Paper released
Consolidation of Risk, Paper 2 in the Water Pollution Series (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21500234), reports on how farmland consolidation changes enforcement math for nutrient load.
Saskatchewan's public census of large farmland ownership, compiled from land titles by Magnan and colleagues at the University of Saskatchewan, shows entities holding more than 10,000 acres rising from 36 in 2018 to 84 in 2023, with acreage under those holdings up 140 percent. The paper asks what that scale does once monitoring isolates a load increase on a specific reach.
Central finding
Where one title holder dominates the drainage feeding a monitored reach, a concentration difference between upstream and downstream stations points at that title before anyone proves which tenant applied fertilizer in which week. Portfolio scale raises the probability that a large landholder is named first when mandatory nutrient rules or cleanup damages attach. A reference scenario for a 100,000-acre grain and oilseed holding bounds expected annual exposure near $2.23 million under the paper's probability-weighted pathways.
Where exposure concentrates
Acreage alone does not decide liability. Holdings on monitored, phosphorus-sensitive reaches, Lake Erie tributaries, Manitoba's Red River valley, Alberta's middle Bow corridor, carry more of this exposure than large holdings on lower-sensitivity drainages. The PDF sets out methods, sensitivity ranges, and the full scenario math.
Full paper: Download PDF · Zenodo DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21500234 · Water Pollution Series