"Water-Arizona's Productive Resource"

Reclamation in the desert of central Arizona has resulted in a prosperous sheep raising industry in the state. Thousands of sheep are pasture fed during the winter on the farm lands of Maricopa county, and then in the spring are herded over the desert and up to the high grazing land of the White Mountains for summer feeding. This annuel sheep drive illustrates wise and judicious use of water, and the range.

They found that cooperation was not enough. They needed the experience of trained conservation engineers and other technicians who would work with them on their farms, make studies of their soil, and with them develop the best conservation treatment of each farm and for each field. Their objective is to treat each acre in accordance with its conservation needs for present and future safe use and to use each acre in accordance with its productive ability. In order to obtain these results nearly 3,000 Arizona farmers have voted to form organizations known as soil conservation districts. These districts, sought by petitions and created by referenda, are legal subdivisions of the state government very much like counties. They are organized under a state law with the guidance and direction of the state land and water commission. There are now thirty-eight of these state districts in Arizona. They embrace nearly 90 per cent of the irrigated land in the State.

The farmers in each district elect a board of three supervisors to run the affairs of the organization. These men, with the help of land owners in the district, study their conservation problems and determine a course of action. They assist individual land owners with their equipment needs in undertaking conservation work. Most of this work is done with the farmer's own equipment and at his expense or by contract with equipment operators. The district supervisors secure technical assistance from the various agencies both governmental and private. Farmers enter into an agreement with the district to help plan and undertake a conservation program to meet the conservation needs of the land.

Because the state conservation law passed in 1941 specifies that range and watershed land owners cannot participate in conservation district work, farmers frequently are not in a position to get at the source of their problems but have to console themselves with emergency protective measures on or adjoining their own land. In too many cases these efforts have been futile. Flood waters are not successfully controlled at the small or discharge end of a funnel. Some well planned remedial measures are needed on the watershed above to detain temporarily the damaging peak of flood flows. Surveys and planning for these remedial measures are now being made in the State by the Corps of Engineers of the War Department and by the Forest Service and Soil Conservation Service of the U. S. Depart ment of Agriculture as provided in the Federal flood control act.

Plans for the treatment of Queen Creek watershed in Maricopa and Pinal counties are practically complete. Work on the upper Gila is underway. The Santa Cruz, lower Gila, San Pedro, Hassayampa, and the Agua Fria watersheds will be planned in about that order.

Farmers in the Queen Creek Soil Conservation District are grateful that the first major flood control operations in Arizona will likely be undertaken on the Queen Creek watershed. The district's farms occupy the alluvial flood plain and lower, gentle slopes of this river basin southeast of Phoenix. For many years the creek overflowed the farm lands, buried the crops under silt, and cut gullies in their fields. In 1942, twenty-six farmers who had lost crops year after year when the creek overflowed, decided to form a soil conservation district and find a way to control flood waters. They knew that the best solution was a storage dam up the creek but they also knew they stood no chance of getting a dam until the war was over. In the meantime they wanted to continue to produce carrots, potatoes, and other truck crops, long and short staple cotton, along with corn and hegari, oranges and grapefruit the main crops grown on this 20,000 acre area.Three farmers whose land was damaged when the creek spread from its channel formed the first cooperative agreement in their soil conservation district. They rented three trucks, two large tractors, a scraper, a roller, a leveler, and started clearing a straight channel for the stream. They made levees on both sides to take care of all but the heaviest floods. Eventually more than five miles of channel along Queen Creek and its tributary, Sonoqui Wash, were cleared.

Thousands of trees and shrubs were planted for windbreaks, erosion control, and cover for wildlife. Hundreds of acres of farm land have been leveled in order that irrigation water can be used more efficiently. More than ten miles of farm laterals have been lined with concrete to prevent seepage loss of irrigation water in transmitting it to the fields. In this district all the irrigation water is pumped from the groundwater reservoir beneath the land and none should be wasted. All these operations have reduced to a minimum wasteful erosion loss of fertile top soil and have saved a great deal of water.

Each farmer cooperating with this district may now secure a complete soil map of his farm prepared by Soil Conservation Service technicians with the help of the State Experiment Station and the Soils Bureau of the Department of Agriculture. The texture, physical character, and quality of the farm soils in this district have been studied in detail to a depth of six feet. No extensive land improvement operations are planned or undertaken without a thorough study of these soil characteristics on each field. The Queen Creek District soil survey was the first complete utilitarian type of survey made of any district in Arizona.

In the upper Gila Valley near Safford in the Gila Valley Soil Conservation District farmers struggled for a year to repair the damage that befell their farms two years ago when an unprecedented cloudburst brought over eight inches of rainfall within a three day period. All the main banks were destroyed in many places. Crops were ruined and the entire valley northwest of Safford was left without irrigation water to complete the production of crops.

