BOARD01106

• Board Meeting Date: 2/3/1962
• Description: Minutes
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

I

irrigation systems have done to cutback
land from irrigation or by exclusion.
Now, I am under the San Luis Valley
irrigation district. At one time, when
they organized, they had in the neighbor-
hood of 80,000 acres under their system.
Since the compact has been negotiated with
the lower basin states, there has been a
cutback to between 48 and 50 and the land
has been blocked as near as possible to
keep the irrigation land together.

Now, the other problem is how much
water have we pumped while we accumulated
a debit to the lower states of the compact?

Now, if we were not able to deliver
we were not able to furnish the farmers
of the San Luis Valley with water. So
what happened there? Many thousands of
pumps or several thousand pumps have went
into this thing since the compact and we
have pumped more water than the river, I
would say, has supplied. So that has
caused us great concern. Now, at the same
time, what effect the pumping had on the
water table. When the water is pumped,
the table is pumped to a much lower depth.
Now, I am situated in the Hooper area on
a ranch. I bought a place there in '42.
At that time, our water table was five
and six feet from the top of the ground.
Right now my water is over sixteen feet.
Does pumping bother us or doesn't it?
That is what the Hooper ranch is off to
right now and it has been nothing but
the lack of diverting from direct flow
and supplementing it with pump water.

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Now, this is a self-irrigation district.
Whenever we pump water, whether it is myself
or most anyone in the group that owns land
and pumps water, you are going to lower
the water table. The oftener he is pumping
for his land, the lower the table, and you
finally finish up pumping about every four
days on your potatoes to keep them wet.
We have open soil. The water goes through