Insofar as I am concerned, I represent a district that has made i large investment. In fact, we have an assessed valuation in the Coachella Valley of $15,000,000, which, under our ratio of asses ments, would mean an investment of $130,000,000. There are 20,000 acres there that belong to the Government, which have bee taken out of entry until such time as this work is completed. Or water level in this section of California has been receding. It he been going down, and we cannot economically pump any longer to take care of our production.

This valley produces approximately 95 percent of the dates that are produced in the United States, and, by the way, here is a samp of them. Perhaps that is the final answer to the question of whether or not, we really produce great dates in this valley. We happen be very fortunate so far as climatic conditions are concerned in tha particular area. We must have more water. Almost all the people who have built homes in the district I represent are pleading to have the project consummated and successfully completed so they continue their production, and not have the land revert back a desert.

At this time, I would like to have permission to introduce into the record a statement which I will hand to the reporter, and which will cut down the time that I would otherwise consume in explaining this situation. I will ask that this statement be inserted in the record, s that you gentlemen can read it at your leisure.

Gentlemen, I feel this way about the request we are making, using the language of a former distinguished Chief Executive:

They took the money away from us, and now they should put it back where belonged in the first place.

I appreciate very much the opportunity to appear, and will submit this further statement for the record. Thank you, gentlemen, for you favorable consideration.

Mr. SCRUGHAM. It may be inserted at this point. (The statement submitted is as follows:)

LOCATION

Coachella Valley is an interior valley, located in Riverside County, in southera California, about 120 miles southeasterly from Los Angeles. It is the northediy arm of the Colorado River Desert, which also includes the Imperial Valley. Be tween the two valleys lies the Salton Sea, 40 miles long, which is the low spot of the desert, to which both valleys slope and drain.

TOPOGRAPHY

Coachella Valley may be likened to the bowl of a spoon, 60 miles long and 20 miles wide, tipped at its base, the tip at an elevation of 2,500 feet, the base, at the Salton Sea, being 250 feet below sea level. The valley floor is a rather smoeta plain, having, besides its axial slope from northwest to southeast, lateral slopes from the axis up to the mountain ranges on either side. The mountain block of the Pacific Ocean side of the valley, San Jacinta and Santa Rosa Mountains, is exceedingly precipitous, rising from 5,000 to 12,000 feet. The mountains to the eastern side, San Brenardino Range, are generally lower, but also abrupt.

GEOLOGY

The valley is described by physiographers as constructional in type, rather than formed by erosion. The mountain masses represent raised blocks and the valley a sunken block. Thus, Coachella Valley, Salton Sea, Imperial Valley, and the Gulf of California constitute a great trough 1,000 miles long, created by

the agency of faulting, and dropping as the coastal range on the west and the lower ranges on the east were raised. Silt carried by the Colorado River to its delta dammed the gulf off from the two valleys and thus through the ages they have been unwatered and made agricultural land where once was sea-bottom.

During the process of deformation, materials were eroded from the mountains and transported by water into the sunken Coachella Valley, creating a valley fill, composed of gravels, sands, silts, and clays. This fill, as demonstrated by drilled wells, is more than 1,000 feet deep.

Coachella Valley is, therefore, a watertight rock bowl, receiving its water supply entirely from precipitation on its watershed. The effective storage capacity of the bowl is made up of the void spaces between the particles of the sand and gravel in the valley fill.

CLIMATE

The climate of the valley floor is hot and arid. By "hot" is meant annually recurring temperatures exceeding 120 degrees and recorded temperatures of over 90 degrees in every month of the year. By "arid" is meant an average annual rainfall of less than 3 inches and recorded periods of 2 years with no precipitation. Irrigation, with a rather heavy water duty, is thus indispensable to the growth of any agricultural products.

DRAINAGE AREAS

The principal stream feeding the valley is the Whitewater River, rising in the northeastern portion of the watershed and extending the length of the valley to the Salton Sea. This trunk stream has about 15 small tributaries arising in the northern and western mountains. The aggregate area of the watershed is 1,108 square miles, of which about 400 square miles, in the eastern range, produce comparatively little water. The smaller inflowing streams, except on occasions of very unusual rainfall, discharge their flow into the sandy valley fill and are diverted for use or sink underground almost immediately. The Whitewater is caused to sink underground by water-spreading works maintained by Coachella Valley County water district on its gravelly debris cone.

