The province’s Water Security Agency (WSA) said Friday its $1 million cost-share rebate program will expand its eligibility beyond RMs, conservation and development area (C+D) authorities and watershed associations to also include landowners and small urban (under 5,000 people) municipalities.

The program provides a 50 per cent rebate of eligible costs, up to a maximum $100,000 per application/applicant, for activities in the 2023-24 program year.

Eligible work can include removing silt, sediment, beaver dams and/or debris such as trees, brush and deadfall. The work is meant to reduce risk of blockages that can cause flooding on roadways and farmland, whether on approved drainage projects or natural watercourses.

Eligible projects can’t involve altering, replacing or repairing existing structures such as culverts or approaches. Other than sediment removal, projects also mustn’t involve new earthwork of any kind, such as digging new ditches or deepening, widening or otherwise reshaping a natural watercourse.

In clearing natural channels, volumes of water released “must not be so significant as to result in damage to downstream lands.” A project proponent also must have consent from owners of land next to the natural watercourse before starting the work.

Eligible applicants are also responsible for gathering “all necessary approvals, licences or authorizations required under municipal, provincial or federal legislation” and approvals from any affected landowners for access to a work site.

The application deadline for this program year is Jan. 31, 2024; the program will only cover eligible costs incurred between April 1, 2023 and Jan. 31, 2024.

“Preserving unobstructed waterways and proactively managing potential flooding and erosion concerns play a critical role in safeguarding the well-being of every individual residing in Saskatchewan,” Jeremy Cockrill, the provincial minister responsible for the WSA, said Friday in a release.

WSA said it also “streamlined” the rebate program this year by “eliminating unnecessary steps” in the application process. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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Precision Land Solutions (PLS) announced Friday it has bought the AccuPipe business — which makes HDPE tubing for the farm, commercial and construction tile drainage markets — from Minnesota-based manufacturer Prinsco for an undisclosed sum.

AccuPipe had been set up at Winkler, Man. in 2012 by PLS founders Chris and Charlotte Unrau. The Unraus sold the business in late 2013 to Willmar, Minn.-based Prinsco, which until now has operated the Winkler shop under the name Prinsco Canada.

“This investment will provide vertical integration with our existing Precision Land Solutions company, allowing for a consistent supply of drainage pipe to meet the growing needs of our clients,” PLS CEO Chris Unrau said in a release Friday.

Unrau, a former potato grower, launched PLS in 2006, setting up tile drainage on farmland and more recently moving into “full service agricultural water management.”

“Ultimately, this allows us to serve our clients better, while providing an additional service to the local market,” Unrau said.

In the same release, Prinsco co-president Jamie Duininck said the company is “confident that our employees and customers in Canada will be well taken care of,” adding the U.S. firm will continue to partner with AccuPipe as a supplier, “giving AccuPipe access to our full line of water management products.”

Prinsco, which also has operations in nine other U.S. states and is known for its gold-striped tile pipe, had sought to expand its Canadian footprint after buying AccuPipe by setting up another tile pipe plant at Taber, Alta. in 2014.

That plant closed a couple of years later, a Prinsco spokesperson said, citing market conditions at the time among other factors.

At the Winkler plant, meanwhile, “it’s really business as usual for us,” general manager Garnet Peters said in PLS’s release. “Our staff is staying on and we’re committed to producing the same quality product at cost-effective price points right here in Manitoba.” — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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There are no soil-perfect systems yet for crop production, attendees at the Summit on Canadian Soil Health held recently in Guelph heard repeatedly.

No-till farming has declined in Ontario, creating more chance for soil erosion and degradation, mostly because it is difficult to consistently and easily get similar yields from no-till compared to fields that have some tillage.

Ken Laing, an organic farmer from near St. Thomas, Ont., described the new “soil health paradigm” as including no bare soils, making sure that soil is filled in with living cover crops, along with reducing or eliminating soil disturbance through tillage. He also includes the integration of livestock as important.

Laing has planted cover crops for decades, but admitted organic farming also has problems with parts of the new soil health paradigm.

“A major challenge for organic farmers in the new paradigm is reducing tillage,” said Laing.

Organic farmers have to use tillage to control weeds, integrate manure and kill a previous year’s crop or cover crop. Weed control alone in an organic system often means numerous tillage passes in a growing season.

