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‘The saving grace for agriculture’: Farmers look to irrigation amid climate woes
Sean Stanford’s wheat farm just south of Lethbridge, Alta. falls within the far left corner of Palliser’s Triangle — an expanse of prairie grassland encompassingmuch of southeast Alberta, a swath of southern Saskatchewan, and the southwest corner of Manitoba.
The area is named for explorer Capt. John Palliser, who in 1857, famously declared the entire region a wasteland — so hot and arid that no crops would ever grow.
More than 160 years later, with parts of the prairie provinces suffering through another summer of drought conditions, Stanford’s farm is certainly dry.”I think we’ve had three inches of rain since we started seeding. It’s been pretty dismal, honestly,” he said in an interview in July.
But Stanford is growing crops, thanks to a series of small sprinklers, attached to a large pipe and powered by an electric motor that disperse water from a nearby irrigation canal over some of his fields.