Interested in Community Irrigation?

Guests: Ione Smith (Upland Agricultural Consulting) & Bruce Naka (Sound Water Advise)

In this episode of Growing Opportunities, Ione Smith of Upland Agricultural Consulting and Bruce Naka of Sound Water Advise discuss the Regional District of Bulkley-Nechako’s pilot project exploring community irrigation in the Vanderhoof area. They share insights on water licensing, drought impacts on forage production, stakeholder engagement, system design options, and the real costs of building shared irrigation infrastructure in a changing climate.

External Links:

https://uplandconsulting.ca/

https://www.rdbn.bc.ca/departments/agriculture/irrigation-resources

Transcript

The Regional District of Bulkley-Nechako has been administering a pilot project called RDBN, Water Feasibility and Community Irrigation in the Vanderhoof area. 

The main goal of this project was to establish a process for determining if and where a community irrigation system could be established in the agricultural area around Vanderhoof.

Recent drought conditions have heightened concerns about sustainable and profitable forage production in this area and throughout the region. Irrigation is a great tool to have in the toolbox when it is practical and makes good economic sense. Ione Smith from Upland Consulting was hired to complete the project for the RDBN.

Bruce Naka from Sound Water Advise was also part of the Upland Agricultural consulting team as he brings years of irrigation design experience to the table. They're both here with me today to talk about this project and some other findings. Hello, Ione and Bruce.

Bruce Naka: good morning. 

Ione Smith: Hello, my name is Ione Smith and I'm with Upland Agricultural Consulting. I am a professional agrologist and I've been working in consulting for about 16 years now primarily around, agricultural planning and policy, but with a specific interest in beneficial management practices and adapting to a changing climate and how to come up with solutions that benefit farmers and the wider agricultural community.

And I'm based in Sechelt on shíshálh Nation territory in the lower mainland 

Megan D'Arcy: and Bruce. 

Bruce Naka: Good morning. I'm Bruce Naka. I'm from a family that's been involved in the irrigation industry for over 60 years in the Okanagan Valley and beyond. I've been involved in irrigation from quite a few different aspects, from, uh, sales to management of company.

To, uh, doing a lot of, uh, large scale designs based on anything large commercially, such as golf courses, to pumping systems on agricultural systems, large vineyards, and the likes of that. That, uh, in 2014 I moved on from my design in that aspect of things and I got more involved in doing. Of irrigation systems. Um, I'm a certified irrigation designer and scheduler and auditor and so I, I have done a lot of things in regards to, uh, large scale irrigation and, um, I'm doing it presently into the twilight of my career and loving it.

Megan D'Arcy: That's great. I was wanting to ask you both why this project was of interest to you. 

Ione Smith: Yeah, so as we mentioned, I'm really interested in projects that that can benefit local producers, but that also have impacts on the wider agricultural community. And in recent years there's been so much drought in at the bulk in the Nechako area in fitting Vanderhoof, and that's obviously led to a drop in the ability to produce hay in forage crops.

And that's of course then impacted cattle in the area. You know, many producers, ranchers are having to send their cattle to market early due to a lack of feed. And also there's quite a few forge producers in the area that supply their feedstock to producers in other parts of the province, including the lower mainland or dairy producers, specifically in the Fraser Valley.

And so I'm quite aware that those impacts. Crop yields in the Vanderhoof area are far reaching, and so I wanted to be involved in a project that would ultimately be part of greater solutions that would help to impact local forage producers, but also the wider agricultural community in dc. 

Megan D'Arcy: Yeah, that all makes sense, Bruce.

So 

Bruce Naka: when I was asked by I owned, um, participate in the, uh, RDBN project, um, I thought it was a good fit. A lot of what they need is development of a, a system that can be used efficiently and be able to deliver water. To all of their fields. And beyond that, right now, with climate change, uh, what it's doing is it's, it's causing a scarcity of water in the peak times when water is required by a lot of crops. So that means the irrigation is, goes a long way to being able to use every glass drop of water you have for that purpose.

Megan D'Arcy: Um, I wanted to talk a little bit about the stakeholder engagement that you did during this project. It was, a fairly significant part of this spring work that you did. 

Ione Smith: It was fantastic to be able to meet with so many producers. Uh, back in April this year, end of April and early May, Bruce and I visited the area and we visited quite a number of.

Farms and ranches, and it was invaluable to be able to meet face-to-face with producers to hear about their specific challenges. Uh, I would say chief, amongst the concerns that we heard for pro from producers was the ability to access safe and reliable sources of water for irrigation, and also underscoring the fact that there were quite a lot of unknowns about the, the process involved in acquiring a water license and purchasing and designing irrigation systems.

