Irrigation District
David Westwood
David Westwood is the General Manager of the St. Mary’s River Irrigation District. He plays a part in deciding how much water should be allocated to farmers in a given year based on data from Alberta Agriculture and Irrigation, including storage, snowpack, historical precipitation and irrigated area across the district. Regarding the decision to allocate 8 inches of water per acre in 2024, Westwood said in a statement to CBC news:
“We wanted to make sure we set an allocation that we feel we could service throughout the season, but obviously not run short of water.” – via CBC news
In a statement to CTV, Westwood described the Chin Reservoir Expansion project as “pretty exciting,” saying “Being able to expand it and also rehabilitate the western dam and conduits, that’s a really fantastic thing for us.”
Discussing the rehabilitation of the east and west Chin Dams, he adds: “This is a critical component of the infrastructure in the St. Mary irrigation project, the Chin reservoir supports up to 400,000 acres of agriculture irrigation and water for many communities downstream of Chin.” – via My Lethbridge Now
This year (2025) the allocation has been set to a maximum of 12 inches per acre.
George Lohues
George Lohues is the chairman of the St. Mary’s River Irrigation District and echoes David Westwood’s sentiments. In a statement to CTV in 2021, Lohues emphasized the importance of irrigation infrastructure for farmers’ livelihoods and for food production:
“It just gives you security that you will get a crop, provided there’s no hail … We expect that more irrigation will attract more processors” – via CTV news
Jason Miller
Jason Miller is the General Manager of the Raymond Irrigation District. Similarly to Westwood and Lohues, he emphasizes the importance of irrigation infrastructure for water security for farmers:
“Expanding Chin will not only provide further water storage security for our region, but will also enable the Raymond Irrigation District to provide irrigation to more farmland near Welling, Raymond and Stirling.”
Richard Phillips
Richard Phillips is the Chair of the Alberta Irrigation Districts Association, and General Manager of the Bow River Irrigation District. Responding to concerns about potential environmental impacts of the expansion project such as impacts on at-risk species, in-stream flows on rivers, and the conversion of native grasslands to farmlands, he stated:
“Irrigation expansion goes on existing dryland. A farmer, whether he’s already an irrigator or dryland farmer, says ‘I’ve had enough of getting unreliable crops on dryland and I want to grow high-value, reliable crops, therefore, I want to irrigate my dryland.’ That’s where the expansion goes … This business of 200,000 acres and we’re going to lose so much native prairie because of it and all the species that’ll be impacted, that’s simply and completely unfounded. No validity to that whatsoever.” – via the Western Producer