 times the size that it is today, and to just imagine the collapse of society based on going in knowingly that it’s not going to succeed. That’s just fascinating. Bob, did you have any follow up before you lead into the next question? Yeah,
Bob:
And one thing the Special Areas didn’t have that a lot of Southern Alberta had was irrigation. There were big irrigation works that people had been trying to build. They weren’t terribly successful. Even the powerful CPR got out of the irrigation business, but there were works that the PFRA could actually manage in some fashion to rehabilitate to help those areas that had suffered through the twenties and the thirties. But I was interested in terms of the Special Areas, how they’ve changed over time. You’ve mentioned a couple things, but have there been significant changes or has the special area pretty much remained the same in terms of the way they govern the area?
Jordan:
I think Bob, I mean obviously we have evolved since the original act that we go back to as the foundation of how we were created goes back to 1938, and there have been modifications and some changes made to that structure. Generally, I would say though that again, our core role and function still remains the same. The board’s mandate is the provision of municipal services. Part of their duties and responsibilities is much like any other rural municipality. It’s roads, hamlet services, utility, water, wastewater, emergency services, parks, recreation, those types of activities that you’d see in other municipalities throughout the province. But then added to that, again, it is the public land management role. The board does have a group of staff that actively manages those two and a half million acres through agricultural dispositions like grazing leases to ranching operations. There still are some, I’ll say cultivation leases on arable farmland out there that producers farm annual crops on. And then we have all the industrial dispositions, mineral surface leases for oil and gas exploration south of Hanna, the Sheerness mine, where coal mining activities had historically taken place managing some of those dispositions on public lands. Really our core function remains the same, but obviously the way we do it and the priorities that the board has now in terms of the activities and how they go about governance have changed, I’ll say significantly over that time. But really the core foundation of our businesses is still the same.
Bob:
Now Shannon Jordan mentioned John Palliser, but there was another John out on the prairies back in the 1800s, a guy named John McCowan, and he was telling CPR and the federal government that this was the Garden of Eden out here, that agriculture was going to make it. It didn’t turn out that way, obviously. And then the PFRA had to step in, particularly in the southern part of the area. What were the key initiatives that the PFRA put in place to adjust? And that’s really what they were trying to do, adjust agriculture on the prairies.
Shannon:
Sure. The Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration was a sprawling agency that operated for many, many decades. It tackled a whole range of challenges and activities in that context. But in sort of the rush of the 1930s crisis, the PFRA worked directly with farmers in lots of ways to refine agricultural practices. And the PFRA also relied on expert input to assess what might be more likely to be viable in terms of these agricultural practices, and also to plan for what the agency hoped would be more prosperous and more enduring agriculture. In the Prairie West. Some of the agency’s best known early activities included the small water development program, which was basically a program through which farmers could access resources and support to undertake the creation of small scale water supplies like dams or dugouts, small reservoirs on their own property. Sometimes these were used for private garden irrigation.
Other early initiatives of the PFRA that are pretty important includes one that was most significant in Saskatchewan, the creation of what were called community pastures, government managed areas in which farmers could graze their livestock, both as a means of putting to productive use lands that were thought to not be suitable for ongoing annually cropped farm practice, but also in service to the ideal of more diversified agriculture that farms might prove more enduring and sustainable if they had both wheat crops and cattle. In this model. And in this period, some of the experts that I’ve already talked about working with the PFRA were involved in sort of assessing water resources and soil resources across the Prairie West efforts that underpinned later large scale projects that the PFRA would undertake, like the construction of St. Mary Dam in southern Alberta and later the construction of Gardner Dam, the Capel River Dam, and the creation of Lake Diefenbaker in central Saskatchewan. And both of these projects have really important links to ongoing irrigation practices in both these provinces and the PFRA did a bunch more stuff as you do if you’re an agency in operation for 80 years or so. But perhaps I’ll leave it there for now.
