Big Dam Backlash Rising in the Sun Belt - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 93

named the reservoir's dam in Woodruff's honor in 1957), and other projects throughout
the Sun Belt. 49 Other participants were not as sanguine about additional massive dams and
reservoirs as solutions to drought-proof the South.
Two alternatives to massive dams and reservoirs emerged with the backlash and rep-
resented methods to solve the Sun Belt's water problem: irrigation and small watershed
projects. First, Dr. George King, a University of Georgia irrigation engineer, corrected a
misinformed historical comparison about the Southeast and the American West. “Until
recently,” he explained to a Rome (Ga.) reporter in 1954, Georgians thought “irrigation
was … something pertaining to the arid western states.” But after Georgia moved through
“three drought years in succession” with a final year “of extreme severity,” state agricul-
turalists reconsidered the value of irrigation in the humid American South. King was really
only rediscovering a problem already identified by a much older colleague. Georgia hydro-
logist Benjamin M. Hall noted in 1908, “In Georgia and other Southern and Eastern States
the rainfall is much greater and more evenly distributed through the year, but, nevertheless,
the lack of rain at the proper time often cuts a crop to one-half or one-third what it would
have been.” Hall explained how “a small amount of water in storage and ready for use”
would be beneficial for southern farmers but would also require a substantial investment
that might not be as easily justified as irrigation was in the arid American West. 50 In the
1950s, King and others believed that Georgia's water supply was “reasonably fair to copi-
ously ample” south of a line drawn from the fall-line cities of Columbus through Macon
to Augusta, and in parts of the Georgia mountains. The Piedmont area between the Coastal
Plain and the Blue Ridge, however, faced serious challenges “obtaining enough water for
general irrigation.” The state generally had plenty of water, but the water was not always
in the right place at the right time. 51 And King, like his predecessor Hall, understood the
financial barriers to irrigation. So where would the new water supply infrastructure, water,
and financing come from?
U.S. Geological Survey technician M. T. Thomson had an answer: Georgia's Citizens
and Southern bank began “financing irrigation installations” and urged “farmers to avail
themselves” of the new revenue source and technological solution “where conditions jus-
tify.” 52 Georgia's farmers received loans from local banks for equipment, but federal tax
dollars funneled through the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) of the U.S. Department of
Agriculture (USDA) bankrolled the state's farm and fish ponds that filled irrigation lines.
SCS engineers, who had been providing technical consultation for nearly two decades,
helped build 1,289 Georgia farm ponds in 1953. To build a pond, farmers contacted the
SCS for advice and, for a few hundred dollars, paid for an earth-moving equipment oper-
ator, the pipe, and the necessary material to build a small embankment dam. If the farmer
declared the pond was intended to support livestock or to irrigate fields, the USDA's Pro-
duction Marketing Administration paid up to $300 (or about $2,500 in 2012 dollars) of