Water Infrastructure at VXV Farms: Getting Water Where It’s Needed

VXV Farms | Regenerative Alberta Living Lab

Gerald Vandervalk has been running cattle on VXV Farms near Claresholm for most of his life. The operation his grandfather started in 1956 now runs just over 300 cow-calf pairs across 4,000 acres - roughly two thirds of it native rough fescue, the rest tame grass and hayland.

In recent years, one problem kept coming up. “We can get water almost everywhere we want,” Gerald says, “but when it's so dry like this, it's kind of a toss-up - what's worse, no water or no grass?”

The answer, for the Vandervalks, was to stop treating water as a fixed constraint and start engineering around it.

Moving water without a power bill

The core of the VXV water system is gravity. A 2-inch pipe runs more than 5,000 feet across the valley from a dam, feeding troughs at multiple points across the landscape. “Some people would comment, wow, that's expensive to bring a pipe that far,” Gerald notes, “but land is expensive too.”

Where gravity isn't enough, solar pumps pick up the slack. Flood irrigation draws from the creek and returns excess water naturally. The result is a system that moves water to remote areas of the operation without drawing on grid power or diesel.

For Gerald, the motivation is practical - no fuel costs, no power bills, and no need to run infrastructure to distant parts of the ranch. The fact that the system runs on sunlight and gravity is a byproduct of those decisions, not the starting point.

Low-tech that works

The trough setup at VXV reflects the same thinking. Gerald sources large tires from coal mines - “this is kind of my favorite size, it holds enough water, it's not too big in the winter” - sets a concrete plug in the bottom, and runs 2-inch poly pipe up into it, with a second pipe as overflow.

Valves are buried below frost line so the system can run through winter without freezing. A simple ball valve turned a quarter turn opens or closes flow. For filtering, Gerald drills holes in capped PVC pipe - “twice as many as you think you might want” - and that's the filter.

None of it is complicated. All of it keeps working with minimal attention.

What changes when water moves

Before this infrastructure was in place, cattle would camp near the one reliable water source on a given part of the ranch and rarely move far from it. “There's a lot of land that we wouldn't be able to graze at all, or not effectively,” Gerald says.

Getting water distributed across the landscape changed what was possible for grazing management - something the next post in this series looks at in more detail.

What early soil sampling is showing

VXV Farms is one of the operations participating in the Regenerative Alberta Living Lab, a five-year project tracking how whole-farm management decisions interact with soil health outcomes over time.

Early soil sampling at VXV is showing higher carbon levels in areas with better water access - particularly in the multi-species cover crop grown for green feed on flood-irrigated ground. It's early data and conditions vary year to year, but the pattern is worth watching.

Water, in other words, may be doing more work than just keeping cattle hydrated.