As a drought never before seen in the area parches the North Okanagan, local water purveyors are stressing that tough decisions will need to be made to ensure taps don’t run dry later this year.
And when regional district staff spoke to farmers in person Tuesday evening, many farmers expressed dismay at the tough decisions they could have to make with their animals, their fruit trees and their livelihoods.
Staff from Greater Vernon Water and the Regional District of North Okanagan (RDNO) held a pair of meetings with agriculturalists at Coldstream Community Hall Tuesday, June 23. The meetings amounted to a series of alarm bells as staff outlined the severity of this year’s unparalleled drought before relaying abysmal news for farmers in the area.
Staff also responded to questions to cut through some confusion among farmers about what the next few weeks and months will look like for them.
The key consequence of this drought for agriculturalists is that they are only permitted to use 30 per cent of their total remaining water allocation for the year. Amanada Summerfelt, the water efficiency coordinator with Greater Vernon Water, said the 70 per cent reduction in allocation was prorated to June 14 to provide “a bit of a grace period” for farmers.
About a dozen agriculturalists spoke at the first of a pair of meetings Tuesday. Their comments made clear the seriousness of these water cuts for farmers, and the economic losses that could ensue.
Unprecendented drought
“I think we shovelled once,” Zee Marcolin, general manager of utilities for the RDNO, said at the meeting, referring to this past winter and its mere trace amounts of snow.
“We rely on both lower melt and upper melt. We got 30 per cent of what we normally get,” Marcolin said. “We’ve never seen that in our historic records.”
Those records go back 100 years, Marcolin said, adding the amount of precipitation the region has seen so far this year is about the same as “the big drought” in 1930, except that in that anomaly year, the region still had snow in the valley.
“I’ve seen creeks going dry the last five years that have never been dry,” Marcolin said. “We’ve been trying. We did see this coming. Everybody’s fighting for water in this valley.”
Stage 2 water restrictions were called in May, but Marcolin said signs of a potentially serious drought were apparent in January. This comment drew the ire of some farmers who wished they could have been warned sooner.
One 87-year-old landowner said his tenant farmer planted $100,000 worth of trees this year, not knowing they wouldn’t be able to get water.
“With any kind of warning, he wouldn’t have done that,” the landowner said. “He can’t possibly keep those trees alive with the trickle of water that we’re struggling with. I cannot keep my property safe from fire.
“We should have known about this in January, not May,” the landowner continued. “All that water was wasted early in the year. We could have been much more intelligent with that water if we’d had some warning.”
Marcolin responded by saying that calling a drought in January would have been highly difficult because spring precipitation is a critical determining factor on whether a drought will happen or not.
“We have had low snowpack before, and we get rain and our reservoirs fill,” she explained, adding that calling the drought so early, in May, is something they’ve never done before.
She said spring precipitation is taking place east of the Rockies instead of here.
“I talked to my friend in Edmonton and they’re flooding, so they’re getting all our water, unfortunately,” Marcolin said.
In response to the situation, Greater Vernon Water is working with high water users directly and “updating them as we go,” Summerfelt said.
Enforcement of Stage 3 water restrictions is also beginning this week, with finaancial penalties in store for those who don’t adhere to the restrictions, or the shutting off of water for repeat offenders.
Communication has been another priority for the RDNO and Greater Vernon Water as officials look to convey the seriousness of this water shortage.
Farmers respond to worrisome water report
On the topic of communication, one farmer wondered why people in Vernon aren’t grasping the seriousness of the situation, and questioned the messaging coming from the RDNO.
“It’s 70 per cent cutback for the agricultural community, and I don’t sense the seriousness of that,” he said. “When you look at the phenomenal economic impact that this is going to have on this community, we haven’t even scratched the surface in discussing the seriousness of it.”
The farmer said domestic water users should have to reduce as much as agricultural users, or for there to at least be more serious messaging put out about the need for water conservation on all fronts.
“If you talk to people in town, it’s ho-hum,” he said. “You’re doing a good job of managing what’s in front of you, but at a higher level, it’s totally missing.”
Marcolin said communication has been a challenge because of the need to get messaging out in many different media forms, from print to radio to social media.
Another farmer of 50 years in the BX, whose family also lives in Coachella Valley, Calif., spelled out the consequences of the situation for his farm with a stark rhetorical question.
“What are we supposed to do, go out and shoot our animals because we can’t get water?” he said.
This farmer said the situation comes down to poor planning, questioning why he’s having to throw potable water on his hay fields — which are now dry — instead of reclaimed water, as is done in other dry jurisdictions.
“We don’t run out of water in the Coachella Valley,” he said. “I have mares that are having foals. I just finished buying $27,000, and I’ve got to do another $20,000 on hay that should be grown on our property. To me, it’s mismanagement.”
The farmer proposed that the regional district should stop all building permits until the drought is over, reasoning that these new builds consume water.
Regarding planning ahead, Marcolin said there are a lot of legislative challenges that get in the way, adding this drought couldn’t have been planned for.
She also deflected some blame from Greater Vernon Water, which is merely the water purveyor and does not get to make a lot of the high-level decisions that farmers were calling for.
“As a water utility — you might not agree with me — but we don’t do land use. Nobody wants us to do land use,” she said. “We are a water utility, that’s it. We don’t do planning, we don’t do development. But what I’m finding is during this drought, everybody wants us to do land use.”
As for using reclaimed water, Marcolin said she completely agrees that it should be utilized more, and Greater Vernon Water has been talking about it for years.
“We are trying to actively get that approval now,” she said.
At the meeting, farmers speculated that they may have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on hay from Alberta to feed their animals, because they won’t be able to grow hay themselves.
Several were dismayed to learn that they won’t be getting a reduction on their annual water fee even though they won’t be getting the water they’re paying for. Marcolin stressed that this is because without those fees paid, there would be no water service.
“No matter how we set the fees, the cost to operate a water system is the same,” she said.
Representatives from the Ministry of Agriculture were on hand at the meeting to answer farmers’ questions about obtaining crop insurance and feed shortages resulting from the water cuts.