When Will the Water Turn on for Lake Diefenbaker Irrigation Project Phase 1?

Feb 20, 2024

The Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities (SARM) wants to hear about any advancement in the Lake Diefenbaker Irrigation Project.

Announced in 2020, the project, once completed, will provide water to over 500,000 acres of agricultural land.

SARM President Ray Orb said many RMs will benefit from the project. These RMs have suffered from drought over the last few years and are optimistic it could begin to assist the viability of their farmland. The economic importance of this project is significant for rural residents.

“This project has been a long time in the making and will positively impact rural municipalities into the future. It will increase crop diversity and farm profitability through irrigation. We need to see Project 1 launch soon,” Orb said.

SARM is calling for an update on Phase 1, in Division 5, which was deemed one of the most shovel-ready projects in the province. Ninety per cent of the current canal was already in place in 2023.

It is anticipated that there will be an economic boost for several smaller communities, and nine RMs when Phase 2 begins with the buildout of Project 2 Westside. This adds 260,000 acres of irrigated land.

In 2023, many Saskatchewan rural municipalities declared agriculture disaster areas due to drought. Producers in the area immediately surrounding the project are optimistic that this project could begin to support the sustainability of their agricultural land. When producers struggle, the effects ripple into communities.

Orb said the progress and opening of the Lake Diefenbaker Irrigation Project is a viable solution to bring thousands of acres of land into the provincial irrigation system.

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Video: Wheat Yields in USA and China Threatened by Heat Waves Breaking Enzymes

A new peer reviewed study looks at the generally unrecognized risk of heat waves surpassing the threshold for enzyme damage in wheat.

Most studies that look at crop failure in the main food growing regions (breadbaskets of the planet) look at temperatures and droughts in the historical records to assess present day risk. Since the climate system has changed, these historical based risk analysis studies underestimate the present-day risks.

What this new research study does is generate an ensemble of plausible scenarios for the present climate in terms of temperatures and precipitation, and looks at how many of these plausible scenarios exceed the enzyme-breaking temperature of 32.8 C for wheat, and exceed the high stress yield reducing temperature of 27.8 C for wheat. Also, the study considers the possibility of a compounded failure with heat waves in both regions simultaneously, this greatly reducing global wheat supply and causing severe shortages.

Results show that the likelihood (risk) of wheat crop failure with a one-in-hundred likelihood in 1981 has in today’s climate become increased by 16x in the USA winter wheat crop (to one-in-six) and by 6x in northeast China (to one-in-sixteen).

The risks determined in this new paper are much greater than that obtained in previous work that determines risk by analyzing historical climate patterns.

Clearly, since the climate system is rapidly changing, we cannot assume stationarity and calculate risk probabilities like we did traditionally before.

We are essentially on a new planet, with a new climate regime, and have to understand that everything is different now.