TURNING ON THE TAPS
Irrigation a simple drought solution
Ken and Brian Vandeburgt have never seen corn so short on their dairy farm near Dewdney, B.C. “Typically we have 12-foot high corn,” Ken says. “This year it’s really short. It looks like Saskatchewan corn.”
The brothers also just finished the third of five cuts of their hay, but the fields are so dry that “the diesel that we burned was worth more than the feed that we cut.”
In a typical year, the Vandeburgts fight mud on their farm, which sprawls in the valley of the mighty Fraser River in a normally wet, lush part of Canada. But this year’s hot, dry summer across B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan has left thousands of dairy, cattle and grain producers parched, as they grapple with the worst drought in more than a decade.
But Western Canada’s struggles with dry weather leave farmers in much of the world scratching their heads. There is a simple solution to lack of rain, employed to great success all over the world and in much of Canada: irrigation.
Israel, which famously made its deserts bloom, is an agricultural exporter, producing grain, cotton, wheat, sunflowers and citrus fruits, with only a small fraction of Canada’s fresh water.
Israel’s irrigation know-how has also yielded industrial spinoffs. For example, Netafim Irrigation Inc.is now on every continent, employs 4,000 people and its sales of drip irrigation technology earned about US$750 million.
California, meanwhile, relies on irrigation to produce the bulk of North America’s fresh vegetables. But as California grapples with a four-year drought, it lacks the key resource that Canada boasts in abundance: fresh water. Farmers in Western Canada are near an abundant supply of water in lakes and rivers — if only they could get it to their crops like other farmers do.
The plight of the Vandeburgts contrasts with the broad smile on the face of David Janssens, a fellow B.C. dairy farmer who works 650 acres of the agricultural land reserve in Surrey, just south of Vancouver.
In the late 1990s, after weathering a couple of dry summers, Nicomekl Farms dug trenches and installed high-density, big black flexible pipe across the farm. Big hose reel irrigator sets irrigate four to five hectares at a time.
“Investing in irrigation seemed to be the right thing to do,” says Janssens, who milks 450 cows and has six employees.
Other farmers, as their crops wither, see his lush fields and tell him he’s lucky. “It’s not luck, it’s smarts,” he says. “You spend money. It’s not rocket science. It’s pumps and pipes.”