The issue of water and farming is one which just won't go away.
The reason it persists is simple enough to understand, there is just not an easy solution to the core questions at play.
From a single farmer perspective there is generally a rather rationale belief that if they own a piece of land they should be able to tend to that land in whatever way they see fit in pursuit of making an honest living.
With that as a central belief, the idea of draining a slough to capture more acres for planting, or digging a trench to channel run off away from their land would seem to be well within the realm of managing one's land resource.
However, when water is drained and rerouted it ends up going somewhere else, and too often than means a farmer 'downstream' gets hit by more water, and ends up with flooded acres.
If that farmer in turn trenches water away, the problem compounds downstream.
It is a recipe for hard feelings and lawsuits as farmers end up enemies based on where water flows.
The first farmer in the line is not happy to see legislation to limit his ability to drain and trench because it leaves acres under water he feels he could turn productive by diverting water.
And while the farmers downstream might be protected by trenching bans, they do not line up to pay the first farmer some level of compensation for being prevented from bringing additional acres into production.
Ultimately, the water grows in volumes and ends up impacting communities downstream.
Nowhere is that better illustrated than the Assiniboine River system where Portage la Prairie and Winnipeg often feel the brunt of water flowing from much of eastern Saskatchewan and western Manitoba.
The situation has led to millions, upon millions of dollars spent over the decades to mitigate the problem.
In some cases the efforts, such as Lake of the Prairies, have worked as they were supposed to, with limited negative impact.
In other cases efforts by government agencies have simply diverted water to flood farmed land in an effort to save urban housing, housing which in reality were and are allowed to exist far too close to a known flood plain in the first place.
But those homes on the flood plain house voters, more voters than on the remaining scattered farms of ruralManitoba, so one knows who government will look to protect first.
So the affair of water and farming rages with the issues so twisted with related ideas ranging from the right to farm, to the politics of re-election, answers seem all but impossible to realize.
