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Businesses and non-profit organizations regularly open and move in Saskatoon. Today the StarPhoenix talks to Layne Larson, a sales director and business growth manager for Delta Irrigation, which recently opened its first Saskatchewan branch in Saskatoon.
Delta helps farmers receive consistent water at the ideal times to boost crop yields to their best levels of production. The company also provides water products like heaters and boilers and other water-related services.
Delta, which originally opened in Kamloops in 1978, now has about 20 branches in Western Canada. It entered the irrigation market in Alberta in 2019 and has irrigation centres in Medicine Hat, Lethbridge and Taber. The company said it sees Saskatchewan as a growing market in need of their water services, and plans to open a second location in Outlook this spring.
A: We take care of pretty much anything to do with irrigation. We mainly do agriculture irrigation, and we take care of everything — the design, the pipeline, the power, the pumps and pivots.
A: The benefits of irrigation are double to triple your crop production potential. In Alberta, the land prices are about two to three times as much if you have irrigation on your land. It’s very exciting for Saskatchewan to be getting into this. It’s going to be huge and you’re going to see a lot of growth.
This gives farmers a certain consistency of water. It gives farmers the option to grow a variety of different crops as well. Crop variety is limited for farmers, without knowing what type of moisture they will receive. The main thing is the timely water with irrigation. You plan it out and use it when your crop needs water. Getting a ton of rain doesn’t necessarily help if it’s going to be dry for a month after. We’re creating better crops and better land through avoidance of drought.
A: We are really excited about the growth and what’s happening in Saskatchewan in irrigation. We have developed a growing number of irrigation projects in Alberta and we see such huge potential in Saskatchewan. Just with what the projections are looking like, there’s going to be a lot more pipelines opening up in Saskatchewan. We’re very excited to see what’s coming. It’s really going to blow up here in the next five years.
A: Irrigation is completed through pivots that we install. A pivot is a giant sprinkler. It comes in sections of anywhere from 150 to 200 feet. We have droplet sprinklers and hoses that come down and they uniformly spray water on a field and they have motors that run them around the field. It actually moves the pivot all the way around your field till you get water on the whole field. A single pivot will usually cover a 160-acre field. We have installed projects as small as one pivot, all the way up to 54 pivots. We’re working on a Glidden project (50 km south of Kindersley) which will cover close to 9,000 acres with 54 pivots for irrigation. That’s our biggest project, but we’ll work on smaller projects too, down to a quarter section.
A: Our biggest thing is taking care of our customers and making sure everything is done properly. We have a design team, a service team and we have a parts team. Every aspect that you can think of, we take care of that. Our main goal is to make sure our customers are happy and that’s how we’ve ended up growing so much. We’re actually the number two dealer in North America for Reinke (a leading worldwide irrigation system provider). There are other dealers (in Saskatchewan), but nothing that is the size of our dealerships. I would say nobody has the backing or the crew that we do.
A: Our main focus in Saskatchewan is irrigation right now, but we provide a wide range of water services. We have a pump and motor division and a wildfire division. We have water products such as heaters and boilers.