Jenny:
Okay, great. Just following up on that, Shannon, can you speak to them, there was fixing and adding new irrigation works is probably what the PFRA is most known for, if that’s right. And the PFRA believe that irrigators and their districts would be unable to afford on their own to cover the cost of building and operating, maintaining dams, canals, and other infrastructure. How did the PFRA respond to that challenge?
Shannon:
It’s hopeful here and hopefully this sort of expands a little bit of a productive matter on bit of the summary of irrigation that Bob started us off with. Irrigation in Alberta was already underway privately by the final years of the 18 hundreds by sort of the 1920s and 1930s. However, it had become clear that neither private irrigation, nor corporate irrigation undertaken by private for-profit entities like the CPR nor irrigation undertaken under the cooperative model, the drainage district model was likely to be viable as a standalone financing model. It was clear that if irrigation was going to continue to expand or even be pretty stable in its current form, public funds and public resources were going to need to be directed at irrigation. And after the creation of the PFRA in the mid 1930s, that became a vehicle to direct public resources or one of the vehicles to direct public resources toward irrigation in Alberta and in Saskatchewan primarily.
Bob:
Well now Jordan, you’ve actually got some irrigation now from the Red Deer River, I gather. Is it the Sheerness Dead Fish project? Am I getting the name right?
Jordan:
Yeah, that’s certainly one source of irrigation we have, Bob, and I’ll admit, I thought it was, I mean, I appreciated the invite to attend this. I thought it was maybe a little bit odd at first that Special Areas were invited to a podcast on irrigation and water management because we are not known for that, certainly in this part of the province. But I appreciated your introductory presentation into this conversation because as you’ve seen, there are a number of private licences held within this part of the province that support irrigation. One of the primary pieces of agriculture or of infrastructure that we see irrigation happening on out here is related to the, I’ll call it TransAlta’s, Sheerness generating station south of Hanna along Highway 36. As part of that infrastructure development in the early eighties, they had constructed a cooling pond, which was supplied by water via a pipeline out of the Red Deer River.
And in order to maintain operations in that facility, they had to flush a certain level of water through it just to maintain operating temperatures. Part of the planning around that was using some of that water that is moved through the cooling pond just to maintain temperature, and utilizing that for irrigation purposes. On the, I’ll say the back end of that facility, I think there’s about over 13,000 acres of irrigation that happen off of that. There’s infrastructure that’s built out from the sureness generating station. It supports a reservoir of, on the east side of Highway 36 along secondary highway five 70 called car side that then spills back into Berry Creek and then there’s irrigation along the blow down canal into Carolside and then off of Berry Creek downstream of that car side reservoir. And then we also have a number of irrigators within Special Areas and even into the MD Acadia that have water licences directly out of the Red Deer River, and they irrigate their operations right along the Red Deer River.
All told, that probably adds a few more thousand acres of irrigation within Special Areas. But every little bit helps and certainly we see those operations that have irrigation, very stable, again, very successful operations in terms of the farm and ranch unit that that’s supporting. All in all, I would suspect, I don’t know the exact number, but if you say there’s 12 to 13,000 acres tied onto the Sheerness system, probably a few more thousand acres off the Red Deer River on private licences and other, as Shannon talked about the PFRA program building catchment dams just kind of cross the landscape. There might be a few private licences there. Maybe we’re at 20, 25, 30,000 acres of irrigation within Special Areas. Certainly not to the extent that we’ve seen development in some of the other irrigation districts in southern Alberta, though
Bob:
Very small, yes. But has it made much difference in terms of the economy, do you think?
