Grainswest - Spring 2022

Spring 2022 grainswest.com 15 BY ELLEN COTTEE • PHOTOS COURTESY OF LETHBRIDGE COLLEGE Researcher works to improve efficiency and effectiveness of Prairie irrigation Splashy science GrainsWest: What drew you to agricultural irrigation? Willemijn Appels: I studied at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, which is a general university with an agricultural focus. I started with hydrology, but it always had something to do with agricultural ecosystems, drainage ditch levels. There’s nothing too dry around the Netherlands, it was always too wet. My work on my master’s degree in hydrology and my PhD in soil physics also happened to take place in agricultural settings. I like the agricultural sector because it’s so dependent on water. It needs water, it affects water bodies, it can receive too much or too little water. It seemed like a natural fit, even though I’ve never farmed. GW: You came to Canada to work on a postdoctoral project at the University of Saskatchewan. Did that start your journey in Canadian agriculture? WA: I worked on oilsands projects with a little bit of ag, mostly dryland. My research was focused on investigating spatial patterns of soil over fields or vegetation and how it affects the way water moves through a system or is available in a landscape. In the case of oilsands reclamation, we worked on making water balances to ensure there wasn’t too much water, which would kill the trees. O f all the variables in agriculture, from prices and pests to supplies and sun, water is perhaps the most difficult to manage. Most Alberta farmers may prefer to forget the 2021 season, which illustrated just how damaging a lack of it can be. In southern Alberta, drought can be mitigated by irrigation, and local scientists are at work to improve the practice. Willemijn Appels, the first Mueller Applied Research Chair in Irrigation Science at Lethbridge College, is one such scientist. Having grown up in the Netherlands, a maritime nation well-accustomed to water, Appels swapped canals and coastlines for rivers and sloughs with a move to Saskatchewan in 2012. Now, she and her Lethbridge colleagues use advanced technology to develop irrigation modelling and best practices to ultimately analyze return on investment and improve Prairie irrigation management. She also leads an Alberta soil water mapping project. Then this position popped up in Lethbridge, and I figured getting water onto a crop is pretty much the same as getting it off the field, so here I am. GW: Since 2016, you have filled the position of Mueller Applied Research Chair at Lethbridge College. What does the role entail? WA: As a research chair in the Centre for Applied Research, I am a full-time researcher, although I do interact with students and employ them in our projects. My focus is really to come up with projects in collaboration with local or regional industry partners that help use water more effectively and efficiently. Everyone needs food, and we all realize we need to work to grow these plants. That is what I would like my work to contribute to. GW: Your irrigation group is working on a three-year soil water mapping project with $420,000 in funding from Results Driven Agriculture Research. What do you hope to accomplish with this research? WA: This is an exciting project. The difficulty in doing precise irrigation work is that the sensors we normally use to measure water in the soil take a point scale measurement representative of a very small area. It would be the same as if you were just to take