ARIZONA'S MODERN IRRIGATORS: PART 1.

WRITING an account of modern Arizona irrigators should be simple. Before me are dozens of books, pamphlets, reports, with all the history and all the statistics. In just a moment or two I can tell you when any storage dam in Arizona was started, when it was finished, how much it cost, how many cubic yards of concrete and how many tons of steel it contains, how much water it impounds, how much land it serves. I can tell you about the increase in irrigated acreage from year to year, mileage of canals and laterals that convey the water to the farms, number of pumps drawing upon our underground supply, and so on and so on. Mere dates and figures, however, do not constitute any true picture of irrigation in Arizona. The story of irrigation is the story of vast changes wrought in a vast state by the artificial application of water to less than 1% of its area. Of the homes it has made possible for hundreds of thousands of people who would Dates are one of the crops grown most successfully in Salt River valley. This shows an extra heavy crop on an extra fine palm. The nine bunches weighed 800 pounds, half of which was graded out as "fancy" fruit that brought the grower 50 cents a pound.

otherwise have no means of making a living; of the influence of irrigation upon the utilization of other resources. Only a few years ago, mining was Arizona's first industry in point of output value. Yet we can be sure that, without agriculture, mineral development would have stopped far short of where it is today. Many of our mines could not have been opened and their minerals economically transported to market without the railroads and highways that would have never been built had there been no large agricultural population to serve. As for the range livestock industry, there were no agriculture of importance, but its value would be much less. The range cattle would mostly have to be driven or shipped elsewhere for fattening. As it is, they are fattened in the pastures and pens of our lush irrigated its output might be about the same if valleys, shipped on in the far more profit-

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Marvels of engineering are embodied in the dams that impound water for irrigation and in the canal systems that distribute it. But in the last analysis it is the man with the shovel who must guide the water where it is to go. The tower in the distance is over a modern deep-well pump which supplements the "gravity water" from the reservoirs.