Jordan:
It has. Again, I kind of mentioned that maybe in passing there that the operations that do exist out here that have access to irrigation, again, very stable successful operations and in their own right to the point where actually we start to see some of the operations within Special Areas. They are, I don’t want to say moving south, but they are going down into, say the EID and trying to access irrigation land and other irrigation districts so that they can have stable feed sources for their operations. They’re usually going in there and buying irrigation and then growing hay, and that helps support their operations within Special Areas. There’s always demand for more irrigation on the Sheerness system. That group would certainly like to expand down there, but it is limited obviously, by water, and it hinges on the volume of water that now TransAlta would pump up into the cooling pond and then release through that blow down canal. And I’ll admit too that that’s maybe not necessarily the cheapest irrigation water. Obviously, if you’re familiar with Special Areas, it’s a vast, vast region in central Alberta. There’s great distances to convey water across, and we’re not often blessed by elevation either. Got to apply energy to move water uphill. That’s been part of the challenge here as well is just wrapping your head around some of those logistical challenges with moving water across landscapes.
Bob:
Now, you and Shannon have both mentioned the combination of growing the crops but also feeding the cattle, the community pastures, and having some hay for your cattle. That seems to be, and maybe I’m not right about this, and this would be too bad, we don’t have the people from the agriculture department. That seems to be one of the key reasons why people like irrigation is because there’s this, I don’t know, cross fertilization, maybe that’s not the right term in agriculture, but you’re growing the crops and then you’re going to be able to feed the cattle to much greater extent than you could if you were farming dry land. It’s also providing security in terms of having that hay available when it wouldn’t have naturally been available. Shannon, Jordan, am I heading in the right direction on that?
Jordan:
I think you’re onto something there, Bob. I can’t speak from a scientific analysis on this. I certainly think your comments are fair. I think it’s an evolutionary thing. I mean, you look at some of the mature irrigation districts in the south that have really gotten into the high value cash crops that potatoes, sugar beets like after they’re grown, and there’s a lot of processing that goes into them. I think with livestock feeding, and again, this is just my observation, I think it’s really probably easy for a first time irrigator to grow a barley crop on irrigation. And it’s just natural at that point because your production is, I mean obviously stable and greatly increased with water being applied at reliable intervals. Your production is great value and that it makes sense to maybe feed that to a beef animal. I think initially you kind of see where you get a lot of wins early on with that kind of value added.
But as irrigation develops and you start to see investment from secondary processing and value added food processing, that really creates other opportunities for higher value crops to be grown. And I think that’s an evolutionary thing. I think there is certainly a good mix there, and I think producers are savvy enough that in order for them to make ends meet, sometimes that’s just the reality of the economy. They’ve got to be chasing that dollar. If they can see an opportunity to grow barley and sell it to a feedlot or feed their own cattle, they’ll do that. If they see an opportunity to grow seed canola or processing potatoes or whatever, they will move into that. If it necessitates that, an economy scale economy thing,
Bob:
Or like the farmer who I heard about who was growing peppermint because it would be adding a lot of value and people wanted that.
Careful with Terminologies like Efficiency and Public Interest
Jenny (32:42):
Slightly different for you, but similar, Shannon is you examined the PRAs community pastor program and it ran into conflict with increased efficiency, agriculture efficiency and helped those who were trying to make a go of it on the land that was marginal in nature. How was that conflict managed, the conflict between community pastor programs and increasing agriculture efficiency? Did we see a disconnect between those two things with that program?
Shannon:
I suppose I’m curious about what we mean when we say efficiency in this context. Do we mean cheapness? Are we talking about minimizing the need for public investment to sustain these operations? When we think about community pastures, we can think about them as a means of using areas of land that are difficult to maintain under more intensive forms of agriculture. But we can also look at community pastures as repositories for biodiversity in a prairie landscape that’s increasingly hostile to forms of life that aren’t fed into streams of agricultural production. Community pasture lands provide opportunities for wildlife that has more difficulty navigating more heavily cropped environments to continue to flourish on the prairies or at least continue to hold on. I think there’s lots of scope for thinking really carefully about what we mean when we say efficiency, and also ensuring that our conversation encompasses the prospect of other goals for our public policy leavers.