Laing is working with different types of organic no-till and planting into growing crops, but like conventional farmers working with no-till and planting into green crops, some years the systems work better than others.

Tillage is the biggest quandary facing maintaining soil in its place. Tillage erosion comes from almost any movement of equipment through the soil.

Dr. David Lobb of the University of Manitoba was blunt at the conference. “It’s not just the mould-board plow. If we don’t talk about soil movement we are not going to solve the problem,” he said, pointing at chisel plows and the hoe drills used in Western Canada as significant movers of soil.

“Vertical tillage: It makes me explode when people call it conservation tillage,” he said.

The end of the practice of summerfallow and the popularity of no-till in Western Canada has meant a significant improvement in the loss of soil there to wind. In Eastern Canada, Lobb said there are still issues due to greater use of tillage.

‘Decline in interest’

He’s also surprised, he said, by how much erosion continues due to water movement.

Lobb recently completed a study finding that in Canada there’s $3.1 billion worth of crop production capacity lost due to soil erosion.

He’s worried that the long-term focus on soil health is being lost.

“There’s a steady decline in interest in soil conservation. I see recently a strong and pervasive belief that we know everything we need to know about soil degradation,” he said, including a “sense of fatigue” about the topic when talking to government and policy people.

Dr. Bob Sandford, a professor with the United Nations University, a U.N.-supported think tank, said he’s encouraged by what he saw on the Soil Summit tours in Canada.

However, he added, there needs to be more focus on earth systems, including soil health.

“We forget that agriculture is the foundation of our civilization. Agriculture saved us once with green revolution, but it needs to save us again from unintended issues of the green revolution,” he said.

The next green revolution needs to integrate climate, soil and water security at a global level, at the same time as increasing agriculture productivity, he said.

The conference, convened by the Soil Conservation Council of Canada, heard from farmers making steps in that direction.

The event included a visit to Bob McIntosh’s farm in Perth County, where he uses all no-till and carefully manages water movement and erosion with drainage and berms.

Jocelyn Michon, a Quebec crop and vegetable farmer, talked about his evolution from tillage to no-till, to strip tillage, and now to planting directly into cover crops.

“Healthy soils are performing soils,” he said.

But it was Lori Phillips, an Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada soil microbiologist at the Harrow Research Station, who pointed out how much more there is to be learned, not just in managing the soil above the ground, but also below the ground.

We are now in the “golden age” of soil microbiology, she said, with new genetic tools helping to identify a small proportion of the microbes that live in soil and to start to understand their function.

“Soil is the foundation for our life on earth,” said Don Reicosky, a soil scientist emeritus with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service, warning that farmers need to rely on nature’s plows — plants and worms — and not man’s plows, to manage soil health.

If not, he said, the current direction of soil degradation will be a global disaster.

“We have a hungry world. Our one chance boils down to conservation agriculture.”

— John Greig is a field editor for Glacier FarmMedia based at Ailsa Craig, Ont. Follow him at @jgreig on Twitter.

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The provincial government on Tuesday announced the creation of two advisory boards: a policy development board and technical review board.

Specific members haven’t yet been named to either board, but the province said the policy advisory board will include members from Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan (APAS), the Western Canadian Wheat Growers, the Saskatchewan Farm Stewardship Association and the Saskatchewan Canola Development Commissions (SaskCanola).

The policy board will also include members from the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities (SARM), the Saskatchewan Conservation and Development Association and Ducks Unlimited Canada, the province said.

The technical review board, meanwhile, is to be made up of experts with backgrounds in water management, engineering and hydrology, the province said.

If a drainage project’s “proponent” believes a technical error has occurred, the province said, he/she/they can provide information to the technical board and ask for a review.

“For example, if there is a question on the adequacy of an outlet, this board would review it and provide technical advice.”

The creation of the two advisory boards comes as the provincial Water Security Agency Amendment Act, introduced in November, passes third reading in the legislature, the government said Tuesday.

The amendments lay out a new process to deal with unauthorized drainage on Saskatchewan farmland.

“Our government’s goal is to create responsibly-managed agricultural drainage networks focused on controlling and organizing water management in the province,” Scott Moe, the provincial minister for the WSA, said in a release Tuesday.

“This will ensure mitigation of impacts to downstream landowners while continuing to provide benefits to producers. The advisory boards will provide input and advice on agricultural water management policies as we move forward with the strategy.”

