Irrigated Agriculture

Idaho's Economic Lifeblood

by Sherl L. Chapman

Executive Director

Idaho Water Users Association

Acknowledgement: Extensive use in this article has been made of research and writings produced by others including Ron Carlson, Watermaster of Water District 1, Randy Bingham of the Burley Irrigation District, the informal history of the Idaho Department of Water Resources, written by Nikki Engs and Dick Larsen, Idaho Department of Water Resources.

If you want to see evidence of a true Idaho miracle, take a drive on the Interstate from Rexburg to Mountain Home just about any day in July.

As you drive, look out across the tens of thousands of acres of alfalfa, grain, corn, potatoes, beets and other crops that stretch almost to the horizon. Those fields of green are just the tip of another kind of green - a $5.3 billion agricultural related economy.

From nature's perspective it is all wrong. Those crops are not supposed to be there. Not in an arid land where the average rainfall averages between 8 and 12 inches. Instead the land would be largely barren, the natural home for Idaho's famous sagebrush.

The difference is water.

Its water flowing serenely along in Idaho's rivers and streams, being guided through diversions out of the river and into thousands of miles of canals. There it glides along until it pours out through headgates into ditches and finally down the furrows soaking down to the thirsty roots of crops. What isn't used runs on where it is reused down the line.

Its water being pumped from huge center pivots that irrigate hundreds of acres at a time. There is no scene more Idaho than that when you look off across the Idaho landscape and see dozens, even hundreds of sprinkler sets pulsing their life-giving water against a morning or evening sun.

Irrigation water delivery systems are the engine that has single handedly transformed our state - especially the lower two thirds. Many believe that development of Idaho's irrigation capacity is the single most significant activity in the history of our state during the 20^th Century..

And the vast majority of the system has been put in place in what is really a relatively short period of time compared to historical standards.

Idaho water was first put to irrigation in 1837 at the Whitman Missionary farm near Spalding.

As early as the 1850s, farm entrepreneurs in the Boise Valley dug crude ditches to bring Boise River water to small farms where they grew vegetables and other crops that could be sold to miners flocking to the gold rush bonanza in the high county of the Boise basin.

By the 1850s, settlers moving up into extreme southern Idaho from Utah began to divert water for crops from Maple Creek near modern day Preston. In the process they created the basis for what has now become the oldest recorded water right in Idaho.

All along the Oregon Trail through Idaho, settlers headed for Oregon decided instead to try their luck by carving out small farms along the Snake River and its many tributary streams and creeks.

Throughout the 1850s and 60s Idaho's population grew slowly, restricted almost exclusively to areas in close proximity to streams and rivers. That fact was dictated by the harsh, arid conditions found across the southern half of the state. There simply wasn't enough rainfall to support a general crop growing season. And what rainfall there was, often was so undependable that the farmer lived on a constant razor's edge of economic brinkmanship.

Early settlers knew there was enough water in the rivers to meet all their needs. The huge snowpacks of the high country provided run off that swelled streams and rivers well into summer. They had the vision to know that if somehow the water in the streams could be controlled then a consistent source of irrigation could be provided. But it would take decades before opportunity could be married up with vision.

Irrigated agriculture in the second half of the 1800s in Idaho developed slowly. In most cases it literally boiled down to a tooth and nail battle between settler and his harsh environment. Totally without the construction equipment and technology we take for granted today, the farmer used pick and shovel and horse-drawn slip scrapers and Fresno's to carve out crude ditches from rudimentary brush, rock and dirt-filled diversion dams on nearby streams to his farmland.

By the 1870s settlers in the Burley-Albion area had begun to divert water from small creeks into a series of canals. Along the Snake River above today's American Falls dam, farmers were making plans to join forces to carve out canals to carry water to farmland being opened.

In June 1880 the Long Island Canal began to carry Snake River water to farmers. Within four years, construction was underway on what would eventually result in nearly all of the major canals above American Falls. In other locations along the Snake River and other streams, ingenious farmers used water wheels, sometimes as many as a dozen at a time, to lift water from the river and transfer it to ditches used to irrigate nearby fields.