CHARACTER OF WATERSHED

The mountainous watersheds of the Whitewater and tributaries are precipitous, with deep-cut canyons, rising up to peaks, San Gorgonio and San Jacinto, at about 11,000 feet elevation. Timber line is at about 9,000 feet. The slopes between 5,000 and 9,000 feet are covered with thin, open pine forest, interrupted by rock patches and areas burned long ago and since covered with brush. The lower slopes are generally covered with continuous growth of brush, chaparal, juniper, and pinon pine.

PRECIPITATION

Evaporation from the Pacific Ocean charges the warm air with moisture. Prevailing winds move east. On reaching the cool mountain mass of the coast range the moisture is discharged. Thus the precipitation on the western or Pacific coast slope of these mountains is much heavier than on the desert side to the east. The greater part of the precipitation that does occur on the desert side is in the months from December to March.

THE UNDERGROUND RESERVOIR

The sole source of all water in the underground reservoir of Coachella Valley is the light rainfall on the surrounding watersheds on the desert side of the mountains. This rainfall, minus evaporation in transit to the valley floor and also minus occasional torrential run-off which rushes down to the Salton Sea, constitutes a definite, limited, annual "crop" of water. It has for ages past fed into the underground reservoir, yet the run-off thus accumulated was not sufficient to fill up the reservoir or change the desert character of the surface soil. (Salton Sea, as it now exists, was created by a break in the Colorado River in the years 1904 to 1906.) When the first wells were drilled, about 1894, the valley was an extremely barren desert, but the underground water supply seemed to be abundant.

WELLS

The wells dug following 1894 were few in number and generally shallow is depth and were drilled for domestic use. These were gradually increased unti over 1,200 wells now exist, supplying water for the irrigation of approximate 15,000 acres, the deepest wells running from 1,200 to 1,500 feet. Most of the used for irrigation were drilled after 1910. Since 1920 comparatively few new wells have been drilled, owing to the general realization that the underground supply was insufficient to meet the demands being made upon it.

DRAFT ON THE UNDERGROUND SUPPLY

The lower part of the valley, adjoining Salton Sea, contains beds of clays and fine silts. The water in this area is confined under these beds by artesian pressin Abundant artesian flows were accordingly obtained from the wells first drilled in this area.

The artesian area, prior to 1900, extended from the sea to north of Indio and covered approximately 78,900 acres. Today the artesian area extends only to a point between Thermal and Coachella and covers about 34,150 acres. It has decreased 57 percent in the last 25 years.

Further, artesian wells have shown a marked decrease of pressure and core quently of quantity of flow. Wells which once spouted water 15 to 20 feet in a air now barely flow, or must be pumped.

Outside the artesian area a definite and steadily progressive decline of the underground water table has been taking place since 1910. Since its organization in 1918, Coachella Valley County water district has kept well observations and records. It now has data on the levels in approximately 200 wells. Typical graphs of such wells show a fairly regular and constant decline, averaging 1 to 2 feet per annum.

The diminution of the ground water supply has been felt in various w Wells have steadily produced less and less water. The standing level of the water plane has gone down. Also the "draw-down" during pumping has increased By reason of both factors farmers have been obliged to deepen their wells and have had to junk serviceable centrifugal pumps and substitute turbine pups because the former would not function. Costs of pumping, already too high tư other than high-value specialty crops, have become excessive.

CONCLUSIONS

1. Agriculture in Coachella Valley is made possible only by irrigation. 2. Irrigation in the valley today is positively limited by

(a) The definite quantity of water which has been accumulated in ages pañí in the underground basin, plus

(b) The slight and varying water crop which can be immediately used or added to the underground supply.

3. The contraction of the artesian area and the steady decline of the we table demonstrate beyond question that the draft on the basin to irrigate t present acreage has substantially exceeded the average annual water crop of the past 25 years, causing an alarming fall in the water table of the underground reservoir.

4. Both the artesian area and the outside area in which water can be obtained at all is threatened with decline unless a large additional quantity of water is imported to the valley.

5. If the rate at which the water table has been falling is kept up in the future, lands around the rim of the basin which are now irrigated soon no longer will be able to get water by deepening the wells.

6. Ultimately the supply will be exhausted. Then only an area limited to s small fraction of that now farmed can be irrigated, at an extreme cost, from the water annually flowing into the basin. A large portion of the now productive farms must revert to barren desert with tremendous losses in property value. 7. The foregoing conclusions are directly in line with actual experience in other western valleys where irrigation by wells has overdrawn the annual replenishment of a limited underground supply and where the process of exhausting the accumu lated reserve of ages has gone to a more advanced stage than in Coachella Valley, 8. There is no source from which a supplementary supply of water can be secured, other than the Colorado River. As put by Senator Johnson in Senate Irrigation Committee Report, No. 592, on the Boulder Canyon Project Act 70th Cong., 1st sess.) in the construction of the All-American Canal from the Colorado River to Coachella Valley "lies the only hope of this section."

