With the hiring of their first-ever executive director, Jillian Brown, the Saskatchewan Irrigation Projects Association (SIPA) is set to undergo a push for growth in both membership and activities, says Sandra Bathgate, a SIPA project organizer from Central Butte.
Bathgate’s enthusiasm stems from the Saskatchewan government’s recognition of irrigation by granting the group secure funding to hire and to open a formal office in Outlook, Sask. “That happened a year and a half ago, and we hired our executive director on January 1,” Bathgate says.
The association began in 1996 and does advocacy work in eight of the 20 provincial irrigation districts. Some of those districts encompass large tracts of land and water volumes near Lake Diefenbaker, but others are “private,” with one or two users tapped into smaller local water sources. The voluntary association has about 250 members, Jill Brown says.
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For beef producers, SIPA leapt into action this past fall when they asked their members to drop straw from their combines and let drought-stricken farmers and ranchers bale it up for their livestock feed needs.
“It was easy for our members to do,” Bathgate notes. She says the arrangements played out in a variety of ways, but mainly with the straw recipients bringing their own haying equipment and trucks. “Often, they’d be baling closely behind the combines,” she adds.
The recipients were an assorted group of friends, relatives, customers or others in “feed need.” The Oram family, who grain farm and raise purebred cattle on partially irrigated land a mile south of Lake Diefenbaker, contacted their bull-buying customers and offered them the straw. One customer, who came from 160 km away, took them up on the offer. “They were happy to come by and bale up the straw,” says Deb Oram. “It was a good idea.”
Bathgate says the Saskatchewan government wants to expand the province’s irrigated land acres, and increase SIPA membership. “We have big projects on the drawing boards,” she adds. She has been doing much of the management and administrative duties for SIPA. “We’ve come a long ways in our 25 years.”
Most of the SIPA irrigation projects are large-scale in the Lake Diefenbaker region, but there are some medium-scale efforts in southeastern Saskatchewan. There are a few smaller dams that have been on water- courses for 100 years, Bathgate says. A 10-person volunteer board of directors run SIPA. They represent geographic zones within the province. The SIPA motto: “Irrigation makes Saskatchewan Grow.”