In the late 1880s, plans were drawn up to build a major canal in the Boise Valley that would carry water to farmlands to the west. Financed by New York City tycoons, a canal named the New York Canal was heralded as the opportunity of a lifetime for the valley. A few miles of canal were built but the project almost immediately foundered in the harsh financial reality of canal construction.

That collision between project expectations and financial reality unfortunately repeated itself all too frequently around the southern half of the state in the 1880s. Time after time, canal projects that were to transform an area were wrecked on the rocks of financial insolvency. As the written history of the Burley Irrigation District explains, the result was that farmers in the Mini-Cassia area often ended up with foreclosure notices rather than water.

But the lack of growth in irrigated agriculture was not from a lack of trying. By 1889 it was reckoned that there were nearly 40 canals that had been built, paid for by nearly $1 million from both private investors and farmers. But those canals carried not a single drop of water.

By 1890, the Idaho Territory's population had grown to 68,000 people. Officials also estimated that there were about 217,000 acres now being irrigated. But most also believed that the Territory had just about reached its limit of land that could be developed. The limiting factor was availability of water. It was just too difficult or expensive to create the irrigation canal systems needed to offset the lack of natural rainfall.

Around the southern half of the state, irrigation survey's had been done to determine where potential canals could be developed. While it was concluded they would be successful, their cost of construction made them impractical.

Perhaps the most painful paradox of all was that the land itself, largely a silt loam soil made of volcanic ash, held immense growing potential. It lacked only one thing: a consistent source of water. The situation was made even crueler by the huge volumes of water that flowed unchecked down Idaho's rivers past those arid lands and on out of the state.

By 1890 most observers had begun to believe that Idaho's growth, as with most of the rest of the 10 arid Western states, was running out of momentum. They could not have imagined that just 10 years later the total irrigated acres in Idaho would have more than doubled and that a water driven economic miracle was underway.

By most observers, the Carey Act of 1894 marked a watershed point in the development of Idaho's irrigated agriculture. The Act, proposed by Sen. Joseph M. Carey of Wyoming, was designed to lure both settlers and investment capital to the west without the need for federal financial subsidies.

The answer was land, lots of land. A million acres of free federal lands made available to the states for their settlers provided the development also included irrigation systems that could deliver the crucial element of water.

Before the Carey Act, the Desert Land Act provided federal lands to people at a cheap price provided they could establish irrigation on the land within three years. While the earlier Desert Land Act encouraged land development, the financial burden on the individual to provide irrigation meant most projects were small scale in nature.

It was the Carey Act that put in place the basic framework for the widespread development of Idaho's fertile lands. Idaho would take claim to the federal lands, develop it with irrigation so it would support agriculture and then sell it to settlers.

The Carey Act cleared the U.S. Congress in June 1894 and was signed into law on August 18, 1894. Seven months later, the Idaho Legislature created the Office of State Engineer, the forerunner of the present day Idaho Department of Water Resources, specifically to administer implementation of the Act in Idaho.

The first Carey Act project proposed was the American Falls project which came before the State Land Board towards the end of 1895. It would eventually cost some $800,000 and would end with some 50,000 acres being brought into production early in the 1900s.

Idaho would eventually become the most successful Carey Act state in the nation developing, or patenting as it was called, almost 630,000 acres of irrigated agriculture.

The early years of the Carey Act in Idaho were difficult times. Private investors were required to fund the costs of bringing irrigation to the lands being patented. Many Carey Act projects failed because of the inherently high cost of developing irrigation systems.

Still, the Carey Act served as the stimulus for continued development of Idaho's irrigation capability. In 1900 the first major irrigation project below American Falls was filed under the Act by the Twin Falls Land and Water Company.

The centerpiece of the project was to be a dam on the Snake River where two islands split the river near the Rock Creek Station. Today we know the structure as Milner Dam. And the Twin Falls project proved to be the key that unlocked the door to the future of irrigated agriculture in the Magic Valley.

