A new consortium of industry and environmental not-for-profits is spearheading a new approach to water stewardship in the Lake Winnipeg basin.
The Lake Winnipeg Water Basin Stewardship Project is a “more formalized approach to on-farm water stewardship,” according to Mike Nemeth, a senior sustainability adviser with fertilizer company Nutrien.
“The project is bringing together farmers, corporations, environmental not-for-profits and watershed groups to build scalable solutions to sustain agricultural production by building on-farm resilience, and sustainability value to the agri-food supply chain,” Nemeth said in a media release announcing the project.
Read Also
The joys of fishing from shore
Manitoba has many lake and river shorelines to drop a fishing line without the cost of a boat, making shore fishing more accessible, and anglers can still catch impressive fish.
The project will be guided by a steering committee with representatives from each of the partners. The project concept was conceived when ALUS and The Water Council approached the corporate partners seeking a joint effort to improve water quality and quantity challenges in Canada’s eastern Prairies, through land and management practices in agriculture.
The first step of the project entails working with producers in the Seine, Rat, Roseau, and Redboine watershed districts in Manitoba’s agricultural heartland. Using the Alliance for Water Stewardship’s International Water Stewardship Standard (AWS Standard), the project manager will assist the farmers in developing a water stewardship plan. The plan will assess current farm water use and management. This approach will allow potential water-related risks to and from the farming operation to be identified and will provide landowners with tools to help improve managing water-related risk.
Launching this year, the pilot project will run through 2023, while on-farm projects will run for at least five years from the project launch.
