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<br />of Grand Junction.t4 _ The early promise of a valley filled with orchards has yielded to the <br />realities of growing fruit in a mountain valley with elevations between 4,000 and 6,000 feet, <br />but fruit remains an important part of the agricultural economy in parts of the Grand Valley <br />today. <br />Beyond problems with climate, fruit production in the Grand Valley suffered from <br />salinity in the soils and from pests and disease. Salinity long has plagued irrigated <br />agriculture. To a considerable degree this is a problem that can be managed through good <br />drainage practices, but in the Grand Valley (and in most irrigated areas of the West) drainage <br />simply was not considered until problems appeared. In retrospect, it is not surprising that <br />lands accustomed to receiving perhaps eight inches of moisture per year would not necessarily <br />adapt well to receiving four or five feet of additional water as a consequeoce of irrigation. In <br />the Grand Valley, as meotioned above, the particular problem was the Mancos shales. The <br />soils of the valley are primarily alluvial in origin and are underlain by the shales. With the <br />addition of large amounts of water to the lands beginning in the 1880s, groundwater levels <br />started to rise. A study by the Department of Agriculture in 1916 emphasized the <br />increasingly saline character of the groundwater and concluded that successful crop production <br />in the area would require keeping the water table far enough below the root zone to avoid <br />salinity damage: <br /> <br />In many instances the existence of a problem in the Grand Valley was first <br />realized when some of the older apple orchards began to fail. Almost <br />invariably the older trees in any particular orchard died first. Frequently the <br />land upon which apples trees 15 to 25 years old had died and had been <br />removed would be reset to apples and the younger trees appear to thrive for a <br />period. sometimes for several years. These younger trees would then die and <br />fmally the owner would remove the orchard and plant the tract to alfalfa or <br />small grain. It was not unusual for either of these crops to do well at first and <br />sometimes for several years, although almost invariably the end has been the <br /> <br />I' Nolan J, Doesken et aI., "A Climatological Assessment of the utility of Wind Machines for Freeze Protection <br />in Mountain Valleys," 28 J. Appied Meteorology 194, 195-96 (March 1989). <br /> <br />8 <br />