THE IRRIGATION AGE. 



149 



IMPORTANT QUESTIONS FOR IRRIGATORS 



GRANVILLE LOWTHER* 



Granville Lowther 



If men are not as honest 

 in the use of water as in the 

 use of other things of value, 

 the reason is to be found in 

 the conditions under which 

 they live rather than in the 

 natural dishonesty of the men 

 themselves. After consider- 

 able observation in traveling 

 throughout the orchard sec- 

 tions of the Northwest. I 

 am convinced that men are not as careful in 

 the use of water which they have no right to 

 use, as they are in the use of other commodities. 

 I can select almost any community of citizens in 

 the irrigated districts of the Northwest, and be- 

 lieve that my property such as horses, hogs, farm 

 machinery, household goods, or anything else 

 would be entirely safe from any dishonest use by 

 the people of that community, and yet I think I 

 can find in those neighborhoods, orchard districts 

 and other farming industries where the rule is that 

 people take water ordinarily which they know be- 

 longs to others. I think I have seen one community 

 where, if all the men who "steal" water or "hog'' 

 water were in jail, there would not be enough left 

 in the orchards to spray for codling moth. Now if 

 this be true, it is on account of the conditions, not 

 on account of the men themselves, and these condi- 

 tions ought to be remedied. One of the conditions 

 is the difficulty in measuring water. 



Different Units of Measurement 

 I know of nothing in common use except water, 

 with different units of measurement. In weights 

 and measures there are customary standards gen- 

 erally fixed by law, such as the foot, the pound, the 

 bushel, the barrel, etc. In land measure we regard 

 the rod as the unit, with feet and inches as fractions. 

 We have no such unit in the measurements of water. 

 For instance, in some parts of the country the miner's 

 inch is the standard, in others the acre foot, and in 

 others still the estimates are made in terms of depth 

 in inches over the surface of the land. Now it is 

 so difficult to translate one of these units into the 

 terms of another that very few persons can get the 

 equivalent. 



Examples of Different Standards 

 I will give as an illustration, some examples 

 with which I am familiar, although my observation 

 leads me to the conclusion that throughout the 

 Northwest, much of the same differences prevail : 

 Naches and Cowichie Ditch, one miner's inch per 

 acre ; Yakima Valley Canal Co., one inch per acre, 

 measured over a wier. The Selah Ditch Co. gives 

 two-fifths inches per acre, measured under six 

 inches of pressure. The Terrace Heights Company 

 gives one-third of an inch per acre, measured 

 through a meter. The Tieton, a government 

 project, gives two and seventeen-one-hundredths 



*See illustration of measuring wiers on another page. 



acre-feet. The Moxee Canal Co. gives one cubic foot 

 per second for 160 acres of land. The Washington 

 Irrigation Company, one cubic foot per second for 

 160 acres. The Fowler Ditch Co., one cubic foot 

 per second for 150 acres. 



The difficulty is for the average person to know 

 what relations these different standards sustain to 

 each other, or to the standard adopted by the gov- 

 ernment. 



The miner's inch is not a uniform unit for all 

 states. The court of Kittitas county, Washington, 

 has defined the miner's inch as "the amount of 

 water which will constantly flow through an open- 

 ing one inch square through a plank one inch thick 

 in the side of a box in which still water is main- 

 tained at a constant depth of four inches above the 

 top of the opening." Engineering News, Nov. 7, 

 1907. 



In California the measurement is taken from 

 the center of the opening instead of the top. 



Generally throughout the Yakima Valley a 

 miner's inch is defined as the flow of water through 

 an inch aperture under six inches of pressure. In 

 some cases the aperture is made two inches wide 

 and one-half inch long instead of one inch square, 

 and this gives less water than the inch square be- 

 cause there is more friction surface. A continuous 

 flow of one miner's inch is commonly supposed to 

 be enough to irrigate two acres. However, this 

 depends on the characters of the soil and the char- 

 acter of the crop grown. 



It is necessary to distinguish between the terms 

 "miner's inch," "cubic inch" and "acre inch," as it 

 is to distinguish between the terms "second foot," 

 "cubic foot" and "acre foot." 



The cubic foot is a cube of one foot on every 

 side and contains 1,728 cubic inches. It also con- 

 tains seven and one-half gallons. 



The acre-foot is one foot deep over one acre 

 of land. 



The second-foot is a cubic foot of water dis- 

 charging from a certain point in one second of 

 time. 



The "acre-foot" is a measurement of volume, 

 while the term "second-foot" is a statement of the 

 rate of flow. A continuous flow of one second-foot 

 for 24 hours will cover one acre two feet deep, 

 equal to two acre-feet. 



Water More Valuable Than Land 



The land in most irrigated sections without 

 water was worth less than five dollars per acre. 

 The water has cost ten times that much. The land 

 with the water on it is variously estimated at from 

 one hundred to two hundred and fifty dollars per 

 acre, and if it is planted to orchard and the trees 

 are in bearing, it has been brought by means of 

 cultivation up to a point where it has sold as high 

 as two thousand dollars per acre. The land in an 

 arid country is not the thing of most value; it is 

 the water. While it is true that neither would be 