The WSA is now working with “hundreds” of Saskatchewan landowners on organized drainage projects covering over 160,000 acres, the province said. –– AGCanada.com Network

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Scott Moe, minister responsible for Saskatchewan’s Water Security Agency, on Tuesday introduced legislative amendments meant to encourage “producer co-operation through the formation of watershed associations and (allow) for producer-led projects.”

Under the previous formal complaint process, some kind of resolution could take up to two years, the province said. The WSA estimated it can now complete requests for assistance within 90 days under the new amendments.

Under the amendments, fines for unauthorized drainage works will also change, from a maximum of $10,000 per day to up to $1 million per day. The level of fines will be determined by the courts on a case-by-case basis, “weighted to the severity of the situation,” the province said.

The amendments, to be made to the provincial WSA Act, are meant to focus on “ensuring drainage projects can be permitted when they have downstream landowner permission to drain and are draining into an adequate outlet,” the province said.

The province said its new Agricultural Water Management Strategy is meant to give producers and municipalities the “parameters” to control and organize drainage projects in their area, through either conservation and development area authorities or watershed associations.

Under the new process, if the WSA gets a request for assistance, it will first confirm the presence of a drainage project, then recommend the drain’s owner either get a permit or close the drain.

The agency will then work with producers to permit drainage works, if allowable, using gates and gated culverts, the province said. –– AGCanada.com Network

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The provincial government’s Water Security Agency (WSA) on Thursday said it would invoke new drainage regulations passed last fall and require all unapproved drainage works flowing into the Quill Lakes to be closed before Oct. 1.

The Quill Lakes, about 150 km north of Regina, are saline lakes in a closed basin with no natural outlet.

The lakes were considered acceptable to drain water off surrounding lands up until about 2005, but since then have risen about seven metres in an ongoing wet cycle, swamping thousands of acres of farmland and infrastructure, the WSA said.

If Big Quill Lake rises about another metre, the WSA said, it risks spilling southward into Last Mountain Lake — “something that has never happened in modern times,” the WSA said — and from there toward the Qu’Appelle River system.

The WSA said Thursday it will focus, starting “immediately,” on the “top 100” largest unapproved drainage works in the area that cause the greatest impact, and would work with landowners on inspections and to make sure closures take place.

Going forward, the province said, the WSA will not approve any drainage works that contribute more water to the Quill Lakes.

New regulations require drainage works to have an “adequate outlet” for WSA approval, but the Quill Lakes will not be considered adequate because of “flooding and environmental impacts.”

Any landowner with unapproved drainage works into the Quill Lakes will be asked to place a ditch block, made of “compacted material,” in the constructed drainage ditch in question at the natural high ground level.

If a drainage project can be built to divert water to an “alternative location” other than the Quill Lakes it could be considered for approval, the WSA said.

The WSA said it will also work with Ducks Unlimited (DU) Canada to “eliminate or limit flows” into the Quill Lakes from DU projects, such as those at Foam Lake and Ponass Lake.

The agency said it will work with DU to “re-establish the naturally higher water levels in these wetlands,” making for additional storage to prevent further flows into the Quill Lakes.

The Quill Lakes are “a priority area where impacts to landowners around the lake need to be addressed,” Herb Cox, minister for the WSA, said in a release Thursday.

“This is a very complex water management situation and, while there are no easy solutions to this issue, this is one step that will help us lower the lake level and prevent future flooding.”

The province said it has been looking into options to deal with rising levels on the Quill Lakes for “a number of years,” but all alternatives that involve storing water or diverting it elsewhere have “very significant costs and/or environmental consequences.”

In one case, the WSA noted, a proposal for a project last fall that “would have limited inflows to the lake and reduced the risk to infrastructure” required diverting water to Last Mountain Lake. The plan “did not proceed with a significant majority of the public not in favour of this approach.”

“We appreciate the challenges the Quill Lakes has created and the action the provincial government is taking to enforce these drainage regulations,” Norm Hall, president of the Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan, said in the province’s release.

“This will help to address the flooding issue and ultimately reduce the level of the lake.”

“We support the enforcement of these drainage regulations across the province and this is a key area where closing unapproved projects will have a significant benefit,” Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities president Ray Orb said in the same release.

The WSA last year estimated about 58,000 acres of public land and 27,000 acres of private land were flooded and up to 56,000 more acres of private land were at risk if the wet cycle that has fed the Quill Lakes continues.

