Western Irrigation District Memories – Peter and Elsie Nikkel

By John Godsman Times Contributor

The Nikkel family name originated in northern Holland and Prussia, before settling in Ukraine in the 1700s. After the Seven Years War, Russian Czarina Catherine the Great required the services of farmers to rehabilitate her nation’s land and persuaded many Mennonites, including the Nik-kel family, to move to the Ukraine.
In 1926, Peter’s grandfather came to Coaldale, east of Lethbridge, with his family, which in-cluded Peter’s father Abram. This area was particularly attractive to immigrants with a farming background because of the opportunities associated with irrigation and sugar beets.
Peter was born in 1938 in Coaldale and attended the Readymade School for both elementary and junior high, followed by the Mennonite High School. From 1958-1960, he attended SAIT in Calgary for aircraft maintenance, which led to subsequent work with Pacific Western Airlines in Edmonton.
From 1964 to 1982, he was an automotive teacher at Bowness High School, then took a number of alternative fuel courses, which came in handy after he started farming and using irrigation. From 1983 to 1993 he was a consultant for Career Technology, then spent three years curriculum writing for the province.
Elsie (Thiessen) Nikkel’s family also originated in Ukraine. She was born at her parent’s farm in Namaka, and attended school in that area and Coaldale AMHS, where she met and married Peter. They were married in 1962 and have three children and nine grandchildren.
Her father George acquired the land at Namaka in the early 1930s from the CPR, and started us-ing flood irrigation in 1932. The A canal supplied water to the farm, and V ditches were trenched to divert the water onto their land. Peter purchased his first pivot in 1985 from South Dakota. It was an old Valley Water Drive originally manufactured in the 1930s. In 1992, they installed wheel moves in the hayfield, and converted the water drive pivot to electrical power in 1994. A rough survey of the land in 1998 was completed with the help of Namaka Farms, prior to ap-proaching WID about installing pipelines which would supply water to two pivots and a wheel move.
The future of irrigated farming in the area will depend on water efficiency, particularly if climate forecasts are accurate, requiring advances in technology that will have a major impact on the economy and how water is delivered.