Bob:
I went through that question to Jenny, my apologies. I was getting at what you got at in your book that with the PFRA, they were trying to get sub marginal land out of production in terms of growing crops and use it as community pasture, but they’d find that the farmers would have a good year and they’d want to use that sub marginal land and they really didn’t want to turn it over to a community pasture, that sort of thing. That’s what I was getting at when I threw that one to Jenny.
Jordan:
I think that one of the last really successful programs that the PFRA had was their perennial forage cover program where they basically paid producers to put marginal farm farmlands back into perennial forges. And I know that there was a lot of producers in this part of the world that took advantage of that, and for many years you’ve seen a lot of acres in permanent cover, whether it was agronomic, alfalfa, broome, whatever, but that really pushed a lot of those marginal lands back into perennial cover. And you’re seeing that now with the PFRA no longer obviously existing, and that program no longer existing where a lot of those lands through the, I’ll say the early two thousands were put back into perennial forges. They’re coming out of that perennial cover now and they’re being put back into annual crop production. And I think to me personally, that was a real loss when they scuttled the PFRA was just that perennial forage cover program because whether it was $20 an acre, I think if you seeded something more native, they maybe compensated more. But even that $20 an acre, it helped producers make that decision to get some of these marginal ads back into more consistent cover, whereas you’re seeing a lot of that come out right now.
Jenny:
Yeah, I think you raised such a great point, Shannon, when you spoke about define what efficiency is because I think there is a lot of assumption around efficiency being what we’re producing on the landscape rather than what can the landscape can sustain for us long-term based on leaving those key areas in place, which I’ve come to learn, I believe it was from you, Shannon, is that those marginal areas do serve the ecosystem long-term if they are left to be natural and allow that biodiversity and everything to stay in place. Just a follow up for you, Jordan, with farms becoming larger and larger, and you mentioned earlier the population has quite dramatically dropped from where it was today, but are we at risk of seeing more depopulation from this rather than what seems to be an increasing agricultural land base?
Jordan:
I wish I had a crystal ball for that question, Jenny. I don’t know if I could really give you a firm answer. I mean, I suspect yes. I mean, I do think that at some point there is a critical mass of settlement that whether you can drop below that threshold and still really function as a community. I mean, those are things that I wonder about often, but I think on the reverse side of that, the question is how big is, practically speaking, how big can farms actually get when you start seeing producers farm 25 or 30 or 45,000 or a hundred thousand acres, how big can they actually get? But yes, that is a real true issue I think, and I look at the example of my brain when you go back to the late seventies, early eighties when a family farm, they successfully farmed a thousand acres.
Then now you have farm operations, not all of them, but some of them might be farming 30,000 acres for example, that’s taking the place of 30 family farms in the hands of one single operation. I think it’s bound to change the landscape in terms of settlement and real depopulation that truly does have an impact. But I don’t know if I would go as far to say that rural depopulation is just strictly a function of farm size. I don’t believe that. I think it’s obviously another natural resource, primary production, oil and gas, all that stuff kind of feeds into it. I don’t think it’s just simply a factor of farm size. But yes, I think it does have an impact. Will it continue to have an impact? Again, I wish I had a crystal ball for that. I suspect in some ways it does, but I’m not sure where it actually ends up.
Jenny:
Right. I think, yeah, to your point, there’s been a lot of move to cities by younger generations. If their farms potentially have been bought up to bigger, not with the family anymore, then there’s a lack of reason for folks to stay there. That’s certainly one reason, but also just the motivation to be a part of other industries, period. I think that’s true as well. We were talking a bit about efficiency. Why don’t we try to get in a little bit more into that. Starting with you Shannon, what advice do you have in terms of managing the conflict between this concept of efficiency, let’s say efficiency for production? Let’s be specific and support the people who often through no fault of their own are not farming the best land. How do we help balance those things? Thank you.