This tragedy brought the farmers together with the supervisors of their conservation district, representatives of their county government, the City of Safford, the Soil Conservation Service, the Extension Service, Farm Security Administration, Agricultural Adjustment Administration, and others in a position to help in some manner with this problem. In conference they decided to clear out the canal that required the least work and to go from there to the other canals. Much heavy equipment was needed and the supervisors scoured the area for it. They found four Diesel tractors with dozers, a dragline, and a power shovel. Within twenty-four days after the storm, water was again being delivered to all farms in the area.

Much additional work was required to finish the job. A number of permanent canal structures were replaced and new ones planned and built.

Well over a hundred farms in this valley have benefited, as a result of organizing their district, by the application of soil conservation practices. Two years ago the district conducted a seed purchase pool through which farmers were able to obtain seed for irrigated pasture plantings at a great saving. Nineteen tons of seed were secured for ninety-three farmers of the Gila Valley District and adjacent districts in eastern Arizona and southern New Mexico.

There are now more than 3,000 acres of improved, permanent irrigated pasture in that part of the State. In addition many fields have been releveled and many miles of soil saving dikes have been constructed at the lower end of sloping fields in this valley.

Bedeviled by a lack of materials, farmers in other districts in the State have employed novel methods of conserving their land and controlling water. In the Camp Verde Valley, through which the Verde River runs in Yavapai County, a device called a "growing spider" is being used to keep the river from cutting into farm fields. A growing spider is made out of live willow poles about ten feet long, two of which are crossed at right angles and bound together with wire. Two sets of them are made. Then a twenty foot pole is placed across the saddle of each crossed set and fastened at both ends with barbed wire. This contraption is then placed at an angle along the edge of the river bank with the ends of the pole sunk deeply into the moist sand. The barbed wire catches trash and slows the water so that the carried silt load drops against the cut bank.

Then the green willow poles take root and grow into trees forming a permanent, live, erosion control structure. Three growing spiders were placed along the banks of the Verde on the Gale Wingfield farm below Camp Verde. This structure turned the stream away from the cutting banks and the field was saved. Later several thousand trees and shrubs were planted along the banks of this river to help with its stabilization.

Last year the Chino Valley Soil Conservation District ir Yavapai County built a concrete diversion dam on Granite Creek a few miles north of Prescott. Equipment used on the job was rented or borrowed from the Yavapai County Highway Department, the Soil Conservation Service, the City of Prescott, the Prescott High School, and some local contractors. Labor was recruited from the farmers within the conservation district who were paid a wage of $1.00 per hour. By pooling benefit payments, available under the Agricultural Adjustment Act, $5,000 of AAA funds went into the job.

The new dam saved the farmers an estimated 1,500 gallons of water a minute. This amount was formerly lost through seepage under the old dam. District water users estimate that with this saving of water, the dam will pay for itself in ten years.

Up in Apache County on the Little Colorado River conservation operations are underway also. The Garcia brothers report yields of corn and chili peppers on their 100 acre farm near St. Johns have been increased 50 per cent by the leveling of one of their fields. Now each part of the field receives an adequate amount of irrigation water when needed.

Martin Ellsworth, a farmer in the nearby Na-vajo County Soil Conservation District, has stated that he would not take $1,000 for his overnight storage pond. The pond did not cost him anything near that much. It has a maximum capacity of two and one-half acre feet of water with about one-half acre in surface area. Mr. Ellsworth is especially pleased over the fact that the pond has eliminated night irrigation with its resultant water losses. The improvements on the pond included raising the dam and installing an enlarged outlet pipe. It was also deepened and has since been stocked with bass and bluegill.

J. O. Lawson farms 200 acres of dry farm land near Flagstaff in the shadow of the San Fran-cisco Peaks which give his conservation district its name. He has reported that the installation of a system of field terraces on his farm has increased his yield of beans by more than 25 per cent. These conservation measures, he says, have stopped flooding and loss of soil through erosion. Rainfall and melting snow are held on the terraced fields and account for the better crop yields. Mr. Lawson also practices subsoiling and crop residue manage-ment and plans to terrace other fields as time and equipment are available.

The use of water in central Arizona has been of interest to people all over the world. The lessons learned in Arizona are pure gospel.

Buckeye conservation district farmers in the lower Salt River Valley of Maricopa County have, over a period of years, lost the production from many of their farm fields through the rising water table and accumulation of harmful alkali salts. During the past year or more district technicians have undertaken a complete groundwater survey of the area to determine the best means of draining excess water from under these farms. Farmers have already undertaken some drainage work where the groundwater pattern is known and reclamation of a number of fields is underway.

For many years flood waters have washed across the fertile farm lands within the Agua Fria Soil Conservation District lying between the Agua Fria River and the White Tank Mountains northwest of Phoenix. Uncontrolled flood water has on many occasions caused severe damage to the district's irrigation canals, the county highways, and to farm lands in the valley below. Soil Conservation Service engineers, working with the district supervisors, have designed control measures to reduce erosion damage to district lands. Work on the first of these structures will be underway early in 1947.