How Yuma delivers water efficiently to Ag fields
Now for our weekly agriculture segment, Home Grown. Have you ever wondered how we are able to turn our dry desert landscape into lush green fields?
Yuma County Water Users Association breaks down the process on how water is dispersed throughout Yuma County.
“We run the least amount of water in the summer when it’s the most inefficient time to deliver water,” Tom Davis, manager of Yuma County Water Users Association told News 11. “I t wasn’t always that way decades ago when cotton was king,” he said.
Davis said we actually deliver less water in the course of a year now then when we delivered water 40 years ago due to crop patterns changing.
Arizona is entitled to 2.8 million acre feet of water from the Colorado river per year. The Yuma agriculture area diverts 1.2 million acre feet of water to farmland. That leaves 1.6 million acre feet going to the Central Arizona Project to pump water to Phoenix and all the way to Tucson.
“The Water Users Association was incorporated in 1903 to entice the federal government to come to the Yuma area and build an irrigation facility, that permanent structure across the Colorado river and a delivery system to deliver water on a reliable permanent basis to the Yuma Valley,” he said.
Growers request a certain amount of water for a certain amount of time for their fields.
“We manage the dispatchers office around the clock,” he said. “Orders are coming and going, being canceled and orders are coming in and going around the clock,” he said.
The dispatchers office controls the elevation of the canals and the gate openings.
Water is then diverted from a siphon near the Hilton Pivot Point hotel and sent to the Yuma Valley supplying water to 50,000 acres of farmland.
Yuma is the oldest diversion of Colorado river water in the state of Arizona. We began delivering water in 1910.
“We have the senior rights, the oldest diversion rights to the Colorado river in the state of Arizona so one thing that comes along with that right is that we will be the last ones to suffer a shortage should there be a shortage in any of the reservoir supply of the Colorado river,” he said.