Milner Dam came about because of the vision of Ira Burton Perrine, a rancher who had developed a Shoshone Falls resort and a Blue Lakes farm downstream. Perrine chose the site of the dam and acted as his own engineer. He obtained financing for the project through Stanley B. Milner, a banker and financier from Salt Lake City, and easterners Frank H. Buhl and Peter L. Kimberly. As a result, the Buhl-Kimberly Corp. was formed and in 1903 a contract was entered into between the State of Idaho and the Twin Falls Land and Water Co. for construction of the project. The dam was formed by three earth and rockfilled embankments abutting the riverbanks and two islands. In 1905 construction on the dam was completed. Men with mules and scrapers had also finished their work on the canals and all was ready for the water.

In a ceremony on March 1, 1905, Frank Buhl of the Twin Falls Land and Water Company closed the gates of Milner Dam and water began to flow for the first time into a thousand miles of canals and laterals. In the process they also temporarily dried up Shoshone Falls. But the system opened up more than 260,000 acres of farmland.

Four years later the North Side element of the project began taking water adding another 170,000 acres of irrigated farmland to Idaho's total.

The legacy of the original investors of the Twin Falls Land and Water Company can also be found in the towns, dam and bridge that today bear their names: Buhl, Perrine, Milner and Kimberly, to name just a few.

By the turn of the century, it was clear that the Carey Act had enormous potential to stimulate the development of irrigated lands across the southern half of the state. But there was one major roadblock to the full development of the west the way it had been envisioned. The problem was money.

There was just not enough private capital investment to handle the staggering financial demands necessary to build the large-scale water delivery programs needed in the arid west.

Still, projects were being built but they were small and local in their impact.

Then in 1902 came the congressional action that many feel was the bellwether that opened the floodgates for development of Idaho's irrigated agriculture. It was the National Reclamation Act.

When President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Newlands Act, as it was originally known, into law on June 17, 1902, it created a special fund into which would go all money received from the sale and disposal of public lands in the 16 western states. The money would then be put into a special reclamation fund, which would be used to finance the costs to examine, survey, construct and maintain irrigation works in the arid lands of the American West.

Suddenly, federal dollars were available to pay for projects that had been out of reach of local irrigation districts, canal companies and private investors. Farmers and settlers could contract with the federal government for the construction of irrigation facilities, the cost of which then would be repaid to the government by the water users over time.

The result was an explosion in major irrigation projects across the State over the next decade.

The construction of canal facilities such as the New York Canal in the Boise Valley, finally completed with federal dollars, proved to be the economic veins of Idaho's irrigated agriculture. But when it came to water, they were just a part of the equation. After all, Idaho farmers already had canals that stood empty with no water to carry because water just wasn't available for use during the summer when demands on natural flows far outstripped the supply available in the rivers. At times during the summer, one watermaster noted, the Snake River in the vicinity of Blackfoot was dried up over a 10-mile stretch.

With the rapid development of irrigated farmland and a still limited water supply, argument swelled over the availability of water. So serious had become the growing disputes over water that a lawsuit eventually was filed to force an adjudication of all water claims on the Snake River and its tributaries above Blackfoot. The outcome was the 1910 Rexburg Decree, which was the first true court demonstration in Idaho of the principle of "first in time is first in right." Three years later the Foster Decree adjudicated the lower part of the Snake to Milner Dam.

The court cases left no doubt, if any was needed, that there was not enough natural flow water in the river to meet all the demands.

This water shortage situation became especially critical as Idahoans began to open more and more land through the Carey Act. As more and more applications were filed on the available water, it became clear that Idaho's canal capacity far outstripped its supply of water.

The situation helped clarify the real dilemma: lack of irrigation water storage. If irrigated agriculture was to ever really expand across the desert areas of the state, then there had to be a way the water could be stored in the fall and winter. That way it could be made available to irrigators on a consistent basis throughout the dry months of Idaho's growing season.

The answer was crystal clear then, and it has remained so to this day. If you build a dam and store the abundant snowpack run-off of a stream in a reservoir behind it, then you would have water to deliver to canal diversions on a massive scale in the dead of summer when Idaho was typically at its most arid worst and the plants needed it the most.

That's why many leading figures in Idaho irrigation history have credited the National Reclamation Act, as it became known, as being the key that truly unlocked the west. Federal dollars ignited an explosion in dam construction in Idaho in the first part of the 20^th Century. By the time it was finished, a system of dozens of major dams was in place creating an intricate system that today stores more than 12 million-acre feet of water.

