Exploring Water Resource Management with SPC

With the help of Scottish Government KTIF funding, SAOS is teaming up with the Scottish Potato Co-operative (SPC) to investigate how we can better manage one of our most precious commodities, water. Storing, abstracting, and irrigating are common practices, and all these have a cost. We want to think about management of water in a future, drier climate. And how beneficial, and costly, changes to water management could be. Although it hasn’t been a problem this year, water scarcity is challenging; reducing overall potato yield, and marketable yield for high value, early salad, and higher dry matter, potato varieties.

We know our climate is changing. We’re seeing more extreme weather events affecting farming operations more often. We’re projected to have hotter, drier summers and warmer, wetter winters. Climate trends show that Scotland’s East coast has had more increasingly drier summers than the rest of the country. Globally, we are now in a La Niña weather pattern, which will give us a period of wetter and milder weather in Scotland. When this flips back to an El Niño weather pattern*, we expect water scarcity to become a significant challenge and we want SPC’s members to be ready for this challenge.

This project will interrogate the practicalities and feasibility of different water resource management practices and their costs and benefits: whether that be storage, technologies, or different practices. We’ll look at what SPC members are currently doing in terms of water storage and irrigation, and also further afield, for countries and businesses that are doing things a bit differently.

Climate adaptation will be expensive and will require policy support. NFU Scotland is a partner in the project and the information gathered will inform their lobbying activities.

David Michie, who is leading on the project, tells us his plans: “When lifting is finished, I will get out and onto farms to interview SPC members to get a better understanding of what they’re doing. Getting a good handle on the practicalities and costs of what they do will help put potential innovations from elsewhere into a Scottish potato growing context. These interviews might also identify different practices to investigate further.

“Ultimately, we want to find out how to manage water as the climate changes. To identify options that businesses can put in place. As growing conditions change over time, and water becomes a scarce and valuable resource, we want to ensure our co-op members are best placed to use that resource profitably and sustainably.”

*During normal conditions in the Pacific ocean, trade winds blow west along the equator, taking warm water from South America towards Asia. To replace that warm water, cold water rises from the depths — a process called upwelling. El Niño and La Niña are two opposing climate patterns that break these normal conditions. El Niño and La Niña events occur every two to seven years, on average, but they don’t occur on a regular schedule. Generally, El Niño occurs more frequently than La Niña.