There were also quite a few producers that may have had already a water license in place, but were not necessarily using their allocated volume because they hadn't yet invested in irrigation equipment. So that was quite interesting and. Also just acknowledging the expense required individually in purchasing and designing a system.

So therefore, we helped to underscore the fact that many producers were interested to determine how a community led irrigation system might benefit them. And then we also got to meet with groups that weren't necessarily, uh, directly involved in agriculture, but that had direct impacts and partnerships with them.

For example, we worked with, uh, Wayne Salewski from the Nechako Environment and Water Stewardship Society and he was able to show some of the work that his organization's been doing with partners in the region. We also, uh, had some meetings, not necessarily in person, but by phone with, uh, Rio Tinto, who is one of the key license holders of the n Nechako River.

And we met with hydrologists and authorization officers from the BC Ministry of Water Land and Resource Stewardship. We met with the local regional agrologist from the BC Ministry of Agriculture, and we also made sure that we reached out to Saik'uz First Nation management staff. So all in all, it was a very kind of wide ranging and holistic set of interviews and discussions that we were able to hold with key stakeholders in the region.

We had an evening sort of focus group, open house to talk about the project. Uh, it was a drop in style. We had a good number of producers attend, and it was a great opportunity to have a wide ranging discussion about issues around irrigation. And Bruce was there to answer some of the more technical questions that some of them had.

Megan D'Arcy: Yeah, that's lovely. Bruce, what was your experience with that trip to Vanderhoof 

Bruce Naka: as, uh, I mentioned, uh, we did find out, and one of the things that, uh, is, uh, first and foremost of this is, is the water that is gonna be used in. Does require licensing and found that there are a lot of licenses that are out there, a lot of which may not be used, uh, to their maximum capacity of allocation or not at all.

But I, I think those things were all important, that we understand that, uh, people may not necessarily understood how much water that they require. I think in the fact that we're looking at a custom situation, if, if I may, in this situation, because predominant crop is forage, forage crops, um, require if, uh, you calculate it out, the amount of water that's used over the entire season, it's a lot different than what people are trying to achieve.

A lot of people prior to maybe not quite as much in Vanderhoof Exactly, but in the general vicinity, we're not irrigating at all or very little. And what, what we found is that even by being able to enhance the first crop to come to fruition and then also supply some water to a second crop, it's beneficial.

What was standing in the way in that, and a lot of circumstances is a lot of the water license that were there may not necessarily have been on a large, uh, quality of water fits the taco, but on some uplift streams may feed into the nut taco. Unfortunately, as things have changed, those dry up early. So what does that mean?

Well, I think it means a little bit more management. So on those type of circumstances, uh, production or development of a, uh, dugout is a sound idea and so good for planning on that could achieve their goals. And I saw, uh, various fields, uh, that people did great jobs utilizing government funding that's available to build fantastic dugouts like that.

So I think it's promising. 

Megan D'Arcy: That's great. I wanted to ask you both, I know that you're in the report writing phase, but just if you could highlight some of the key findings that you found as you went through assembling the information that you had gathered throughout the previous portion of the project.

Ione Smith: Yeah, sure. So one of the things that we were able to confirm in discussions with BC Ministry of Waterline and Resource stewardship is that there aren't a lot of opportunities. For acquiring new licenses from a groundwater source perspective because they're feeling that they don't have enough data in place right now in order to make and affirm decisions around groundwater licenses.

And as Bruce mentioned. They also spoke to the fact that some of the tributaries to the de Nechako are drying up earlier and earlier in the year, and so there's an aversion to issuing new water licenses from tributaries, and so that left in a Nechako main stem is really the best option for potentially applying for a water license for a producer who doesn't yet have one.

That's all well and good, except for, you know, many of these fields that producers would like to irrigate are located fairly far from the me Nechako main stem. And so there's a need to look at in designing an irrigation system, a pump, and being able to access pipes in conveyance systems, in areas that may require the ability to get the pipes from the main stem to the field.

And so those were some sort of complicating factors that we needed to take into consideration when Bruce was doing the design. And then the other thing that we found was. That the province is quite amenable to this idea of a water users community group. And so this is a more formalized ability of neighbors to work together to, uh.

Govern, maintain purchase irrigation waterworks equipment. And so what that looks like is formalizing an organization essentially of a group of at least six neighbors who would all need to have water licenses already in place, but then who could share the costs and the governance of those small waterworks systems.