The irrigation districts and systems that we take for granted today are largely an outgrowth of that construction.

The first major federal reclamation project in the State was the Minidoka Project on the Snake River near Burley. It centered on a diversion dam that would store some 97,000 acre-feet of water in a 35 mile long reservoir called Lake Walcott that would serve some 130,000 acres of land via canals on both the north and south sides of the Snake River. In 1903 the government filed for a water right that would supply more than 1,700 cubic feet per second of water for the project. Construction began on the project in 1904.

Another key project was launched in 1906 when the government built a log crib dam at the outlet to Jackson Lake in Wyoming near the Idaho border to store some 300,000 acre feet of water for use in downstream irrigation in Eastern Idaho. By 1915, a new dam was in place which provided storage for 847,000 acre-feet of irrigation water which could be used to meet water demands as far down the Snake River system as the Magic Valley.

Reclamation work was also underway in the southwestern part of Idaho with the launch of the Boise-Payette Valley projects. The Boise Diversion Dam was completed in 1909 about 10 miles upstream from Boise. Two smaller storage reservoirs, Lake Lowell and Deer Flat Reservoir, were also added in the western part of the Treasure Valley. It was the front door key, and federal dollars for expansion of the New York Canal, that set the stage for the realization of the full irrigation potential of the Boise Valley.

But it was on Oct. 4, 1915 when the true power of the Reclamation Act reached its pinnacle of the era. After four years of construction by some 1,000 workers, Arrowrock Dam on the Boise River, some 20 miles upstream from Boise, was officially dedicated in a ceremony attended by some 5,000 people and reported in newspapers around the country. At 345 feet and constructed of million of tons of concrete, it was the tallest dam in the world.

The first 20 years of the 20^th Century saw the completion of many storage and delivery systems around Idaho. But many believe there were none so grand as mighty Arrowrock, pride of the nation.

More importantly to Idahoans than its international stature was the fact that it stored more than 200,000 acre feet of irrigation water that could be supplied to some 340,000 acres of farmland in an expanding Boise Valley where annual rainfall amounted to just 11 inches. By 1955, two additional dams, Anderson Ranch in Elmore County and Lucky Peak in Boise County would bring the total system to nearly 1,000,000 acre feet of storage.

Throughout the first two decades of the 1900s, a variety of canal and storage facilities were added to the list. Some of the notable projects include the Birch Creek Cooperative Irrigation Project that brought water to Butte County in 1909 and the American Falls Irrigation Project in 1911.

In 1919 and 1920, five Carey Act projects were completed. The Twin Falls Salmon River Project, the North Side-Twin Falls Project, Marysville Project, the Second Owsley Project and the Keating Project. These five projects alone accounted for 86 miles of main canals plus another 1,061 miles of secondary canals and brought irrigation to more than 200,000 acres.

In 1923 the Big Lost River Irrigation Project began to supply water to farmers in Blaine, Bingham and Fremont counties. This was followed in 1924 by completion of Black Canyon Dam on the Payette River near Emmett, which became the irrigation heartbeat of the Payette valley.

Piece by piece the irrigation infrastructure was being put into place that would begin to change the face of Idaho from a sparsely populated western state into a place where agricultural miracles were made possible by the presence of water. And the issues of how to regulate the distribution of water became more and more critical as the system evolved.

In 1919, Idaho was facing a drought year. The farmers need to cope with potential Snake River water shortages and struggles with a complex water management system resulted in the formation of the Committee of Nine. This group, formed by the Snake River water users, was put in place to improve and oversee the overall methods being used to distribute water across the Upper Snake irrigation system.

Three representatives each from the North Fork Protective Association, the Farmer's Protective Irrigation Association and three from the Minidoka and Twin Falls projects held their first meeting on April 18, 1919. The Committee of Nine remains in place today as the overseer of Snake River irrigation water delivery.

The year 1926 proved to be another major watershed year in Idaho irrigated agriculture. That's when construction of American Falls Dam and Reservoir was completed. American Falls Reservoir, with its 1.7 million acre feet storage capacity, has remained to this day a key element in the water supply operation of downstream irrigation systems.