Shannon:
Well, I suppose I was interested in studying the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration in part because I believe in the importance of deliberate state investment in supporting people, whether these people are farmers, whether they’re others, I believe in the role of state in contributing to the creation of spaces where non-human nature can thrive as well. I think there’s power when people work together through the resources of the state. I think it’s really essential that state investments reflect a really careful effort to consider the public interest and to levy state resources in ways that consider a range of factors. And one of the things that became really clear for me as I conducted my research on the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration, it’s sort of a case study of state lever through time, was that we haven’t always done a great job of thinking about what constitutes the public interest in a broad-minded way.
In fact, one of the findings of my work on the PFRA, one of the limitations in conceptions of the public interest that are really evident in the sort of work the PFRA did is the failure of that agency to adequately consider the interests of indigenous peoples and to accommodate the needs and perspectives of indigenous peoples that is dealing with that matter, dealing with the specific circumstances of indigenous peoples in the present, as well as the harmful legacies of the historical operation of colonial institutions like the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration is fundamental to productive ways forward. But I think there’s also a broader lesson here about the need to be careful about assumptions about what’s in the public interest and to really problematize that term. If we need to query what we mean by efficiency, I think we also need to be really careful about the goals we think we’re serving through these state agencies. I think it’s essential we work together that we use state leavers in appropriate and careful ways, but that we think really hard about how we’re doing so
Bob:
Well. And if I can segue on that, you talked about the indigenous people. It’s fascinating to see in your book that the labourers in the irrigation fields were to a fair extent. I don’t know to a great extent indigenous people along with other minorities now where they always treated well. But can you tell us more about their role in the history of irrigation?
Shannon:
Sure. Primarily here, the work that I’m aware of and that I’ve done pertaining to labour in the irrigated landscape is primarily focused on sugar beets. As Jordan was saying, sugar beets are one of these high value crops that can be really essential to trying to capitalize on some of the economic advantages of irrigation. Sugar beets need a lot of water. They also need a lot of work through the growing season. This is a really labour intensive crop. We’re talking about a period before the emergence of the mono germ sugar beet seed. These plants had to be tended at multiple stages in really onerous ways throughout the growing season, farmers looking to grow sugar beet needed to secure water, and they also needed to secure labour. This is beyond the sort of work that a family would undertake at sort of under its own auspices.
Certainly when we get to talking about the larger sugar beet operations and cheap labour at this time came in the form of indigenous peoples during World War II or in turn Japanese people. It came in the form of newly arrived migrants that were deliberately brought in by the CPR with sort of a go ahead from the Canadian state to help meet the labour needs in the 1920s of sugar beet operators. There was this reliance on irrigation water, but also a reliance on cheap labour. And I keep saying we need to think about these words in careful ways. Cheap labour sounds like a good thing, but of course, cheap labour means underpaid labourers. And this reliance on underpaid labourers has persisted into the mid 20th century right up to the present. As we get into the sixties and seventies, we start to see a reliance on sugar beet farms on labourers brought in under migrant worker streams. And this is a really difficult way to make a living working on a sugar beet farm in this context. When we think about people trying to make a living in these landscapes, we need to think about farmers. This isn’t an easy operation by any means. There’s a lot of things to balance, and I believe farmers do the best they can. We also need to think about the experiences of other people who moved in these landscapes who also had really difficult experiences in their own right.
Bob:
And that would extend up the supply chain because I’m sure the farmers many times think they’re underpaid because of who they have to provide their produce to and whether they’re getting value for their efforts.
Jenny:
Absolutely. Yeah, that’s another point that I learned from Chris Spearman. He was saying, and I’m not sure Jordan if it’s the same in the Special Areas, but that a number of farmers in Southern Alberta, or at least in the old man, have switched to potatoes because they found that the purchasers are consumers rather than single companies that potentially can corner the market and make those price points really difficult to maintain. Is that something that you’ve seen before? Leading into the same question to you, which advice do you have in terms of managing the conflicts between efficiency and supporting people? Did you want to comment on that? Are you seeing different crops in the area, in the Special Areas?
