Vernon
hadn't been for this availability of electricity. So there's a lot of power--power has
changed the way the farming
lives and operates.
Actually, as far as the irrigation, I don't really see too much of the irrigation part of it
where I happen to live. Just that they hadn't received really much irrigation. There are
a lot of irrigated farms now, of course, because of the Pick-Sloan Plan. But there has been
a big reduction, of course, in floods. That is one of the major contributions is the cutting
back on all the flooded areas.
There are still areas up there that are not protected by these large dams, too, like the Red
River of the North. There is still a lot of flooding that goes on up there because they don't
have any major place to store the water and the land is so flat it just floods everything.
Quality
Q ..
Wasn't that an international problem because you had to deal with Canada on that river?
A
Oh yes, it's a serious problem there--well, one of the things is the water quality, that's a
big problem, with irrigation return flows picking up a lot of saline material and other
contaminants coming into river. They go into the Red River and the Red River flows
north up into Canada with all of these contaminants in it and Canadians scream in horror,
"Hey, you're messing up our waterway." They have a lot of problems with trying to take
care of that sort of thing.
U
Q ..
That's a problem in the big dams up there, too, isn't it. The contaminants come into the
pools and settle.
A
Actually, it's not such a big problem with a big dam--the contaminants usually take place
when you're getting return water that has gone onto a field and it leaches the salts out of
the soil and so forth. They dissolve in the water and then they come back into the return
flow channels that take that return flow back to the river and the water that goes back in
the river is not anywhere as near as good as the water that came out of it to begin with.
Now they have things in reservoirs to help them avoid that that they didn't have earlier.
But they have more of them now. These multi-level withdrawal outlet type things where
they can take the water out of the reservoir at different levels. Now the water is the worst
at the bottom of the reservoir. That's where a lot of the vegetation decayed and there's
a lot of different kinds of chemicals and things that develop down there that are
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