Pipeline may keep us living here for another century

I grew up on an irrigated farm, or maybe I should say farms, in Roosevelt County just before the handwriting appeared on the wall. Irrigated farming was destined to change and eventually cease in eastern New Mexico.

Some had dared mention it in the 1960s but it wasn’t until I was off the farm in the 1970s that everyone knew the problem was dire and wouldn’t reverse itself.

I was reading the 1977 Special “Progress Edition” of the Portales News-Tribune that I mentioned a few columns ago and reflecting on the part irrigation water had played in the lives of so many families like mine for so many years. Sadly, many of the predictions made in that edition about our water both for irrigation and municipal use have come to reality. With conservation and technology we’ve slowed the inevitable but not forestalled it.

The oral history my grandmother on my father’s side passed on said that when her father began looking for a farm around the Clovis/Portales area he was looking for two things — shallow water and a place without Johnson grass. Apparently he found that in the Arch area.

They called irrigation in this area the “underground rain” because annual rainfall wasn’t sufficient to grow most crops. If irrigation could be accomplished without too much expense it was possible to make great crops. We did just that in the area for the better part of a century. Good crops made the cash registers all over town ring.

By 1977 predictions were that as the water for irrigation slowly ran out, land would slowly go back to rangeland or be converted to dryland farming. I even wrote a research paper for freshman English in college about the problem. It was pretty easy for me to write, I just had to go to the library and source it out. Got an A on the paper and I think I convinced my instructor to move on to greener pastures the next year.

Hydrologists of that time were mostly right on their predictions of how well the Ogallala Aquifer would hold out but the doom and gloom predicted by economists for the local economy haven’t held water.

Those economic hopes rest on how carefully we conserve what’s left in our municipal well fields and incredibly enough to those of us who’ve been around the area for a while, Ute Reservoir water.

Ute pipeline water was mentioned in that 1977 story about municipal water but it was given last-ditch emergency status. Thanks to developments in federal funding over the last couple of years it looks like that “pipe dream” may come to realization in my lifetime.

It won’t bring back irrigated farming on the scale we saw in the last century but it does look like we may be able to continue to live on this high arid prairie for another century if we’re careful with our precious water.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

[email protected]