The future of water in Western Canadian agriculture

What happens when climate change, glaciers, and agriculture collide in Western Canada? 

Dr. John Pomeroy, a world-renowned hydrologist and lead of the Global Water Futures program, explores how water systems are shifting in the face of climate change—and what it means for producers, ecosystems, and future planning. 

From snowpack and glacier melt to drought prediction, irrigation stress, and even COVID wastewater detection, this conversation dives into both the science and the stakes of water management on the Prairies and beyond. 

With surprising findings, promising innovations, and a candid look at what's coming down the pipeline, this episode is a must-listen for anyone who depends on water – everyone.

Listen For:

03:23 – Building Canada’s First National Water Model

07:10 – The Future of Irrigation in Southern Alberta

18:58 – Smarter Crops, Smarter Irrigation: What Tech Can Do

22:41 – Balancing Agriculture and Natural Ecosystems

GUEST: Dr. John Pomeroy

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Dr. John Pomeroy is the Director of the Global Water Futures Programme and its follow-on, the Global Water Futures Observatories Project, at the University of Saskatchewan. He holds multipole prestigious titles, including Canada Research Chair in Water Resources and Climate Change, UNESCO Chair in Mountain Water Sustainability, and Distinguished Professor of Geography. Dr. Pomeroy is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the American Geophysical Union, and the Royal Geographical Society. He has received numerous awards, including the Walter Langbein Lecture Award and the Miroslaw Romanowski Medal. This research focuses on snow hydrology, climate change impacts, and water quality, and he has authored over 400 research articles and several books.

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Chapters

• 3:23 Building Canada’s First National Water Model
• 7:10 The Future of Irrigation in Southern Alberta
• 18:58 Smarter Crops, Smarter Irrigation: What Tech Can Do
• 22:41 Balancing Agriculture and Natural Ecosystems

Transcript

Kara Mastel (00:09):

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Bovine podcast, brought to you by Alberta Beef Producers. I'm your host, Kara Mastel, and as always, I am thrilled to be here with you today. In this episode, we're diving into a fascinating presentation from the Alberta Beef Industry Conference held in Calgary, Alberta. Joining me is John Pomeroy, who is a distinguished professor and UNESCO chair of Mountain Water Sustainability at the University of Saskatchewan. John directs the Center for Hydrology, which operates in both Saskatoon and Canmore. His field lab in Canmore focuses on the Canadian Rockies. He also leads the Global Water Futures Program, the largest university led water research initiative in the world, and the Global Water Futures Observatory Project, a new network of observational sites across Canada. With over 45 years of experience as a hydrologist, John has been tackling water resource challenges in Western Canada and beyond. John, thank you so much for joining us on the bovine and taking the time to be here today. I'd like to start today's conversation. Well, of course, surrounding hydrology. What initially sparked your interest in this field?

Dr. John Pomeroy (01:27):

Well, I was always interested in water and particularly in the Saskatchewan River system to start off with, and I found it was just fascinating to work with and to understand how it flowed and why it was getting to different places and why it wasn't and other things. And then over the years, climate change reared its head later on and that started to make the droughts and floods more severe and other problems. So it became something that was initially just of interest to me, but then over time, maybe, or more relevance to society as well.

Kara Mastel (02:05):

So let's dive a bit more into the Global Water Futures Program. What specific findings have you found there?

Dr. John Pomeroy (02:13):

Well, there's so much. There have been 64 projects and core teams and global water futures, and it's trained over 2000 students and engineers and scientists and technicians and published many thousands of articles. So it's hard to come up with any short list of things, but there's a few things we're especially proud of. And one was working with indigenous people to work with them to find ways to braid indigenous knowledge and western scientific traditions to find solutions that are suitable for their communities. And we started that very deliberately by having our first scientific meeting on First Nations controlled land, the six nations of the Grand River in Ontario, and tried to keep those connections strong through the rest of the program in various ways. And I think there were strong advances made partly on drinking water and water quality on First Nations that wouldn't have happened otherwise and meant a lot of listening from us, but also really open-minded, great approaches from them in terms of working with the scientists.

