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Family Farms. If the Bureau of Reclamation has its way, the settlers will not be fleeced by land speculators. Large landowners will not be forced to sell, but if they want the bureau's water (financed by U.S. taxpayers) on their almost worthless dry land, they must "join the project." Then each may have water for, at most, 160 acres, provided that they sell the rest of their land at the appraised dry-land price, about $7.50 per acre. This is the price that the settlers will pay, and they may not resell at a higher price for five years.
The bureau's experts will divide the land into "farm units" (40 to 160 acres according to the quality of the soil) big enough to support a family comfortably. No buyer may have water for more than one unit. If Congress continues this policy, * the bureau hopes to see the whole area divided into prosperous one-family farms, with none of the gang-worked "factories-in-the-field" so conspicuous in other irrigated parts of the West.
Water Exchange. A great new project in California illustrates another new trick: "water exchange." California's Central Valley, 500 miles long and 100 miles wide, is one of the world's prize chunks of real estate. When irrigated properly, its rich, level land produces exuberant yields. But the southern part, the San Joaquin watershed, has two-thirds of the irrigable land and only one-third of the water. The northern part, the Sacramento watershed, gets more rain. It has one-third of the land and two-thirds of the water. So San Joaquin is chronically strapped for water, while floods roll down the Sacramento every spring and go to waste in the Pacific.
It would be possible to lead Sacramento water directly to thirsty Bakersfield at the distant southern end of the Central Valley, but there is an easier way. If farmers on the lower San Joaquin are given Sacramento water, they will not need the San Joaquin water that they use now. Then the main flow of the San Joaquin can be diverted well upstream and used as far south as Bakersfield. This is "water exchange."
Moving the Rain. Shasta Dam, second highest in the world, now blocks the upper waters of the Sacramento, storing 4,500,000 acre-feet * of water. During the almost rainless summers, this water will be fed into the Sacramento. When it reaches the delta where the Sacramento and the San Joaquin join, it will be led across the lowlands to a pumping plant at Tracy, in the foothills of the Coast Range. There it will get a boost from six huge pumps to lift it 200 feet into a canal. The pumps run on power from Shasta Dam. At Tracy, as at Grand Coulee, a river is made to raise part of itself above its own bed.
From Tracy, the boosted Sacramento water will wind south 117 miles and spill into the San Joaquin at Mendota Pool. Then it will run down the San Joaquin, irrigating downstream lands. The payoff comes at the extreme southern end of the Central Valley. Friant Dam will divert San Joaquin water that would otherwise be needed downstream and send it through a 153-mile canal to drought-plagued Bakersfield. No Sacramento water will actually get to Bakersfield, but the effect will be just the same. As the bureaumen put it: "The rain will move 500 miles south."