Jordan:
I’m going to say no, and I think that’s just a result of our location and distance to markets, Jenny. Our irrigators here are really focused on basically growing the commodity crops that they’re familiar with on irrigation or growing them to provide feed sources for their livestock operation, for them to diversify into potatoes or sugar beets or onions or whatever the high value market is. All practically speaking, it’s distance to market and getting to those processing facilities. I’d say some of the more diverse crops that we would see would be like a seed canola. Sun producers have dabbled in sunflower production and some of that, but generally you’re going to see alfalfa being grown on irrigation within Special Areas where they can get maybe two cuts of hay off that a year. They might be growing some Durham or hard grid spring wheat or whatever the case is, potentially barley for silage or hybrid corn. Again, for livestock feed, that would kind of be the extent of the, I’ll say the cropping rotation that we’d see in irrigation within Special Areas. I’m just really not familiar with anybody that would grow like potatoes or anything like that. I don’t know of that out here.
Jenny:
My ignorance. Thank you.
Jordan:
No, no, that’s totally a fair question. I mean, you would just assume that if there was irrigation, you would be chasing those high value crops, and I feel like a lot of producers out here, if they could find a way to access those markets, they would fully take advantage of that.
Bob:
Distance becomes important if you’re trying to serve a market.
Jordan:
Certainly does. Yeah, no, it really does. Bob.
Bob:
Now the Special Areas are involved in two proposals, as I understand it, to bring more irrigation to the Special Areas. You’ve got the Special Areas water project, and then in cooperation with the MD of Acadia, the Acadia Project. Can you talk a little bit about where people are hoping that will go?
Jordan:
Yeah, both of those are two separate projects, and the first one that you’ve mentioned, the Specialized Water Supply Project. That was really a project that was conceived, I’d say back in the eighties, and even some of the pre-planning around that, that probably happened even into the fifties and just after the creation of the PFRA and the Special Areas water supply project. There was a lot of work happening on it through the nineties and the early two thousands. PFRA was a strong partner and the planning and the design phase of that project, and the concept was about diverting water over the ridge, your river southwest of Stettler, around that Nevis area, and then moving it via a pipe kind into the headwaters of the buried Creek and the sounding creek, which would land kind of south of castor on the west side of Highway 36, and then using those kind of natural formations in the creek channels to then move water across the landscape.
That project was really more, I’d say about just getting secure water into the region. There wasn’t really a strong component of irrigation on it, and again, that was really a function of where the water was being moved to. I think there’s a lot of land within that Sounding Creek plain, the Berry Creek plain that is highly solonetzic soil. They’re really tough to irrigate. There are pockets of soils within those that are quite good quality for irrigation, but I would say they’re far and few between. On that specialized water supply project, maybe we could get to 30,000 acres of irrigation on that entire system. And it was an extensive project to move water across, again, large distances basically to the Eastern portions, especially areas from Stellar. It was just a tough project economically in terms of annual operations. And to Shannon’s point about allocating public funds to support some of this stuff, it got to be a really tough sell, I think, politically, to move that project forward.
Unfortunately, again, there was a lot of work that had gone into that by many, many people over the years. But just recently, the board had decided to pivot from that project and look at something that was maybe more, I’ll say, efficient use of water and resources. And actually in the, I think around 2020, we were approached by the province and the Canada Infrastructure Bank on looking at irrigation more regionally in partnership with the MD Acadia. The MD for years had been looking at their own kind of regional irrigation project on the southern end of their municipality, and they had kind of come up with a project of a boat, 27,000 acres of irrigation out of the Red Deer River, just kind of right along the Saskatchewan border south of Acadia Valley. We started doing work with them in 2020 to develop a broader project, and we looked at the entirety of Special Areas landscape on the md, and we did kind of narrow it down to those portions south of Acadia Valley down to the Red Deer River and then south of the Red Deer River through bylaws, soils that are, I’ll say, suitable for irrigation.
