Ag 2024: the taps stayed closed when the skies opened up

By Cal Braid
Taber Times
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Before the 2024 growing season kicked off, the St. Mary River Irrigation District announced that local irrigators would be allocated eight inches of water per acre. The number was set at a bare minimum with the expectation that 2024 would be another dry year. The overall outlook was somewhat pessimistic, and the SMRID set its irrigation limits accordingly.

 However, adjacent districts can experience significantly different conditions. To the north, in the Bow River Irrigation District, General Manager Richard Phillips and team were seeing a different situation. BRID started out the year at 16 inches and raised it to 18 inches in July.

 Both the SMRID and BRID are part of the Alberta Irrigation Districts Association (AIDA), which encompasses 11 southern districts. The SMRID covers 506,389 acres and is by far the largest of the 11 districts, while the BRID is the third largest at 292,277 acres. SMRID runs north and south of Highway 3 between Lethbridge and Medicine Hat. BRID begins at Carseland and has infrastructure southeast of there, but the majority of its land surrounds Vauxhall, Hays, and Enchant in every direction. Within AIDA, 8,000 kilometres of irrigation infrastructure including canals, pipelines, and 57 water storage reservoirs transport water to the generally arid region. The water supply sustains crop and livestock production, communities, business, wildlife and wetlands, and recreation opportunities.

 At a glance, the map shows that the two districts are geographically part of the same region, but GM Richard Phillips said the two are distinctly exclusive of one another.  “Very, very different river basins, the Oldman versus the Bow,” he said. “Eastern Irrigation District started the year at 15 inches; they’re now at 24 inches. And by the way, nobody’s going to use that much water. You set a limit just because it’s good to have a limit.”

 “We had a meeting just last week of most of the managers, certainly all the bigger irrigation districts were there, as well as some of the smaller ones,” he said on Sept. 9, “and everybody was the same, regardless of their limit. Water use this year is expected to be sort of eight and a half to nine inches across the board. You know, regardless of whether your limits are nine inches, or 13 inches in Lethbridge Northern, or 18 inches here, or 24 in Eastern we’re all looking at the same thing. It looks like we’re going to be eight and a half nine inches will be the typical water use across the south this year.”

 Even a crop like sugar beets, which requires at least 18 inches of water to flourish would not have exceeded eight or nine inches of irrigation use, because the total water from all sources included plenty of spring snowmelt and rain. If a crop gets 10 inches of rain, then it only needs eight or 10 inches of irrigation.

 “Last year, when there was almost no rain, you’re looking at most of it from irrigation,” Phillips said. “But this year there was so much rain that you only needed half the irrigation water you would in a normal year for crops like that.”