American Falls had been in the planning stages since 1920 when a huge reservoir holding some 3 million-acre-feet of water had been contemplated. But a new Secretary of the Interior visited the site and declared the project to be too large and too costly and pulled the financial plug on the project.

The decision eventually was reversed and construction authorized but only after canal companies raised $2.7 million to guarantee the federal government repayment of the construction cost. Construction soon started on a scaled down version of the project.

A variety of smaller private and larger Bureau of Reclamation storage reservoirs were completed around Idaho in the late 1920s and 1930s. These included Henry's Lake Reservoir built by the North Fork Reservoir Company in 1923, Deadwood Dam on the Payette in 1931, Owyhee Dam in 1932, Island Park and Grassy Lake Reservoirs in 1938.

Dozens of storage reservoirs, large and small, private and public, continued to be constructed well into the 1950s. Cascade Dam, Anderson Ranch, Lucky Peak and Palisades all became elements in an Idaho irrigation infrastructure honed and refined through more than 90 years of water management.

It seemed Idaho could never have enough storage reservoirs. But the end came suddenly, not with a whisper but with a thunderous roar. On June 5, 1976, Teton Dam on the Teton River in Fremont County suffered a catastrophic failure.

Some 260,000 acre feet of water swept like a tidal wave downstream causing 11 deaths and nearly a half billion dollars in damage. With it went the end of an era. Not a single large-scale reservoir has been constructed since.

In the late 1930s and into the 1940s a new player was entering the irrigation field. No longer would farmers be dependent on flows in a river or stored behind a dam. Now field's miles from the nearest canal or ditch could be developed. Now the water would come from a reservoir so large it's immensity can really only be imagined. A reservoir so vast that just its top 100 feet held an estimated 100 million-acre feet of water. A reservoir located beneath the feet of farmers, underground, called the Snake River Plain Aquifer.

Groundwater irrigation was the last true frontier. The idea of drilling a well to get water was nothing new. But the concept of high lift pumping, of bring millions of gallons of water from deep underground and pumping it into ditches serving furrow field irrigation was the start of a wave that would finish transforming the face of eastern and southern Idaho.

From modest beginnings in the late 1920s and 30s, groundwater irrigation began to accelerate as technology in well drilling, pumping and sprinkler irrigation improved. Soon tens of thousands of acres were under irrigation in areas written off by earlier settlers as being impossible to farm.

Entire irrigation districts supplying water from groundwater pumping were soon to follow. The A&B Irrigation District in Rupert, founded in the late 1930s, soon developed a network of over 170 supply wells providing irrigation water to farmers working some 76,000 acres.

By the 1990s some 10,000 water rights had been issued for groundwater irrigation in Eastern and Southern Idaho. Groundwater was directly responsible for a $750 million economic boost to Idaho's farming economy.

In the 160 years since water was first put to use on Idaho farmland, there has evolved a sophisticated network of thousands of miles of canals, laterals and ditches. There are literally hundreds of irrigation districts, ditch companies, canal companies and other entities directly involved with the delivery of water from river to land.

Those 217,000 acres of irrigated farmland in 1890 had grown a hundred years later into nearly 4,000,000 acres. Idaho's irrigated agriculture economy now exceeds $5 billion annually and involves tens of thousands of family farms.

The battles over control of the water have grown more heated and bitter as the stakes have risen. The Snake River Basin Adjudication launched in 1987 was designed to begin to sort out just who should get water and in what order. Idaho's water law has become so complex that law practices that specialize in water law are among the most successful in the state. An entire section of Idaho Code is now devoted just to water. Salmon recovery issues have been a crucial part of Idaho's irrigation future.

Still, the clatter and shrill of today's struggles over the future course of Idaho's irrigation supply pale when you think of the sweat, toil and sacrifice that marked the beginnings and the development of Idaho irrigation.

Water. No other factor so affected and changed the nature of life in our state. No other factor so defined the character of rural Idaho. Terms like watermaster, headgate, ditchrider, diversion, CFS and acre-feet have entered the Idaho lexicon.

From the middle of the 19^th Century to the end of the 20^th Century, there has been one icon above all others that has truly defined at once Idaho's past and its future; the irrigation canal!