Tim Kalinowski
Lethbridge Herald
[email protected]
April 18, 2018
During this time last year, local farmer Colten Bodie was seeding his land, but this year’s unusual weather and overland flooding will cause delays. He estimates about 40 per cent of his farmland in Lethbridge County is underwater.
While in the short term overland flooding in local districts is a threat to infrastructure and property, for farmers the recent flooding means losing a good portion of their spring seeding season.
“The flooding has been pretty substantial,” says Colten Bodie, one of several farmers near Wilson Siding dealing with flooding at the moment. “The frost is still in the ground, and being that we have had so much snowfall, nothing is soaking in and everything is running off. We do have some land where the water isn’t draining away or is draining onto our land. There is going to be a couple hundred acres we can’t seed because of it.”
Bodie says his family started seeding by April 22 in 2017, but May 22 might not be an unrealistic start date this year, depending on how things go weather-wise the next few weeks.
“Based on temperature, soil and the amount of water we have on the ground, we are a couple weeks away yet,” he said. “And it will be interesting to see where we end up. Me and a couple of buddies are actually taking bets on when we are going to start. We’ll also have to see what we can and cannot seed on the dryland acres, where a lot of that water is flowing into our land.”
On a more positive note, irrigated acres are substantially easier to drain, says Taber Irrigation District manager Chris Gallagher, but the irrigation season will definitely be delayed as TID works to clear out ice-choked canals.
“We have not yet set a start-up date,” confirmed Gallagher. “That means farmers have got lots of water on their land, and it’s going to be a delayed start-up (for seeding). We do understand there are some crops that do need early water, especially sugar beets and canola, and we know there is going to be some demand to have water sooner. But we are indicating to them we expect to be delayed this year, and to expect that seeding will need to be delayed also. They should be checking with us to confirm start-up dates for water supply before they seed.”
TID has obtained permission to allow its members to pump out standing water in their irrigated acres once canal flows return to stable and manageable levels.
“Our major focus is getting free-flow to the river so we can safely match our (rising) reservoir levels,” Gallagher states. “The next step then is to address our farmers who have ponded water on their fields. We have obtained a blanket approval from Alberta Environment so that any TID member on our assessment rolls can obtain written permission from us to start pumping across their (irrigated) fields into our works. We are looking at maybe a week from now we will be able to start pumping out those fields where needed. We can’t start pumping out those fields until we are sure our canals can handle it.”
Gallagher says it has been a challenging spring for all local irrigation districts, but he hopes the flood concerns will soon recede and their farmers can get back into their fields before too long.
“For our district we are now kind of out of the woods for inflow unless the forecast changes. The vast majority of the snow that was on the land has melted. The ground is still saturated, however, so sometimes we do find some diurnal cycles where when the temperature gets up during the day the water starts to seep out of the soil and then into our canal systems. But we are not finding the surges we had previously.
“However,” he cautions, “we know our neighbours to the east and to the north are still having some issues (in Vauxhall and Bow River Irrigation District). We are working with them to take some of their water into our Horsefly reservoir to relieve some of the pressure as that water moves east.”
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