Bill McDonald worked in the irrigation business for 25 years, selling pivots and other equipment to farmers.
Given his history, McDonald knows that irrigation makes cropland more productive and increases the value of land.
However, he is highly skeptical that Canada could massively expand irrigation in Saskatchewan and Alberta so that 10 per cent of Canada’s farmland is irrigated.
Read Also
Executive editor recognized for lifetime achievement
Laura Rance-Unger, former Manitoba Co-operator editor, swept up the Canadian Farm Writers Federation 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award on Sept. 20.
Right now, about two per cent of cropland in Canada is irrigated.
“The first question is: where are you going to get the extra water to do five times (the acreage)?” said McDonald, who lives near Lethbridge and sold irrigation equipment in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta during his career.
McDonald was responding to a report published this summer from Omnigence Asset Management, an investment firm. Omnigence believes Canada has the potential to irrigate 10 per cent of the country’s farmland.
Stephen Johnston, director of Omingence, said his team looked at provincial reports and other studies to arrive at the 10 per cent estimate.
“(It) is based on water availability and land that would be receptive to irrigation,” he said.
“It’s a collection of data that’s aggregated together. There’s no specific report that says the potential is 10 per cent.”
The largest opportunity for expanding irrigated acres is in Saskatchewan and Alberta, Omnigence said.
Using data from Statistics Canada:
• In 2022, Canada had 1.87 million acres of irrigated farmland.
• Most of that, 1.36 million acres, was in Alberta.
The Census of Agriculture for 2021 says Canada had 93.5 million acres of cropland, so 10 per cent would be 9.35 million acres.
Going from 1.87 to 9.35 million acres seems extremely unlikely, given the recent droughts in Western Canada, McDonald said.
In the spring of 2024, for instance, Alberta had to cut water allocation because reservoirs were depleted and the snowpack in the mountains was below normal.
Barrie Bonsal, a climatologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada who specializes in freshwater availability, is not an expert in irrigation, but he knows that the amount of snowfall in the mountains determines how much water flows into lakes in reservoirs on the Prairies.
“Eighty to 90 per cent of it probably (depends on snowpack),” he said.
“There’s going to be that year to year variability. Some years it’s going to be OK and some years, when there isn’t a lot of snowpack in the mountains, it’s going to be more difficult (for irrigation).”
Plus, climate trends indicate that winters have been getting warmer in Western Canada.
“It’s been developing for decades.… When you get a little bit more warming … there’s going to be less snow available, just because of the shorter (winter) season,” Bonsal said.
Droughts are always a risk in Western Canada, but some data shows that there is sufficient water to irrigate more acres.
Saskatchewan’s Water Security Agency looked at the flows in and out of Lake Diefenbaker and concluded there’s ample capacity to irrigate more land.
“They found that under normal operations, the lake has an annual water availability of nearly 900,000 acre feet without interfering with municipal use, hydropower or recreational use,” says a post on diefenbakerirrigation.ca, a Water Security Agency website.
The province is proposing to use 100,000 acre feet of that water for the Westside Irrigation Rehabilitation Project. It would cost $1.15 billion and irrigate 100,000 acres northwest of Lake Diefenbaker.
“In practical terms, the amount of water required for the Westside Irrigation Rehabilitation Project would be less than a foot of water from the lake,” says diefenbakerirrigation.ca.
The project, still in the planning phase, would support 100,000 acres. Therefore, it would require tens of billions to build more reservoirs and more infrastructure to increase irrigated farmland by millions of acres.
That sort of investment in big projects is needed to improve productivity and support economic growth, Johnston said.
“Otherwise, our standard of living is going to fall.”
