"Rivers and Eden"

Maricopa, Pinal and Guma Counties form one of America's richest farming areas-all because of irrigationTALE of THREE COUNTIES BY

In the beginning there was nothing, unless you could call cactus and cresote brush and lizards lying torpid in the sun something. At least it was nothing man could live on, for man needs many thingsfood and clothing and shelter, the means of livelihood, roads to take him from where he is to where he wants to go. This was only desert -limitless expanses of desert stretching off to the infinity of some shadowy horizon. And yet wasn't there something more than hopelessness in this vast and unpopulated land mass? It bore little resemblance to the undulating dunes of Africa's Sahara. It was flat, for the most part, and through it twisted broad-bedded rivers and creeks. And there was vegetation on the desert. True, it was a forbidding sort of vegetation the spiked saguaro, the prickly ocotillo, the useless mesquite. But it proved to anybody who might be interested that this wasn't all sand. There was much soil here soil which might be made to grow things. This, in fact, wasn't really desert at all. It was arid land. It needed only water.

And so men brought water to what was known as the Arizona desert. It wasn't as easy as all that, of course. It took perseverance and vision and hard, muscle-straining work. It took constant experimentation. It took much money. And it took 600 years or so.

But if ever the end justified the means, it did so in this case. Gradually the desert evolved into a lush and verdant carpeting. Farms sprang up to produce incredible quantities of food for dinner tables the world over. In this mild, semi-tropical climate, crops grow the year around. And then on the deeply-embedded foundation of agriculture there developed a layer of industry and business, and over all there grew a western civilization as modern and prosperous as any in the world.

This, then, is what irrigation has done for Arizona. So important is its role in the economy of the nation's youngest state that there might be no state here at all were it not for irrigation.

Arizona has in all 775,000 acres of land thus artificially watered. Of that total, three counties alone-Maricopa, Pinal and Yuma-account for 653,000 acres. Let's bring those three most irrigated counties in Arizona into sharper focus to see what wonders have been wrought by water. Maricopa county, which incorporates the state capital of Phoenix. is located in the desert regions of south central Arizona. It is the largest of the three in area, population, wealth and irrigated land. The latter amounts to 414,000 acres and the county's population of about 275,000 is more than a third as large as that of the entire state. In value of crops raised, the county ranks fifth in the United States. The heart of its irrigated area is the Salt River valley, sometimes referred to as the "Valley of the Sun." The Salt River project in turn comprises the bulk of this region, with lesser irrigation districts scattered about its fringes.

The valley well deserves the sobriquet of "the land of perpetual harvest." Agricultural production goes on literally around the calendar. Some crops are harvested twice and three times a year and alfalfa growers get four or five cuttings annually, so rich is the soil and so ideal the climate. Look about the valley any month and you will find some crop moving from the land to market. In January, oranges and grapefruit. In March, strawberries. In May, peaches and green corn. In July, sugar beets and cucumbers. In November, dates and olives and grapes.

But these are only a few of the many agricultural commodities produced in this intensely cultivated valley. The entire list looks like the outpourings of some gargantuan cornucopia. Lettuce, spinach, radishes, cauliflower, turnips, cabbage, onions, mulberries, blackberries, peas, plums, apricots, peaches, cantaloupes, potatoes, alfalfa, cotton, squashes, apples and the roll could be called even further.

Although by no means the greatest producer of revenue, Maricopa county's citrus is perhaps its most spectacular agricultural product, certainly to the midwestern and eastern visitor who has never seen grapefruit and oranges anywhere but in grocery stores and on breakfast tables. Orchards planted in orderly rows brightly speckled with yellows and golds as the ripening season comes on in mid-winter. One visiting writer was moved to describe them as "wheeling platoons of citrus trees like soldiers in dark green, with brass buttons."

During the 1945-46 fiscal year alone the county produced 7,414 carloads of grapefruit and 2,288 carloads of oranges. The gross value of its citrus output was $4,257,242 in the calendar year of 1945. The area devoted to citrus that year was 18,500 acres. In grapefruit alone the valley produced 83 per cent of Arizona's total crop. Much of it was processed in the valley's own processing plants.

Yuma county is a vast domain in southwestern Arizona, whose farm potentialities have not yet been touched. It has a glorious future.

But vegetables are a more important phase of Maricopa county agriculture than citrus, albeit not so colorful. Fifty thousand acres of vegetables were harvested in 1945-one-eighth of the county's entire irrigated area.

Lettuce predominates in the county's vegetable production. During the 1944-45 fiscal year it accounted for 13,389 out of 17,717 carloads of Maricopa vegetables. So extensive is lettuce cultivation that the county actually produces one-fifth of the lettuce grown commercially in the United States. Each year affords the growers two separate seasons. They plant in September and harvest about mid-winter, plant again in November and harvest early the next spring.

There also were 3,178 carloads of carrots in 1944-45, 346 of cabbage, 661 of cauliflower and 143 of broccoli.