(03:23):

So that was great. Another is development of Canada's first national water model. This something we set up. We set out to set up a hydrological model on about 5 million square kilometers of Canada. And we thought, oh, this shouldn't be too bad, but that's larger than the European Union and many areas we were doing it from scratch. And so it turned out to be a tremendously difficult thing to do, but we did it and we ran the model for a historical period, but also into the future, into climate change, and now have some good idea of what the water futures are in various parts of Canada as the climate shifts and as land cover changes and disclosures, melt and permafrost laws and the other things that are occurring. Another is we, during the pandemic, we did a pivot. We had a project looking at invasive species, looking at the environmental DNA of invasive species.

(04:21):

And then when the pandemic hit, everyone's trapped, they can't go out to visit these sites and things like that. And then they said, we can detect covid with the same equipment. And so I said, well talk to them. And they said, we'd like to sample wastewater to determine if we can use this method to find covid infections in communities. So I said, sure, pivot shift, it's a big shift. And they did and develop ways to really do covid monitoring across the country, which were really valuable for us. It's a lot easier to find out how many people are infected in the community by looking at the sewage waters than by checking everyone's medical records. So that was a good thing. The other aspects we're working on finding new sources of groundwater contamination in Northern Canada where we didn't think it was a serious problem. Some of this is associated with hawing permafrost, but it's related to introduction of arsenic and uranium into drinking waters in well water in the Yukon and Northwest Territories, which very, very serious.

(05:31):

And then also understanding some of the effects of runoff of agricultural nutrients as well as road salts in causing eutrofication of lakes in the Great Lakes area. And we found that road salt was a big component of this, and the efforts before had been completely on trying to reduce nutrient loading and turns out working on that alone is not enough. So these are just a smattering of things that have come through, but I think you dig into different parts of the program, you'll find other things probably of interest to different groups, certainly in the agricultural area was working on the future water for agricultural irrigation supply in Alberta and Saskatchewan and how that will change over time. And then also looking at water management techniques for dryland farming and the combination of snow management by leaving tall stubble, but also residue management by leaving trash on the fields to suppressive evaporation in the spring had a very strong impact on improving crop yields, particularly in years when there were big snow packs and then a drought in the summer. And in some cases you could increase the yields by half by full application of those techniques. So yeah, that's an example of a few things that we did.

Kara Mastel (06:55):

Yeah, so I'm located in southern Alberta, my Southern Alberta soul has to dive a little bit more into irrigation. What sort of research have you all done there when it comes to irrigation and especially some of the major river basins?

Dr. John Pomeroy (07:10):

Yeah, so we approached it from two ends. One was figuring out what was the water supply available for irrigation, and then the second how to calculate the irrigation abstractions and the impact on downstream water supplies to the system. So we developed a hydrological water resource models for the old man, the bow and the Red deer river at very, very high resolution that included the glaciers and mountain snow backs, groundwater, but then also the abstraction of water for irrigation, the extra evaporation of that water from vigorously growing crops once they're irrigated, and then the impacts downstream due to the reservoirs and how they're managed from that. And we ran these models forward under a variety of climate scenarios through the end of the 21st century. And that was kind of interesting because the Southern Alberta in particular warms up quite a bit under some scenarios by the end of the century, on average about five degrees overall, but a lot of that warming is in the summer and winter, not so much in the spring.

(08:17):

And the summers get hot, really hot and winters down on Lethbridge, they stop dropping below zero on a regular basis. So it's a big shift in winters by the end of the century. But precipitation goes up as well in winter and in spring, particularly in spring, but then it drops in the summer. So the result is a big shift in the hydro climate of the area. These hot dry summers are really problematic and I think it means for that region, if you're not irrigating, you're not growing, it'd be dryland agriculture already difficult in the region and perhaps close to impossible in the future, but the irrigation demands likely to increase as well because of the increased dryness in the summer and rigid. So then we looked at stream flow from the rivers and there's a big shift there. What's interesting is that the increase in precipitation in the mountains is going to be significant, though most of it will be coming as rainfall and a lot of it in the winter and spring.

