Once at risk of being lost, the Crop Diversification Centre South is being rebuilt through a county-led cost-recovery model, new leases, and growing interest from Alberta researchers.
When the Government of Alberta exited direct agricultural research in 2019, few places felt the impact more sharply than the historic Crop Diversification Centre (CDC) South near Brooks.
Long regarded as a cornerstone of irrigated crop and horticulture research, the facility suddenly found itself with only seven researchers to manage hundreds of acres, a complex of aging buildings — and no roadmap for the future.
“We started getting complaints about weeds four feet tall,” recalls Candace Woods, project coordinator for the CDC South revitalization project. Woods had worked at the centre from 2015 until being laid off during the government transition. When she returned years later, she found a facility at real risk of being lost.
“There wasn’t a long-term plan,” she says. “The County saw that if nobody stepped in, this entire research hub — its land, its infrastructure, its history — could be gone.”
A Major Asset at Risk
CDC South’s significance reaches far beyond Brooks. Established in 1935, the research station has shaped horticulture, forage, pulse, cereal and irrigated crop development for generations. Its greenhouses, irrigated fields, specialized equipment and long-running test sites represent an irreplaceable resource — something researchers know well.
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