From the standpoint of acreage, feed grains and cotton share almost equally high importance in the county's agricultural picture. There were 41,400 acres planted in cotton in 1945, most of it short-staple but some of it the famous Pima long-staple variety. In fact, the Arizona desert regions provided a testing ground for this American-Egyptian type of cotton so similar to the species grown along Egypt's Nile river bottoms. However, the acreage devoted to American-Egyptian cotton has fallen off sharply in recent years because growers find it more profitable than the upland or short-staple species only when it nets them two and a half times as much per pound.

Salt River valley cotton is ginned and baled in and around Phoenix and growers' associations handle much of the actual marketing.

One of the county's predominant crops is alfalfa, which covered 153,000 acres of Salt River valley farm land in 1945. Cattle are brought from the ranges into the valley for fattening on alfalfa, and thus cattle-feeding ranks high among the county's commercial activities. Alfalfa provides much winter pasture for sheep. After stock has been removed, it is harvested for hay.

The last decade or so also has seen the production of seed gain an ever widening importance, not only in Maricopa county, but throughout Arizona. In fact, Arizona was the nation's principal producer of alfalfa seed for many years, and this, of course, was the state's main seed crop in 1945.

About one-third of the sugar beet seed grown throughout the United States comes from Maricopa county and there are significant experiments now under way in the production of vegetable seeds.

Grains account for many thousands of acres of Maricopa county farm lands. In 1945 there were 53,000 acres planted in barley and 37,000 acres of grain sorghums. Grain-growers normally sow in October and pasture until February, then remove their stock from the fields and harvest their crops. Many farmers and cattle feeders also sow grain in their alfalfa fields and pasture through the winter. Fine hay emerges from the initial cutting of grain and alfalfa.

Tree crops like dates, apricots, olives, peaches, figs, pomegranates and pecans, while not overly extensive in the valley, nevertheless form a substantial part of its agricultural output. Again because of its Egyptian-like desert soil and climate, the valley is an ideal region for date growing. When the season is on, open-air stands in the valley cities have an abundance of trimly-packaged dates to tempt winter tourists and suggest a handy remembrance for Uncle Ed and Aunt Tessie back in Chicago.

Pinal county, which lies just to the south of Maricopa is fed by the meandering Gila river as it makes its way toward the mighty Colorado, has been gaining consistently in agricultural importance during late years.

As one of Arizona's irrigated "big three," Pinal now has about 170,000 acres of artificially watered farm lands out of a total of 420,000 acres of farm and grazing area. Some of the irrigation stems from Coolidge Dam, located on the Pinal-Gila county line. But the reservoir is at low level much of the time and the county has become increasingly dependent upon the pumping of underground water.

Cotton is far and beyond the most important crop in Pinal county As a matter of fact, the county produced more in 1945 than all the rest of Arizona combined. Nearly half its total irrigated area was planted in cotton.

Here again, as in the Salt River valley, are found both shortstaple cotton and the newer long-staple variety, although less of the latter. Land planted in short-staple cotton yields one or two bales to the acre. Cotton's by-products also supplement growers' incomes in Pinal county. Cottonseed oil is shipped to Los Angeles and other manufacturing cities and the residual cake or meal is used to feed stock.

Arizona's cotton production in large part has been shifting to Pinal county since 1930. It was then that Yuma county began a heavy reduction in cotton acreage from 35,000 acres in 1929 to 1,200 in 1945. Then, too, the recent war greatly stimulated Pinal cotton production.

Although well behind cotton in importance, alfalfa ranks second in Pinal farming, from the standpoint of acreage. There were 26,000 acres of alfalfa in the county in 1945, and the Gila valley is farfamed for the superior quality of its alfalfa hay.

Pinal farmers, like those to the north of them, have found the south central Arizona desert soil extraordinarily well adapted to alfalfa. For, in search of moisture, its roots work their way to almost unbelievable depths, open the soil and prepare it for moisture penetration. A wise farmer in this section of the southwest grows alfalfa for three or four years, then soil-depleting crops like cotton, small grains and melons.

Pinal also goes in heavily for grains. In 1945 there were 16,000 acres planted in grain sorghums, 12,000 in barley, 3,000 in wheat and 2.200 in corn.

Fruits and vegetables likewise are produced in the county, but in lesser quantities. These include olives, figs, dates, grapefruit, oranges, lemons, limes, strawberries, blackberries, sweet potatoes, watermelons and a duke's mixture of truck crops.

Stock raising is of paramount importance in the county's agrarian economy and the quality of its cattle and hogs is consistently high.

A substantial proportion of the county's agricultural production comes from Indian reservations where the traditionally land-loving Pimas and Papagos tend their crops and herds in much the same fashion as the white farmers. In fact, were it not for their language, appearance and skills at tribal handicraft, the Indians would be undistinguishable from other growers and stockmen. They are so completely absorbed in their agrarian pursuits that only a few old tribesmen remember the chants and ceremonies of days long past.

Even as long ago as 1846, when Gen. Stephen W. Kearney marched through this region during America's war with Mexico, one of his officers commented wonderingly, "To us it was a rare sight to be thrown into the midst of a large nation of what is termed wild Indians, surpassing many of the Christian nations in agriculture, little behind them in useful arts and immeasurably before them in honesty and virtue."

