by Marlene Fritz

It used to take Randy Rutledge three days to water eight acres of pasture in Kimberly’s Oregon Trail subdivision—much of that time with a shovel in his hand, keeping the ditch-delivered water from going where it shouldn’t. “Three days is a long time,” he says.

A rural subdivision of one- to five-acre “ranchettes,” Oregon Trail was developed during the 1970s from what had once been Magic Valley farm ground. While its residents enjoy plenty of country-comfort amenities—including room to raise horses, cows, and goats—its surface-irrigation system wasn’t one of them.

“It was archaic, it was ineffective, it was eaking,” says Rutledge. “It was wasting a lot of water.” Now, with the new pressurized irrigation system that the subdivision installed through a  special U.S. Environmental Protection Agency grant, all Rutledge does is open the valves to his above-ground sprinklers.

“Everybody seems happy with it,” says neighbor Howard Neibling, a UI irrigation engineer who helped spur the irrigation changeover and who advised, educated, and assisted fellow Oregon Trail residents through the process. “It’s met and exceeded our expectations.”

One of those expectations was to return control over their personal schedules to the homeowners. Because water had traditionally been passed from one to another of them as each finished irrigating, they never knew what day they would be receiving it. They only knew that somewhere between one and two weeks would go by between irrigations.

Sometimes Les Nelson’s water came at an hour’s notice at midnight. “I had to be very careful not to flood somebody else, so I had to be there the entire time I was irrigating,” he says. “I’d be out there at 4 a.m. with flashlights, watching the owls and bats.”

Carol Frost can kiss those last-minute calls goodbye, too, along with watching her horse pastures shrivel while she waited for water. With her irrigation supply now arriving reliably every four days and under much higher pressure, she finally has enough moisture to support pasture  renovation. “I’ve been able to water so well that my grass is filling in,” she says. “Every time I walk out there, I’m amazed at how good it looks.”

Saving Magic Valley’s Rock Creek

Despite the clear advantages to homeowners, the key intended beneficiary of the $95,000 EPA grant actually flows just below the subdivision’s canyon rim: the Magic Valley’s prized but highly vulnerable Rock Creek. Because excess Oregon Trail irrigation water—laden with soil, nutrients, and sometimes even manure—was tumbling and leaching into Rock Creek, the Idaho Association of Soil Conservation Districts (IASCD) assembled a “conservation partnership” to curb the problem.

The partnership—including the University of Idaho, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, Twin Falls Canal Co., and Snake River Soil and Water Conservation Districts—was led by Mary Rosen, IASCD water resources conservationist.

Rosen considers the irrigation challenges facing the homeowners a teachable moment, not only for Oregon Trail but for other Magic Valley rural subdivisions and especially for developers and county officials. Using the subdivision’s experience, she hopes to encourage installation of pressurized irrigation systems before new rural subdivision lots are sold, rather than after homes are built. She even had the costly, complex, and clumsy changeover videotaped—in all of its excruciating details—so that public policymakers could see why early installation trumps retrofitting.

“We had utilities, fences, and landscapes to deal with,” Rosen says. “There weren’t really any easements. Messing with somebody’s landscaping gets really personal.”

The Idaho Department of Environmental Quality is monitoring the project’s impacts on Rock Creek, but Rosen expects results to be conservative until other water users along Rock Creek can reduce their polluting impacts as well. That’s why education is so important.

Living on the Land: Help from UI Extension

For Oregon Trail homeowners, that education was delivered by UI Extension’s Jerome County Educator Jo Ann Robbins, who for 16 weeks in winter 2004-05 coordinated a team-taught UI workshop called Living on the Land: Stewardship for Small Acreages.              

Through the workshop, 20 Oregon Trail families gained a better understanding of their natural resources and not-so natural improvements. With guest speakers from UI Extension, DEQ, the Twin Falls Canal Co., and Idaho Department of Fish and Game, Living on the Land taught its participants how to manage their soils, weeds, livestock, and irrigation; how to keep their wells from drying up or becoming contaminated, and how to keep their septic systems from plugging up or becoming a health nuisance.

“The teachers were fantastically qualified and knowledgeable about the individual subjects that they were teaching,” says Ed Clarke, an Oregon Trail homeowner and the subdivision’s watermaster. “It was enlightening.”

Clarke’s wife, Beth, says the workshops served yet another function. “This is a very mixed neighborhood,” she says. “We have struggling single mothers, we have doctors, we have horse-people and non-horse people. There isn’t a common denominator that pulls us together, but for a while the classes were a common denominator.”

Saving 10 million gallons a season

As watermaster, Clarke manages the subdivision’s irrigation scheduling and monitors its irrigation hardware. A retired engineer and business executive, he’s impressed with the new system’s efficiency and versatility. Homeowners who were using private wells to supplement the old system’s inefficiencies, inadequacies, and delays are now drafting far less groundwater—to the tune of 10 million gallons a season.

While the subdivision isn’t getting an ounce more water from the canal company, it’s losing far less of it to leaky, plugged, or overflowing ditches.

Freed from their dismal ditches, the Oregon Trail homeowners are experimenting with a half-dozen diverse approaches to irrigation, including drip. On his own acreage, Clarke has installed a fully automated underground sprinkler system that lets him spend more time fly fishing or watching wildlife off his deck.

According to Neibling, what really makes the pressurized system “shine” is its state-of-the-art, three-pump computerized pumping system. Whether it’s delivering 10 gallons or 450 gallons, the variable-frequency controlled pumping system remains within its most efficient operating range. In addition to helping NRCS civil engineering technician Logan Berg design the system, Neibling installed an irrigation experiment on three homeowners’ properties.

Using soil sensors, he’s determining whether they’re applying enough water to keep their trees and grass thriving. Projects like Oregon Trail’s “meet the needs of a lot of people that our traditional agriculture programs don’t reach,” says Neibling. “They let new audiences know the value of university extension.” That includes neighbor Nelson, who’ll never again be irrigating his horse pastures with flashlights at 4 a.m.

Contact Neibling at hneibling@uidaho.edu or Robbins at jrobbins@uidaho.edu.

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