Farming Smarter’s Spring Wheat Project is focused on learning about water management

Posted on March 12, 2026 by Sunny South News

By Heather Cameron
Taber Times
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Lewis Baarda, lead for Farming Smarter’s Reduced Irrigation Allocation Strategies for Crop Management – Spring Wheat Project, describes the Spring Wheat Project as being focused on learning about water management.

“Irrigation is sort of a unique aspect of growing crops in southern Alberta,” explained Baarda. “Alberta has about two thirds of all the irrigation in Canada, so it’s a unique thing, and it’s something that we’ve been challenged with over the over the last few years is when we have these drought situations. It reduces the amount of irrigation water we have available for the season. When we have situations where there’s less water available, then farmers have to make decisions; they have to decide: how, how am I gonna handle this?”

What the study will do, Baarda says, will look at spring wheat crops and different irrigation levels.

“We’re gonna apply different rates of irrigation throughout the season and see what the impact is,” said Baarda. “By doing that, we’re hoping to learn how much we can reduce our irrigation on wheat while still maintaining, you know, reasonable yields. And once farmers have that information, they can use that to make decisions on how they manage water on their farms. They can also make sure those higher value crops that have higher water needs are getting enough to be productive and profitable, and then you have a pretty good idea how much you can also withhold from that wheat crop and still have a good crop. That’s the general idea behind the project.”

Baarda stated that the project, with a cost of approximately $300,000 attached to it, will take place over four years and what Farming Smarter typically does with similar projects is they will conduct multiple experiments per year.

“The idea is to test at three locations each year for four years, so by the end of the trial we’ll have 11 or 12 unique experiments, and then we’ll take the combined knowledge we learned from all of them to as sort of our final dataset,” explained Baarda. “The reason we do that is it allows us to see what happens in different environments and different situations. We’re gonna kind of cover a range of conditions and environments and that’s what helps us ensure that we have confidence in the results because we’ve seen them in different places and how the experiment responds and behaves under a range of different conditions.”

Baarda says that the variety of wheat used for one experiment will be used for all the experiments and that for the coming year, sites are planned for Lethbridge and Coaldale and plans for the coming year’s sites are still in the planning stages because specialized infrastructure will be required for the experiments that will involve assistance from a consultant. That process, Baarda says, should take until about April or May to complete and will be followed by seeding and further steps.

“I’m really excited about this,” said Baarda. “This is something we’ve kind of been trying to do for, a couple of years now, so we’re thrilled to kind of have this in place. We’re thrilled to have Results Driven Agriculture Research supporting the project as the primary funder. I think we’re gonna generate information that farmers can really use. I would say there’s a gap in information on this particular topic, so I think this will be a good start into closing that gap. A lot of our work is aimed at supporting the ag industry, and so a lot of these research projects help the economy and the industry. The impact on the industry is that our farms are run more efficiently, they’re more profitable, and they’re able to grow better and be more viable and hire more people.”