And those were seen as more favorable, uh, from the province's perspective than having a local government such as the RDBN. Come on board and apply to govern a new irrigation district from a, from a regional or local perspective. There's going to be quite a lot of information in the report about a hypothetical design of a potential system that Bruce has done and some of the costing associated with that because we wanted to make sure that the information we were provided was really grounded in real numbers.

So maybe Bruce could talk to the component around the design system a bit. Sure. 

Bruce Naka: So the system that we've decided that we wanted to design, pumping system, pumping from the river, we wanted to. Have it. Obviously the nut was at the low point. There was need of a pump system, so the development of the pump system that I was initially going to do based on the hypothetical, was to have one central pumping station pumping from the river and then pumping uphill to various adjacent areas.

So I developed on sections of that. So 1,280 acres. So then we had a starting point because it's important anytime you're establishing all that is to maximize what you're gonna need so that all components, what I call the anatomy of an irrigation or supply irrigation questions, how much water do I need to irrigate 1,280 acres and how am I gonna supply that water to that 1280 acres?

In this area here, we may not be looking at growing four or five crops a year, obviously, or 1,280 acres of land in the Vanderhoof area. With the lighter soil content using as an average, we require somewhere in the neighborhood of 63 to 6,400 gallons per minute of water.

Obviously all 1,280 acres in this case aren't gonna be in one particular spot. So as the amount of customers, um, dwindles going into the separate areas or pipe sizes can, can get smaller, um, you're always dealing with the realm of, in this circumstance here, where do you wanna put your pumping systems? If you put all the pumping systems at the beginning of it.

It's gonna be expensive because you're gonna have to pump that water to the, its highest extremes. The pressure that's being put on that pipeline means that it has to be a thick enough pipe to facilitate that higher pressure. The higher the pressure of a pipe would require, the far more expensive. It's so like, I mean, we were talking about in the design of the system, utilizing pipes over 30 inches dies.

Hence, you're gonna need a very thick. Expenses pipe in order to facilitate all you work around that problem. Building of a dugout in this case with is also part of the design work that we had done on it is it has two purposes, a dugout. Or in this case, uh, uh, a reservoir is gonna be holding a lot of that water, um, at, at any given place so that we may not have to pump it all at once.

It's plowing water that could be possibly used for fire protection in a lot of these areas, if you can put them in a reservoir, is you can pump your water that maybe not necessarily as higher pressure to a given spot. There you have that volume of water. So you have one pump that's pumping from in the charcoal.

Up into this dugout, and from that point we have a series of smaller pumps that are pumping to your other areas. What are you doing? You're creating a situation where your pressure isn't as high, hence the hiking will not be having to deal with high pressures. I'm talking in, in excess of 200 pounds of pressure.

Maybe we'd be down to a circumstance when you're dealing with pressures less than a hundred pounds of pressure. Big difference. This type of system has variations that can be done on it tube in circumstances where. A lot of times you may wanna just supply water from your community supplier to the property line of each individual place.

Uh, as long as you have enough pressure to flow to that point. Um, each individual would be responsible for their own pumping system. Uh, hence the community system would've pumped far lesser pressures and, uh, therefore you could go to, uh, smaller pipes if it is pipe. And so there's many things we can look at, and this is just one that we thought out.

And I, the advantage of it is it can be a template. That could be used and modified, could be used for various areas there. 

Megan D'Arcy: Uh, Bruce, it might be good to talk a little bit about the cost of irrigation, because irrigation typically can be fairly expensive for producers to install. And, um, in this situation, the, you know, it's a fairly long main lines.

Bruce Naka: We just had to put some foundation on, on what some of the costs could be. So I would wanna qualify that there is no labor costs or electrical costs based in, in these factors. Purchase of land or land availability for building of dugouts, and the rest of that obviously has to all be considered. I think what we wanna lay the foundation down is with various types of irrigation systems, the costing can vary a little bit.

Things such as the cost of pipe, the pressure the pipe has to hold, can make a remarkable difference in costs. So three costs that we had come up with. One of which we classified under option A, the costing to supply, uh, the piping necessary, uh, the pumped house, the pump stations, and the reservoir was in the neighborhood of $2.3 million.

And that's what we're gonna classify as a low pressure system. So this would be supplying to each. Individual lot along the way. This is the furthest one away at the highest elevation would've 10 pounds of pressure to the desired flow of water that was required at that point. So if there was going to be pipe used versus a ditch and all that would be considered.

So that was 2.24 million. The next option we looked at was incorporating in a reservoir at the top end, uh, of, of our proposed map area. We thought we could maybe have some gravity feed coming down from that reservoir. It allowed possible abilities for fire protection into some of the areas there because of the proximity of the, of the reservoir in that particular option.