(09:22):

What it means is that peak flows will be coming by mid-century, half a month earlier by late century, one month earlier, and they'll be much more erratic and variable. So there'll be very wet years where things are quite going quite good. There'll be other dry years where things are very problematic, but the earlier flows are also we know will be stressful for the system. We had flows about six weeks early in 2023, and along with reduced snow packs and hot temperatures, there were about five degrees snow on average. So we have a prelude as to what this could look like. And that wasn't a good year at all for water management. There wasn't enough water to go around. Demand was higher and supply was lower. So despite the increased rainfall, there may still be some stress in the system flows in April and May going up quite a bit.

(10:13):

But June, July, August flows dropping quite a bit and our simulations show as results fall moisture dropping in the summer and even transpiration from crops dropping off in late summer. So though in some cases run out of water. The other thing there is that right now we have still some glaciers in the old man in Glacier National Park. Not many left a few more in the Bow River Basin and a lot more in the North Saskatchewan basin. And glaciers melt fastest in the hottest driest years, but we we're losing the loss of those glaciers in the old man over the next decade or two. And for the Bull River over the next 2030 years, we'll lose most of the glaciers there, even for the North Saskatchewan. By the end of the century, there'll be tremendously reduced flows and that glacier buffering the drought, buffering that glaciers provide will be gone.

(11:10):

So that with reduced snow packs and more reliance on rainfall will make us more vulnerable to rainfall variability. And it itself is becoming more variable. Rainfall events are becoming more concentrated when it falls are becoming more severe and more clustered. So the longer periods between heavy rainfalls when rainfalls come, they come in larger bursts and greater intensities, but with longer drier periods in between. So we expect droughts to become more frequent and longer and shift to very wet periods at the end of the droughts very quickly. And this will all be difficult to manage. It will mean we need to predict our stream flows much more accurately than we can right now so that producers can prepare for the shifts that are coming. And year to year variations would be massive. So there'll have to be a lot of flexibility in how to approach agriculture, whether it's irrigated or dryland in the region.

Kara Mastel (12:07):

And now when we look at irrigation, obviously it's a really small corner of our world here. Dryland. You mentioned residue management. Is there any other, I guess, methods that we can use to have some of that water management?

Dr. John Pomeroy (12:23):

Well, yeah, snow management and residue management because we'll be getting greater precipitation in the winters. So the winter snow pack, if we can trap it, hold it in place, keep it from blowing away and evaporating when it blows, and then get it to melt into the soils in the spring and stay in the soils and not evaporate before seed germination, that's the trick. And that's why you need both so tall stubble, great way to do that along with a minimum tillage or zero till approach so that the soils crack and that water can enter the ground even when it's frozen and then leaving trash or residue in the spring to suppress the evaporation of that soil before the crops are able to use that water and let it percolate deep. So it's that combination I think can be pretty powerful. These are well-known techniques, but they're not always well adopted, and so we need to make sure that producers are aware of them and that they're something they can do relatively inexpensively and produce our productivity.

Kara Mastel (13:29):

And what about livestock producers that are maybe relying on runoff in their dugouts? Anything that can be done there?

Dr. John Pomeroy (13:36):

Yeah, dugouts should continue to be viable because of the greater winter precipitation. So again, probably going to stay in some areas cold enough that the ground would be frozen except in the far southern Alberta. So trapping that water in dugouts in the winter and spring will make sense. And maybe tall snow fences would be smart things to do as well, collect a large snow drift, so that melt meltwater then enters the dugout because we've got a longer summer to get through. Summer's going to be about a month longer and much hotter, and so we'll need to store more water to get through that whole period until the fall. And then it looks like future precipitation in the fall goes up a little bit, maybe wetter falls, but we have to get through that long dry hot summer first.