The Central Arizona Project Association, an organization set up recently to spearhead the fight for supplemental water from the Colorado river, has compiled some highly significant figures covering Maricopa and Pinal counties combined, or what it calls the "central valley irrigated lands."

In 1945 these counties together had 589,809 acres of crops and recorded a total crop and livestock income of $89,000,000, which was 64 per cent of the total for the entire state. Their cotton crop that year grossed $13,441,000, which was 78 per cent of the state total.

Agricultural wages for the same period aggregated $13,829,575, compared to an overall figure for the state of $21,575,000. And during the 1945-46 fiscal year the so-called central valley area exported 86,864 tons of agricultural products.

The third of Arizona's irrigated "big three" is Yuma county, in the far southwestern corner of the state, hard against the Mexican and California borders. Like Maricopa county but unlike Pinal, all of its farming is conducted on lands watered by artificial means. But, where the other two counties have reached an apparent saturation point in the bringing of new lands under cultivation, Yuma's irri At present the county has some 90,000 acres of irrigated farmlands, most of them in the immediate vicinity of the steadily growing city of Yuma itself and watered by the Colorado river as it surges southward along the Arizona border from famed Boulder Dam.

Lesser acreage are being farmed in the Wellton-Mohawk district east of Yuma along the Gila. The government plans to develop more of that region, along with additional reclamation in the immediate Yuma area, through a complex canal and pump system heading up at the Colorado and Imperial Dam.

The advent of irrigation transformed the raw and blistering desert of Yuma county into as rich a farming country as the nation possesses, for the sub-tropical climate is ideally conducive to agriculture and the soil is mostly of excellent quality. A high degree of diversity characterizes Yuma's agriculture. Production runs the gamut from barley to watermelons.

Alfalfa, of which 10 different strains have been developed, accounts for the largest acreage. Of almost equal importance is the county's production of alfalfa seed. It claims to be the producer of one-tenth of the nation's alfalfa seed crop annually, or approximately 5,000,000 pounds from 30,000 acres.

Flaxseed has figured importantly in Yuma county farming, especially in recent years. In fact, the county has established a world's record of 61.6 bushels per acre of clean, thresher-run flaxseed. This is 14 bushels higher than the previous récord. And in 1945 the county turned out three-fourths of a million pounds of Bermuda seed, which constituted the larger part of the entire American crop. The same year Yuma valley harvested 250 pounds of lettuce seed from each of 480 acres.

Much of the county's irrigated area is mesa land, practically all of which is given over to citrus - largely grapefruit. The climate here is singularly suited to citrus production, for it embodies the least rainfall, lowest relative humidity and greatest percentage of sunshine in the entire United States. The frost bugaboo, which haunts so many citrus growers in California and Arizona, is almost non-existent. Until this year, at least, there has been only one season in which temperatures fell low enough to cause partial damage to the citrus crop of the Yuma mesa. As a consequence of all these factors, the fruit is of fine quality and high color, and it ripens early. Many grapefruit producers get more than 25 tons to the acre. The county harvests tomatoes and strawberries throughout the winter, from Thanksgiving or earlier until mid-March-the season when prices are most advantageous. The gross value of tomato production for a normal year, at average winter season prices, is above $1,500 an acre, according to surveys.

For the rest, Yuma's agricultural roster embraces almost every other product that can be developed in this type of climate. Among them are beeswax, sugar beets, cabbage, cantaloupes, carrots, cotton and cottonseed, fertilizers, hegari, honey, honeydew melons, lettuce, maize, mixed vegetables, mixed melons, onions, pecans, Sudan grass seed and wheat.

Yuma also affords year-around pasturage for cattle.

All in all, the county estimates that the consumer value of its agricultural production is about $18,000,000 a year again on the basis of a normal market. The annual gross average income per acre ranged from $90 to $100 or more over a 20-year period. Rail roads and other carriers haul agricultural freight of Yuma to the tune of $6,500,000 a year. In 1945 the county recorded a total crop and livestock income of $17,277,000, which placed it just slightly behind Pinal. It is largely due to this ever-increasing agricultural activity that the city of Yuma has grown steadily over the years, until today it estimates a city limits population of 11,563, which would place it third among Arizona's cities, only Phoenix and Tucson ahead.

Thus these three counties-Maricopa, Pinal and Yuma-afford vivid examples of what men can do for themselves, given water where there was no water before. For irrigated agriculture has not only brought its own wealth to Arizona's "big three;" it has comprised the foundation stone for lusty and growing economies.

Agricultural products must be processed marketed and shipped. Canning plants, packing sheds and railroads need workers. Workers need homes and clothing, as well as the very food they help prepare. For every demand there comes a supply. Towns appear and grow into cities as agrarian expansion leads to urban civilization. Office buildings and hotels rise from naked streets, residential areas stretch out ever further, stores thrive. And in the wake of enlarging civilization comes culture.

All this from irrigation. In Arizona men have indeed mixed water with the sands of the desert, sifted out the sand and distilled pure gold.