Twin Falls Canal Co. in southern Idaho expects to keep delivering irrigation water into mid-October, a normal-length season, even though low snowpack and dry weather led its board in May to cut allotments by a third and forecast that water would run out in late August, Capital Press reports.

"We are delighted to have made it," general manager Jay Barlogi said. Careful management of diversions, conservation "everywhere we could" and close work with customers meant the company did not have to rotate canals or cut deliveries further. Snake River reach gains also recovered for a while at the end of May.

The company gets about 230,000 acre-feet, or 20% of its water, from reservoir storage and the rest from the river's natural flow. This year it began using stored water in late April and early May, during crop establishment, and used up its own storage in the last week of August.

Since then it has run on 60,000 acre-feet of mitigation water supplied by junior groundwater irrigators who pump from the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer, under Idaho's water rights order and a 2024 settlement between surface and groundwater users.

Stretching deliveries to mid-October helps winter-planted small grains get enough moisture to sprout, and the company is also trying to save water for a 2027 that is expected to be dry. Before this season it lined about seven miles of its High Line Canal south of Kimberly, on gravelly soils where leaks were high. The report is by Brad Carlson.

Photo: Bob Heims, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Source: Capital Press