Kara Mastel (14:24):

So when you're talking about the futures, are you looking just in the next decade, the next, or you're looking way in the future? Are you doing any predictions for say, this year or the next year, like the immediate future?

Dr. John Pomeroy (14:36):

We're looking at mid-century and the end of the century,

(14:40):

And so this is under a business as usual climate change scenario, which presumes that we don't get greenhouse gases under control. So it's kind of a pessimistic one. But you look at policies in the US right now and other parts of the world, that's really what we're headed for at this point. But it doesn't tell us much about next year though some of these things we're already starting to see a little bit, some of the mid-century ones are becoming more prominent. So I think that drought of 2023 is one that we should be prepared to see more of in the near future. And certainly some of the warm spells we're getting in winter, we'll see more often.

Kara Mastel (15:21):

That's not something I like to hear. But are you guys, do you find with some of your research as well, are you collaborating with other institutions and other stakeholders to maybe this is where the research should be going because you look at where the weather's going to be or where the climate's going to be in a hundred years?

Dr. John Pomeroy (15:39):

Yeah, in global water futures, we've collaborating with 540 different groups. And so there was a big part of what we were doing. So a lot of the research we did was based on the questions that these groups had when we started the program, we talked to hundreds and then brought in more over time, and we keep working with them on this to make sure it's relevant to what their needs are. But it also then tells us, well, we still have a lot of uncertainty as to what these future predictions are, and we're very open about that uncertainty, but we need to narrow it down and that's where the next few years are. There. Also, there's a few things that come out very clearly though. One is that the mountain snow snowpack and glaciers provided kind of a free natural water storage for Alberta over the last century or so, and we're losing that.

(16:32):

And as we lose that, we're going to need to find other ways to store water. The further south, the Americans build large reservoirs all through the American West because of the difference in timing between snow melt and irrigation demand was several months. And because they had multi-year droughts that were very, very severe down there, we're going to be seeing more of that now. And because we had reliable mountain snow backs, snow melts peak in June, irrigation peaks in June, you don't need much of a reservoir to store. It maybe peaks in May in the old man, we need a little bit more there, but if we see peaks in April, we're going to be in trouble. So we'll have to look at our storage, look at natural storage, wetlands in the mountains, beaver dams, all kinds, everything. We can use groundwater, but perhaps also artificial reservoirs as well to hold that water back and control it. And in particular to get us through multi-year droughts, which we're not able to do right now.

Kara Mastel (17:34):

So that's obviously an advancement in technology there is looking at different ways we can store this water. Where else do you see advancements in technology going when it comes to the next decade and how it might benefit or how water might benefit?

Dr. John Pomeroy (17:50):

Well, a lot of it'll be in crop genetics and crop breeding to get crops that take advantage of the extra heat that will be seen in the summer, but that are also pretty tightfisted about their water use. And of course, this is the holy grail for crop groups like the Global Institute for Food Security at U of S that's working on crops like that. And then in irrigation technology and application of water open canals, we know they evaporate a lot, so pipes are better, they're expensive, but they're worth it to cut down on those evaporation. The hotter summers will make that worse. And then also very careful irrigation methods, so more drip irrigation that have become more economic and worthwhile as things heat up and crop varieties increase. But also making sure we're never spray irrigating on a hot dry summer's day. It's really just feeding it back to the atmosphere. So a few things like that can be done to use water more efficiently. And there have already been tremendous advances in southern Alberta. It's pretty good that way, but there's more to be done and that will be very important moving forward.

Kara Mastel (18:58):

Now, obviously, like you said, you've been in this industry for 45 plus years, given your extensive experience, what are the most promising areas of research and hydrology and climate change that you think maybe young researchers in the next generation should really be focusing in on?