Canadian Pacific Railway track in the area and stretches of provincial Highways 6, 16 and 35 are also threatened, the WSA said. — AGCanada.com Network

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The BPBA’s Six Streams Initiative focuses on three sources of pollution: cattle drinking in creeks, soil erosion and underperforming septic systems.

In two very busy years the association has already installed 47 off-stream solar-powered watering systems plus related projects such as fencing to keep cattle out of creeks, restore vegetation along stream banks and improve wetlands, says BPBA director John Rodgers, who farms in the Municipality of Northern Bruce and teaches high school science.

Rodgers hasn’t had cattle since 2012, but he was drawn to the Six Streams Initiative by the benefits he’s seen from centralized water systems installed around the district in recent years.

“The health improvement, no sore eyes, no sore feet and improvement in water quality are pretty beneficial,” he says.

Beef production on the peninsula was exclusively cow-calf and backgrounding operations right into the 1990s when the Wiarton Feeder Sale was the first big sale of the fall in Ontario and a bellwether for prices during the rest of the fall run. Cash cropping has increased in the past five to seven years, although the north end of the peninsula is still a relatively large cow-calf area and Bruce County is still one of the foremost beef-feeding areas in the province.

Neils Munk, BPBA’s Six Streams project manager, says the project’s land area is fairly small, but home to 15 larger beef farms that run about 5,000 head between them. Projects are located on five of the streams with the sixth serving as a control. Initial inspection and water quality sampling was carried out beforehand using $2,750 seed money from the Lake Huron-Georgian Bay Framework for Community Action. A $25,000 grant from the Great Lakes Guardian Community Fund for volunteer-based restoration projects helped get things rolling and provincial and federal environment departments have contributed more than $450,000 to date.

“Most of the project areas are remote, long-term pasture sites so the watering systems were designed to be permanent off-grid fixtures,” says Munk.

First, a stream-side well was constructed with a gravel-filled channel to draw water from the stream. A submersible pump in the well forces the water through a buried pipe into a heavy precast concrete trough set on drainage stone and surrounded with a layer of crushed stone for durability. The pump is powered by all-weather batteries charged by a solar panel with a charge-control system. A water-level sensor in the trough activates the pump when cattle drink.

Munk says the needs of each operation are taken into consideration and he works with the producers to improve the practical aspects of each layout.

The main adjustments so far have been the replacement of the square trough with a round one that has lower sides so it is easier for calves to reach the water, installing magnetic float switches that quickly activate the pump to keep up with the demands of the cattle, and armouring the electrical components to protect them from the cattle.

The cost is running around $6,500 for the trough, well tiles, pump, solar panel, batteries, all-weather containment, plus any excavation and installation. Extras might include erosion control earthworks, fencing, and seeding disturbed areas depending on the site.

BPBA pays for the components and installation and the farmers get involved in the planning, installation and any additional fencing as needed. Winterizing the systems was getting underway as cattle were coming off the pastures in mid-October.

A new project this summer involved the installation of drainage level control structures near the main outlets of tile drains in fields. These agri-drains are inline standpipes with flow barriers inside that the producer can raise or lower to control drainage from the field.

This gives them the flexibility to open it up for full drainage in spring so they can plant earlier in wet years and restrict drainage in the summer when moisture may be in short supply.

“Keeping more water in the field may improve growing conditions and provide water to local streams through dry periods,” Munk says.

Farmer co-operation with the water pro­jects has been great and response to the three agri-drains they’ve installed so far has been positive, says BPBA chair Elizabeth Thorn.

Part of the rationale supporting this work is the fact it helps retain more nutrients in fields and pastures where they’re needed rather than washing them into the streams where they can cause harm.

Nutrient reduction in streams ultimately leads to cleaner rivers and, “whatever happens to our rivers will happen in our Great Lakes,” says Thorn.

Linked to the Six Stream project is a science component that trains interested volunteers as certified water testers.

“We’ve just completed our third year of testing and are seeing some positive trends, like a drop in the phosphorus level. I’m told one year isn’t a trend because water flow is extremely variable from year to year, but still it is a positive result,” Thorn says.

This year they’ve added caffeine to the list of items they test for as a way to distinguish underperforming septic systems in cottage country from farm nutrients in their water samples.

For more details visit bpba.ca.

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