Southern Alberta farmers brace for severe drought
LARGE-SCALE WATER SHORTAGE LOOMS OVER AGRICULTURAL LAND
By: Abbey Whitehead
Larry Gibb was driving his seeder truck when a voice came over the radio announcing the first case of mad cow disease in Canada.
The borders closed the next day.
“I can remember shipping cattle for 25 cents a pound,” Gibb says. “I can remember sitting on the loading shoot after the trucks pulled away just crying to see what happened to our industry overnight.”
As we head towards the 2024 summer season, Alberta is at severe risk of a drought, leaving Gibb to hope history doesn’t repeat itself when it comes to the impact on ranchers and farmers.
The province is sitting at stage four (out of five) of water management shortage, meaning there is currently a large-scale lack of water.
That has Southern Alberta farmers like Gibb worried about the fate of their crops and livestock in the summer ahead.
In the shadow of the Chief Mountain, Gibb operates a mixed farm, with a calving operation, a small feedlot, and the raising of crops such as canola, barley and wheat.
“I grew up on the farm and worked beside my dad and I grew to love the farm,” said Gibb, of Hillspring, Alta. “I think I was born to be a farmer.
“The water situation is definitely a concern for this year. We’ve had drought conditions for a couple years now, and they’ve only worsened.”
Hillspring is located 32 km west of Cardston Alta, and has a population of 168 people.
In August of 2023, the Southern Region of Alberta received less than 80 mm of rain, with a large area across the southern third of the region that received less than 40mm.
The winter has been abnormally warm as well, with precipitation levels lower than average. According to the Government of Alberta, there is a 63 per cent chance of these conditions continuing into May and June.
Many areas across the four agricultural zones have remained snow free according to the Government of Alberta.
“If there’s no water, there is no ag industry,” said Chad Folsom, another local farmer. “Water is everything.”
Folsom is a fifth-generation dairy farmer in Hillspring. His farm is home to a robotic milking system which milks 500 cows a day. The cows produce eight to nine gallons of milk per day.
With Alberta’s unstable climate, a majority of southern Alberta farmers turn to other methods to keep their crops and livestock alive without the promise of rain.
“A third of our land is irrigated,” said Gibb “Today, all of our irrigating is done with center pivots which is very efficient.”
Water from irrigation is provided to more than 40 municipalities and thousands of rural residents in Alberta, while businesses also receive water through the system to support their operations.
Irrigation licences total 3.5 billion cubic meters per year and make up to 60 to 65 per cent of the province’s water usage, according to a 2017 report from the Alberta Land Institute.
But irrigation is now at risk with Alberta’s large-scale water shortage.
The district of Hillspring relies solely on the Belly River, which stretches as far as Montana and meets with the Oldman River.
“We have no storage, no reservoir, no dam for our end of the district,” Gibb said. “We count on the flow of the Belly River. Once that flow gets down to a certain level, we’re done. We have no more water.”
With such dry and hot temperatures the past years, Hillspring farmers have been dangerously close to running out of water.
They hope 2024 does not go down as the year when the worst-case scenario actually happened.
“We’ve had to bring our animals in from pasture earlier, because we ran out of feed,” said Folsom “It’s probably raised our costs 10 per cent. With the droughts we have to spend a lot of our costs bringing feed in.”
Gibb shares a similar concern.
“We’ve had pastures where we’ve had to haul water to the cattle during the summer,” said Gibb “The dugouts and ponds have dried up completely.
“I think that this will continue to be a part of Southern Alberta, Hopefully we’re just going through a period of drought and the wet years will return again.”