Dr. John Pomeroy (19:16):

There've been three revolutions in the last few years, which have been really promising. One is in observations, and so the ability to put out automatic sensors, but also satellite observations of glaciers and soil moisture and groundwater and snow depth and hopefully in the future, mountain snow pack water is really, really pretty good and interesting things there. Canada's talking about putting up a snow mass mission, a terrestrial snow mass mission, which would measure the mountain snowpack, which we can't do right now. Right now we have to do it by snow survey by hand, which is slow, tedious, and we don't cover a lot of areas. So getting by satellite would be fantastic. The other is in computer modeling and simulation of this that has improved dramatically over the last couple of decades. We're able to get a lot of these simulations running on supercomputers now and add resolutions down to less than a hundred meters so you can get down to the farm scale with simulations to soil moisture and snowpack and temperature and wind speed and stream flow.

(20:22):

So doing that over the whole country, we've just got these things running. We haven't even quite figured out how to make them useful for. People want to say, Hey, I want to know what this soil moisture is on this section and how is it different from the next section over to it? But I think that's what we're going to see a big expansion of over the next decade. And those two come together because the satellites and these surface observations inform models and keep them on track. And we do something called data assimilation that kind of drags the models back to reality when they drift out of line, and that's still very necessary.

Kara Mastel (20:57):

That's super interesting. Has there been any surprises that you've come across when it comes to some of this research you've done?

Dr. John Pomeroy (21:05):

Yeah, yeah. There have been. The glacier contribution to stream flow is much smaller than we thought it would be at the beginning. We look at the Saskatchewan River Basin as a whole, and it's about 0.75%, so less than 1% coming from glacier melt, but it's snow melt is about 80% of the stream flow over the whole Saskatchewan River. So it's snow, snow, snow. So we didn't think it was that high. We thought it was 50, 60%, but even higher, a lot of the rainfall is just soaking into the soils and feeding groundwater and being used by plants for transpiration but not contributing so much the stream flow,

Kara Mastel (21:43):

Especially after a dry year.

Dr. John Pomeroy (21:45):

Yeah. The other thing is that a lot of the effects of climate change are coming faster than the models we're predicting. And the really extreme weather events we're really not predicted to hit until mid-century, and we're seeing them now. So the wildfires we've seen lately, the severe routes here on end or floods like 2013, these are way ahead of any of the predictions and forecast. So that worries me quite a bit because we're sort of, you do a canoeing analogy, we thought there were rapids ahead, but now we're in the whitewater already and it's going to be very challenging. Every year is going to be very challenging, unfortunately.

Kara Mastel (22:29):

So do you want to talk a bit about how the Global Water Futurist program, how you guys address the balance between water for agricultural use and the preservation of natural ecosystems as well?

Dr. John Pomeroy (22:41):

Yeah, yeah, of course. We had the agricultural water research and the source areas research, but also downstream working with indigenous people in the Saskatchewan River Delta, which is the largest inland freshwater delta in North America. It's on the Saskatchewan Manitoba boundary near the community of Cumberland House. And they've had terrible droughts over the last few decades that have pretty well wiped out the muskrat in that region. And the muskrat was the basis of existence of that Cumberland house of fur trade settlement from 1761 of the oldest in Western Canada, and they ran out of water last year. For the first time ever, they had to dig an emergency groundwater well to access water because there simply wasn't any in the delta. It was bone Bri the moss grad are essentially gone now. So we see effects like that downstream, and it's important to realize that we can't use everything for irrigation, and we can't use everything to optimize the hydroelectricity in our dams and reservoirs.

