Big Dam Backlash Rising in the Sun Belt - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 94

the pond's construction cost. 53 Additionally, farmers had access to free fish, including bass
and sunfish, from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Georgia State Game and Fish
Commission to stock the ponds. Farmers could also obtain loans—facilitated through the
USDA's Farmers Home Administration—for diesel pumps, aboveground sectional irriga-
tion piping, and wheeled pump-gun sprinklers to irrigate fields or more easily move wa-
ter to farm animals. Farmers who utilized these federal tools irrigated between 15,000 and
25,000 acres of Georgia cropland by the mid-1950s. 54 Farm ponds, however, were pawns
in a much larger game.
Letters from opponents to the Corps' Hartwell dam and reservoir increasingly included
the second alternative to solving the Sun Belt's water problem highlighted by the 1950s
drought. Some critics wondered why Congress continued to support the Corps' colossal
flood control plans over an emerging alternative. 55 Southerners had learned about the
USDA's emerging Small Watershed Program as the 1950s drought shifted from the middle
of the country to the entire nation. In response to deteriorating national drought conditions,
President Dwight Eisenhower approved expansion of multiple USDA financial farm as-
sistance programs. The first initially provided drought relief in seventeen specific western
states, and another made loans available to communities across the country. 56 Of greater
significance to South Carolinians who were critical of Corps projects such as Hartwell,
Eisenhower made permanent a USDA program that provided technical and financial as-
sistance to local watershed groups who took “responsibility for initiating, carrying out, and
sharing the costs of upstream watershed conservation and flood control.” 57 Known altern-
ately as “The Small Watershed Program” or PL-566, its benefits included technical and fin-
ancial support for flood control and soil conservation for agricultural projects. The USDA
technically administered this federal “assistance” program, but local committees and dis-
tricts were initially responsible for sharing some costs and managing the projects. Unlike
the Corps' reservoir schemes that required top-down acquisition of private land, which did
involve unwilling sellers and condemnation proceedings, the USDA's bottom-up farm pond
incentives and Small Watershed Program catered to willing landowners and local commu-
nity organizations interested in local control. The small watershed program was also cheap-
er and more democratic on paper, and this neopopulist and agrarian solution did offer flood
control within specific watersheds.
The regional debate over who would build small or large dams was hardly confined to
Sun Belt farmers during the Cold War. Luna Leopold and Thomas Maddock Jr. plunged in-
to the national discussion in the early 1950s. Leopold, the son of conservationist and wild-
life biologist Aldo Leopold, was a well-known geologist and engineer. He and Maddock
(also an engineer) coauthored a topic, The Flood Control Controversy (1954), to clarify
what caused floods and how to best manage them. The two authors suggested that small
watershed projects and land treatment methods (terracing, kudzu planting, etc.) would in-