They’re good quality to irrigate, they make sense from a soils perspective. And then started looking at just the volume of water available in the Red Deer River. Again, Bob, you did an excellent job of framing that upfront of this conversation, like in terms of the existing allocations on the Red Deer River, not even in the ballpark as compared to the bow and the old man in terms of allocations out of there. There is water available in the Red Deer Basin, certainly not unlimited, but we started looking at all the future predictions in terms of water use on the industrial side, municipal use and demand for the municipalities along the reaches of the Red Deer River, and then looking how much water would really practically be available in the Ridge River for this project. Where we’ve landed is kind of a concept around about 108,000 acres of new irrigation within the boundaries of the MD Acadia and then south into Special Areas through that BYD loss area. It’s roughly not exactly, but about 50% within the MD Acadia, 50% within Special Areas on the full 108,000 acres on either side of the Ridge River.
Bob:
Well, you’re actually playing a role now, very similar to what happened in Shannon’s book about the South Saskatchewan project where the government walked, not necessarily walked away from it, but it became the local communities who had to start advocating for these kinds of things. Am I reading that right from your book, Shannon?
Shannon:
Well, if we’re talking about the South Saskatchewan Regional Plan in particular.
Bob:
Regional plan, sorry, I got the wrong term.
Shannon:
Yeah, no. That’s what we now know as Garner Dam, the Capella River Dam and Lake Diefenbaker in central Saskatchewan. This is a project that the PFRA had initially promoted. There were always people on either side of the issue. Over time there was a report of a Royal commission that was really negative on it, but Saskatchewan and Ottawa weren’t done with the project even after that. One of the interesting things in understanding the ultimate decision to proceed, I think, is that there were really strong community advocates around the project. There was an organization called the Saskatchewan Rivers Development Association that was looking to promote construction of water infrastructure of various sorts throughout this area of Saskatchewan. The primary leaders within that organization were representatives, rural municipalities, and sort of advocates for business people in these parts of central Saskatchewan. There wasn’t nearly as robust support for this sort of development from farmers.
That seems pretty clear in the historical record. In fact, the research I’m doing now to follow up on my study of the PFRA pertains to the irrigation development that hinged on the South Saskatchewan Regional Plan. And it’s really a story of conflict between the Saskatchewan government that had agreed as part of the 1958 governing agreement signed with Ottawa to proceed with the South Saskatchewan Regional plan. The Saskatchewan government committed to develop 50,000 acres of irrigation, and the farmers in the targeted area were like, no, we want to stick with our dry land model. We understand it is successful. This became a really sustained and intractable conflict, and I think we see that conflict around irrigation persists, certainly in Saskatchewan, if you’re following irrigation in this province at the time, the government, the provincial government is an advocate for further development of irrigation, drawing on Lake Diefenbaker, sort of a move to more fully realize the initial ambitions behind irrigation, hinging on this infrastructure. But there’s a lot of criticism about the economic viability of the project, and that contention really persists.
Bob:
Well, hydroelectric was a big part of that project. And was that what the business people were looking for is to be able to have that reliable energy supply?
Shannon:
Certainly, you’re absolutely right. This is a multi-purpose project that was intended to serve primarily irrigation and electricity generation. There were also ambitions to create recreational opportunities in this portion of Saskatchewan that was perceived to have relatively few, but irrigation itself was really understood as an essential economic motor irrigation. And this is part of the critique that dry land farmers who wanted to persist in dry land farming brought to bear on the project is that irrigation changes the form of agricultural production. It’s a really different model in terms of work. It’s a lot more expensive, you may get higher returns, but the investment is also sky high. That means your margin may not actually be all that different. You might have different sorts of problems than a dry land farmer, but your economic returns aren’t necessarily substantially better. Who does very clearly benefit from investment irrigation are the firms that are involved in construction. There’s opportunity for engineering and construction work that just otherwise wouldn’t exist. It can serve to change population distribution in ways that create opportunities for business of various sorts. Irrigation is often, or historically, at least, I’m far less expert in the present day. We can turn to Jordan for that or others. Historically it’s been seen as a really strong economic motor, but farmers who are skeptical often say, how much ends actually ends up in our pockets, and I think there’s reason to think hard about that question.