(23:45):

That leaves some for nature that leaves some for the indigenous people downstream looking at the whole basin. Again, 2023 was a tough year for irrigation, and City of Calgary was also a tough year for Manitoba Hydro because the Saskatchewan River dumps into Lake Winnipeg and becomes the Nelson River coming out, which has lots of hydroelectricity plants on it going down Dotson Bay. And it was a terrible year because of the low runoff. And so Manitoba hydro was in a deficit situation and challenging for it to supply its power contracts to the US BC Hydro in a very similar situation, bc, the big drop in the lakes and the Ks and the Columbia River system. So we need to look at river basins as the complete river basins and sort of forget provincial and national boundaries and then look at how effects in one part of it affects the rest of it in an integrated way. And we started looking at that and looking at some of the trade-offs involved. What are the economic impacts of expanding irrigation versus expanding hydroelectricity and questions like that that hadn't been addressed before.

Kara Mastel (24:52):

So I mean, there's a lot of struggles out there and I don't want to overshadow that, but it's not all doom and gloom.

Dr. John Pomeroy (25:01):

Oh, no, no. Yeah, it's not doom and gloom at all. I mean, there's substantial heating in Southern Alberta, but the precipitation overall goes up and many parts of the world that won't be happening, including a lot of the us. So we'll still be able to produce food. We might be able to produce more food in the future, and overall stream flow is likely to go up by 50% or more in the old man in bow and red deer rivers. So these are things that we can manage and we can develop. I think we can prosper with that. I also think there'll be a tremendous interest in people from other parts of the world and coming here to live because we will still have water, and so we will still have snow in the Rockies. It'll melt earlier, but it'll still be there. And so the glaciers will be gone, so things will be different, but things will not be unmanageable. But we have to get started now on preparing for that and making sure we manage it intelligently because it's going to be challenging.

Kara Mastel (26:04):

Absolutely. Do you want to share any success stories or maybe case studies where the Global Water Futures program has made a tangible difference?

Dr. John Pomeroy (26:12):

One thing we did was developing a flood forecasting system for the Yukon territory. There's never been one up there. And we started to develop one that included glacier melt and started to run it on a trial basis for the Yukon government. And sure enough, in 2021 came, the heat dome and temperatures hit 36 degrees in the Yukon, and the glaciers and mountain snow packs melted an incredibly high rate and caused the peak flooding of the last century in Whitehorse right through July and August. Every day was another higher stream flow as the glaciers in the upper Yukon River just melted at a record rate. But our model was able to capture that and provide that warning to Yukon government, and so they were able to ensure that they were operating the reservoir safely and provide adequate warning for the people downstream too. And there were essentially no significant damages from that event. That was good to see that these things, you get them in place and they can actually provide benefit. What you want to see is when something's not a headline because of some application of science and technology, and that's what happened there. One thing that we did internationally was promote the idea of an international year for glaciers. And the UN adopted this. In fact, it's this year, it's the international year for glaciers preservation.

(27:43):

And they also, as part of the UN General Assembly resolution, is the first world Glacier Day, which is going to be March 21st and every March 21st after that will be wo Glacier Day. So it's a way to celebrate the mountain snow and ice and the water resources it provides to us, and also to work on trying to better manage the changes that are occurring in this as well.

Kara Mastel (28:07):

Absolutely. Very cool. Okay, well, that's a great way to end off. Thank you very much for your time, and I appreciate you coming on to talk on the bovine today.

Dr. John Pomeroy (28:16):

Okay. Well, thank you so much.

Kara Mastel (28:28):

Okay. I may be a bit of a nerd here, but water is truly such a fascinating resource. Without it, nothing would exist. I know I'm sitting in the office here, but nothing, I always enjoy sitting down and really diving into a conversation with those who study it closely. Anyways, thank you all for tuning into another episode of The Bovine. I hope you find our content both interesting and as well informative. I know plenty of you have a lot of windshield time at this time of the year, whether it's on a tractor or in a vehicle, or however you are sitting behind a windshield, which means plenty of time for thinking. Now, during that thinking time, if you have a topic you'd like us to explore further or questions you'd like me to ask the experts, please don't hesitate to reach out at karam@albertabeef.org. Until next time, stay safe, move your bodies and enjoy some of that lovely Spring air. Bye for now.