03/05/13, 05:13 PM
|
|
|
|
Join Date: Mar 2013
Posts: 1,750
|
|
|
It's a bit more complicated than drought or no drought. Especially in the West. Throughout most of the West, you can't irrigate much more than a big garden without irrigation water rights. Most of the small parcels do not include those rights. No problem feeding yourself and family from grown crops, but a cash crop would have to be valuable indeed to grow it from domestic well water.
We are included in a moderate drought rating, and it's true, but our aquifer is high and healthy, simply because there is so little coming out of it. I have 2 wells about 200' deep, and no worrries about water.
On the other hand, our former place in Miami, NM had city water fed by a lake, through 7 miles of irrigation ditch, but a VERY thin aquifer between the topsoil and bedrock. Hardly worth digging a well. BUT, we were dependant on snowfall in the mountains to refill that lake every spring, and if it didn't happen, crops failed. We never got so low that I couldn't fill the city water pond, (I was the water plant operator) but it was close a time or two. And the nasty crap that came into my pond from the irrigation ditch running 7 miles through pasture made water purity hard to achive.
My land here is rated for a single pair (cow and calf) per hundred acres, so forget grazing much of anythng, BUT we can sprout fodder for almost anything at all, year round. All I'm saying here is look in depth at the condition of land, aquifer, local draw-down of same, what you are going to be growing there, etc. You can get a lot of that info from local well drillers.
Also, for instance, some areas where they are raising swine over tanks to use the crap as liquid fertilizer are getting it in the groundwater. The water devil is in LOTS of details, and you can't decide much without all of them.
And by the way, as Joseph Wood Krutch once wrote, " IT's really a well digger's HEART that things are colder than"......Joe
|
15Likes