The cost worked out to be about $2.253 million, so not a whole lot different. Um, and the last option was maximizing the pressure up to the very top of the system, so we would supply 60 pounds of pressure. To everybody on, on the system. What that means is if you were putting an irrigation system in, if you were putting in something such as the very high tech pivot systems that are available, but on that option C, we wanted to supply 60 pounds of pressure.

So if you had, if you were removing aluminum pipes around, or if you were using a wheel line, which you see many of the large five foot diameter wheels, six foot diameter wheels. Which roll and you, uh, rotate from each irrigation position. They will operate nicely at 60 pounds of pressure. So you would've a plug and play system available.

The system like that, the cost for that would be $2.584 million. But let me caution you on that, that, um, the cost based on that particular system, depending on where you put the reservoir, the costing could be less. Why I say that is if we don't have to have 60 pounds of pressure and we have a dugout somewhere nearer that, and all the piping never incurs more than, uh, say 60 pounds of pressure.

At it, the pipe costs will be a lot less than the piping you would need to supply right from the top to the bottom with one pump from there. All of these things should be thought over quite carefully prior to it. So lot ha. Lot of thought has to go into this. 

Megan D'Arcy: So those costs don't include like the electrical work or the excavator work or anything like that.

Is that. 

Bruce Naka: None of the installation, none of the electrical would've to be included in any work that would've to be necessary. All those other things would have to be developed. 

Megan D'Arcy: Right. Okay. And then individual producers that were part of this community irrigation project would also have to have their own irrigation systems and, um, would they need, I guess depending on the system they went, they would need pumps from wherever the water was brought up to.

Bruce Naka: So not necessarily. If we were to go with the option of having supplying 60 pounds of pressure to the property line, a wheel move system or a pivot system would be able to operate off of that. 

Megan D'Arcy: So one of the objectives of this project was to sort of establish a methodology that can be used by other agricultural producers in the region if they're interested in looking at the community irrigation options or shared irrigation options.

And uh, it sounds like from what you both have said that the water scarcity that is being observed in Vanderhoof is actually quite common throughout the region. Ione, could you elaborate a little bit more on that? 

Ione Smith: Yeah, sure. I mean, we looked at the Nechako as being the main potential source of water in a hypothetical situation in Vanderhoof, but we spoke to a lot of producers who were interested in maybe utilizing ponds on their property or drawing from larger lakes.

And so the thing to remember with that is those still do require licenses. And so, uh, making sure that you have. A, uh, an active water license would be the number one step to take. And if you don't, working with the BC Ministry of Waterland and resource stewardship to discuss your water license options would be a pretty, pretty critical first step in any shared irrigation system.

If you have a group of parcel owners. Each parcel needs its own water license, so you don't get a water license for the irrigation system. You get a water license for the parcel to which the water's being delivered. And so that's an important consideration with regards to some of the water bodies in the region.

There are, uh, of course some that are considered quite important and spiritual from First Nations cultural perspective and any new water licenses. Are going to be done through the ministry in conjunction with engagement with First Nations. So that's an important consideration as well. But the steps that we outline here around specifically how to form a water users community group could be done anywhere.

I think that the costs that Bruce has outlined really underscores the need to formalize some of those relationships. You know, we did meet with a few producers who are already sharing some equipment and some of the design systems, but they haven't necessarily formalized that, and that's okay. But anytime we start talking about these larger numbers and this longevity of the system means that there's a good, I think, rationale for coming up with a more formal water users community group.

Framework and that can be done through the ministry as well. And then lastly, you just wanna mention that there is often funding available, whether it's for the design and engineering of the system or cost share basis, purchase of some irrigation equipment through groups like the Investment Agriculture Foundation.

But those amounts and the program eligibility does change from time to time. 

Megan D'Arcy: Yeah, that's a good point. Some of the money that, uh, this project was. Funded with, came from the investment agriculture, agriculture, water infrastructure fund, and that fund does seem to be open on a regular basis. So it's definitely worth going and, and checking it out.

So, does anybody have any last thoughts before we finish off here? 

Bruce Naka: I'd like to just state that I think that, as in anything that I, I try to work on. We talked about longevity of the system that we're trying to build here. I say the same thing is that if farming is the, um, utmost of concerns of, of your property and you, um, intend on holding that property for long period of time and making a living off of it, times are changing.

Climate's changing, go with the changes. And so what I'm saying is make a long-term plan. You don't want to do things twice. 

Megan D'Arcy: Thank you both very much for sharing your information and the project is wrapping up, as you know, on December 31st. So the final report will be available on the RDBN website and upon request. So yeah, thank you very much, both of you, and have a lovely day.