Idaho Governor: Opinion: Action Needed On Water Woes

Fallowing Project Is An Immediate, Emergency Response; More Is Needed

November 8, 2007 -- By Idaho Governor C.L. “Butch” Otter

Magic Valley farmers have an emergency on their hands. They need more water than is likely to be available for their crops next year. The realities of financing and preparation mean they must decide now about what to plant, or whether to plant at all.

In an effort to give them a realistic and timely option while preserving our precious and dwindling Eastern Snake River Plain Aquifer, I recently proposed enabling farmers to volunteer up to 20,000 acres of their ground in the Thousand Springs area to lie fallow – untilled and unplanted – for three years.

Idaho taxpayers then would pay those producers for not irrigating that acreage from a fund created by the Legislature last winter specifically for this kind of emergency. The water saved would stay in the aquifer, potentially reducing the need to curtail water supplies next spring to other southern Idaho water users. Every drop of water we conserve in this way is one drop – or more – that we need not find a way to recharge to the aquifer later.

Legislative leaders knew exactly what they had in mind when they created the emergency fund. It’s one of the reasons they put a December 31, 2007, deadline, on its use. They know when farmers make their decisions about the coming year’s crops. They know the water situation is dire and getting worse. They know that it constitutes an emergency. So do thousands of farmers who recently received letters from the Idaho Department of Water Resources explaining that they could face curtailment of their water supplies in 2008.

Now, an outside observer who is unfamiliar with the unique history and culture of irrigated agriculture might think that there is simply no possible solution to southern Idaho’s drought-aggravated water problems. Why else would smart and savvy people of good will spend the better part of 20 years doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different outcome?

Isn’t that the very definition of insanity?

The fallowing proposal and a few other relatively modest conservation projects are one way of beginning to change that approach.

On their own, they are not the answer to the disparity between how much water is available from the aquifer and the growing demands on that supply. They are not another strategy in what for too many years has been Idaho’s futile effort to divide up scarcity.

Instead, they are aimed at fostering a new pattern of behavior that emphasizes solutions – actions, however incremental – over continuing to do nothing but talk ourselves to distraction, then dig in our heels and fight.

They are seed projects, if you will, planted in hopes of germinating a whole new crop of ideas for how to address what I refuse to accept is an intractable problem that can only be solved in the courts. My administration prefers fallowing some acreage and taking other actions on the margins of a solution over allowing southern Idaho’s water debate to continue drilling a dry hole.

Source: Idaho Governor

Bookmark/Search this post with:

 •    •    •    •    •    •    •    •    •    •    •    •