Ideas and Elbow Grease, The President's Column

Michael WhiteBy Michael White
President,
New Mexico Farm and Livestock Bureau






New Mexico’s Incredible Irrigation Systems Convert Water from Menace to Miracle

National Agriculture Week in New Mexico, and across the nation, was March 19-25, coinciding with the first day of Spring. We also know that day arrives when the gas station sign from Deming can be seen sailing east over Alamogordo.

Wind and water mark this point in time in agriculture where the new season begins with the promise of a better day. It’s an exciting time for those of us who grow the food and fiber as the irrigation gates are opened and water begins flowing in our incredible irrigation systems. It’s the day we once again exercise our water rights by putting that precious commodity to “beneficial use” as the water lawyers like to say. In celebration of National Agricultural Week, I’d like to offer a sincere tip of the hat to those who came before us with imagination, foresight and energy to create some of the premier irrigation systems in the world in the middle of our now productive desert. These systems are an incredible, complex marriage of engineering, imagination and environment all working for the good of the grower and the population in general. While we’re watering our crops these systems, from one end of the state to the other, are providing vital flood control, water conservation, habitat for wildlife, recreation, power, all in a symphonic system of dams, canals, laterals and drains.

Western writer Eugene Manlove Rhodes once opined that New Mexico is a place where you have to “dig for water and climb for wood.” And so it was before our forefathers took the necessary steps to stop the yearly flooding and destruction and create this needed network that protects the citizens of this state while growing the crops we need. That’s a heck of system. When you add in all the fishing, boating, floating, sight-seeing, camping and power generation you have a “win-win-win” for all involved.

 

Acequia Madre

In northern New Mexico, the historic and functional community ditches, or acequias, are a 500-year tradition in the upper Rio Grande watershed. When the colonists arrived from Spain via Mexico in the late 1500s the building of the community ditch system began before anything else including the settlement’s church. These systems are still at work today in the rural areas north of Santa Fe.

Our N.M. Farm Bureau Women’s Committee chairman, Crestina Armstrong, is herself a Mayor Domo, or ditch boss, on the acequia system in the village of San Cristobal. Her family has been watering their crops from the ditches for hundreds of years and she considers it her civic duty to monitor the ditches, appropriate the water and organize ditch cleaning days prior to the start of their irrigation season which begins the first of May. It is a ritual that has returned every spring for ten generations. Her daughter-in-law who was raised a city girl comes to the farm every chance she gets. She has learned that irrigating is hard but satisfying work. Crestina has some simple advice for those who would try their hand at the art of water diversion. “One thing you have to remember is that water runs down hill. When you try to push it up hill...you have an uphill battle.” The acequia systems are a New Mexico agricultural treasure. In celebration of this years Ag Week we salute those like Crestina who have given their time to keep this part of New Mexico a living history lesson. 

 

Diamond in the Desert

In my part of the state the first substantial irrigation in the Pecos River Basin can be traced to the Spanish settlers around 1600. This system flourished during the system of land grant colonization and continued under later settlers after 1850. The Carlsbad Project, as it’s now known, utilizes diverse but interrelated systems from Santa Rosa and Fort Sumner down hill two hundred miles south to the Carlsbad Irrigation District. The Carlsbad Project was one of the earliest U.S. Reclamation projects and features interwoven technologies from the 19th and 20th centuries. A number of elements of this system are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. From the big flood of 1904 when the Pecos River wiped out Avalon Dam, to the construction and completion of Brantley Dam in 1991, the irrigated agriculture of southeast New Mexico ranks right up there with the economic importance of our energy industry.

In a noted book about life in western New Mexico in the 1800’s, Black Range Tales, there is an account of a miner who came down from Hillsboro to take his precious metals to the assay office in Dona Ana County. Unfortunately the Rio Grande was in full flood stage and it was all he could do to cross holding onto the tail of his mule. He almost didn’t make it. Thanks to Elephant Butte Dam and associated systems we don’t have those worries today. Incredibly there are certain groups that advocate tearing down that dam and all the others in the west. They would be wise to take the council of the Mayor Domo of San Cristobal. Water flows down hill and without proper control it can be a menace rather than the miracle it now is thanks to the vital systems installed by the true visionaries of New Mexico.



*Michael White was elected president of the New Mexico Farm and Livestock Bureau in November, 2002. Prior to the election, White served as first vice-president of the Farm Bureau for eight years and as second vice-president for two years. White serves on the Chaves County Farm and Livestock Bureau's board of directors and is a past president at the county level. White produces corn, alfalfa, small grains and cotton on his family farm near Dexter, N.M., and has been a member of the New Mexico Cotton Advisory committee at New Mexico State University since 1989. White served on the National Cotton Board from 1992-1996 and is the president of the Dexter Consolidated School District board.White is an elder at the Midway Assembly of God in Dexter and Vice-Chairman of the Farmer's CO-OP in Hagerman. Mike and his wife Helen, have two sons and one daughter.