Key Takeaways
Jenny (57:00):
Agreed. Well, thank you guys. This has been a wonderful start to this conversation. I’m sure that we would love your input in the future conversations that we’re going to host at the end of these if that’s possible for you. But I would love to do just some closing thoughts and takeaways from each of us, especially if there’s anything that you would’ve liked to touch on that we haven’t. But I’ll just lead for myself. I really appreciate this concept of revenue versus income. I think really looking at how people are making money on the landscape for less inputs. I’m with you, Shannon, in terms of being concerned about a lot of moving parts making for potentially a lot of missteps and that final income for the end user, for the landowner or for the producer. And then also just this concept of public interest. I think this is something that we really need to investigate not only from a, you were mentioning businesses potentially being successful in this or construction systems, but maybe not the end user again, and then this concept of also truth and reconciliation coming into it, and are we really looking at how the land can be sustained and the more equitable for the people using it?
Thank you so much. I really appreciate all of that. I don’t know which one of you wants to start. Maybe I’ll let Bob, if you wouldn’t mind just giving some of your takeaways first before we let these two hit on anything that we missed.
Bob:
Fascinating and very informative discussion. I really appreciate it, and I need to be better about defining my terms. Certainly. Go ahead, Jordan.
Jordan:
No, I really appreciate the invite into this conversation. I’ll admit, at first I thought, well, maybe this is an odd fit for Special Areas, again, just because we’re not known as an irrigation hub, but certainly an organization and communities that have always pursued secure water. And again, we recognize what water does just in terms of stability and economy and security to the community. That’s always been a grand ambition of ours, and I’m glad that you’ve connected us, and I really appreciate Shannon’s insight into this too, because I’ve struggled with the history of the creation of irrigation in Western Canada and how it came to be. And I think when I look at the province of Alberta, we built a new irrigation district here in 70 years, and we’re trying to do that now, and it’s an interesting kind of context to build an irrigation district in 2025 with some of the exact issues that we have talked about here.
Jenny:
Go ahead, Shannon. You can close this off with your thoughts, please.
Shannon:
Goodness. Yeah, just appreciation for the perspectives that everybody’s brought to this. It is a pleasure to be in touch, Jordan. I hope we might have opportunities to continue sharing information. And Jenny and Bob, it’s great to be a part of this, I suppose. I mean, I’m the historian, I’m always about, let’s define the terms or what do we mean in this particular context. Forgive me as I do that again a little bit. I mean, I chose to study the PFRA as I’ve already said, because it was an interesting historical example to me of how we can use state resources to work together and serve public aims. And in the same way that we sometimes valorize notions of efficiency, we can also valorize notions of small government and we can valorize them because they seem more efficient, but we have the potential to use levers of government work toward bigger goals than we can pursue on our own. I think there’s a reason to think hard about the prospects for collaboration through these sorts of levers, that there’s real possibility, I think, for doing things better. And we should resist efforts to inappropriately dismiss those sorts of options, I suppose.
Jenny:
Yeah, let’s learn from what failed in the past and try to do things differently. And as Bob said, when we let off, keep the things that worked as well. Thank you so much guys. This is a wonderful start. I will end it there. We’ll be in touch soon, I’m sure, and I’m glad that we’ve connected with some new people in some new ways. Thank you.
Bob:
Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
Jenny:
It’s my pleasure. Thank you.
Bob:
Bye.