Use of Water on Federal Irrigation Projects

From the initiation of each of the irrigation projects of the United States Bureau of Reclamation it has been customary to ascertain and record the use of water. Operation and maintenance charges have always been based on the quantity of water delivered to individual farms, a method which was made mandatory by Act of Congress approved August 13, 1914. Other justifications for the measurement of water have been: The desirability of securing data for use in designing distribution systems; the necessity for obtaining data to use in determining project areas; and the desire to foster the most economical use of the available irrigation supply. The results of field measurements of water delivered to farms are assembled annually, in. the project offices and are summarized in their respective project histories. The project histories, together with supplemental data otherwise obtained, constitute the source of information from which the data incorporated. in this paper have been compiled. In abstracting the results of the field measurements many of the original compilations were revised so that comparable data for all projects could be presented herein.