MONDAY, APRIL 12, 1937.

GILA PROJECT, ARIZONA

STATEMENT OF HUGO FARMER

Mr. SCRUGHAM. Mr. Farmer.

Mr. FARMER. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, my name is Hugo Farmer, and I appear before you in behalf of the proposed appropriation for the Gila project.

Now, gentlemen, I would like to present each one of you with one of these booklets, if you will take them please. If you will turn to the map that is in the booklet, about the center of it, it may help you to follow some of my statements. It shows both the American and Mexican lands and the international boundary line marked with a red pencil.

In connection with that project, I want to call your attention to international problems which I consider make it imperative for the United States to exercise reasonable diligence in developing the Gila project.

It was well stated by the special committee appointed by the Secretary of the Interior to investigate and report on the feasibility of the Gila project. First in a telegram, January 19, 1936:

We urge it as imperative to initiate water rights in Colorado River for one and two class lands in all units of project and for Arizona to establish sound water rights to needed portion Colorado water.

And in their final report, completed about February 15, 1936, after stating that there had been 2,800,000 acre-feet of water reserved for the irrigation of American lands in Arizona, they state:

The water supply will be ample and the problem under consideration is, how must we proceed to insure to Arizona the perpetual rights to the supply named; i. e., 2,800,000 acre-feet?

No other method is known than complying with the old law which makes it mandatory to initiate a right by actual construction of the necessary work and the application of water on the lands for beneficial use, and that due diligence is exercised in carrying on construction and settlement.

This project which is the heart of Arizona's future possible agricultural expansion, is threatened by both interstate and international complications.

Old Mexico has also a great stretch of mesa of several hundred thousand acres joining the Yuma Desert mess of the Gila project at the international boundary and extending many miles south to the Gulf of California. It is a reasonable assumption that this frostless Mexican mesa contigiuous to the Yuma Desert area will in time be viewed with favor by some American or foreign interests, if not by Mexico itself, which will lead to a demand for great quantities of Colorado River water to be applied to these lands at the risk of loss to American water rights.

While Mexico might have no legal rights for the irrigation of this great mesa, it may secure funds to make a start on a very comprehensive plan for irrigating both the mesa and new delta lands and acquire at least a moral right that would have to be considered in the future if our Government had allowed them to initiate rights for the irriagtion of new lands ahead of those in the United States. Mexico has already established valid claims to a substantial quantity on the delta lands through beneficial use.

The importance of the Gila reclamation project is not confined to Arizona alone, but to the United States, and the allocation to each State should be recognized as water assigned from the Colorado to definite use in the United States.

I will next call your attention to portions of the report of the American section of the International Water Commission, United States and Mexico (71st Cong., 2d sess., H. Doc. 359).

On page 44 we find the following:

So far as we are advised the only instance of the determination of internations! rights to water for irrigation and other consumptive uses, between the United States and Mexico, is the convention for the equitable distribution of the waters of the Rio Grande River, signed May 21, 1906. Under this convention the United States undertakes to provide a regulated flow of water from a reservor built by and within the United States, and supplied with water wholly from United States territory, sufficient to irrigate certain lands in Mexico which had been previously irrigated from the unregulated flow of this river.

The American section then offered to the Mexican section a proposal that Mexico be allowed 750,000 acre-feet of water for the Mexican lands in the delta of the Colorado River, stating that they were taking into consideration the amount of Mexican lands irrigated at the time (1929) and that such amount of water would be ample for the irrigation of such lands.

As great activity is now going on in the development of Mexican lands in the Colorado River delta, and as they now have under irrigation, or preparing for irrigation, some 463,000 acres of Mexic lands, and are also contemplating the construction of a weir dam short distance south of the international boundary line for the irrigation of an additional 300,000 acres, and a railroad has just been completed from Mexicali to Port Otis on the Gulf of Mexico, and thousands of agrarians are moving into that area in response to a new agrarian land policy recently adopted in Mexico, we feel that there is good reason to fear that actual cultivation and irrigation of these Mexican lands and the slowness of development in the United States may seriously impair, if not actually take away the right to water so necessary to the development of our American lands.

The Mexican section very definitely refused to accept in behalf of their Government the amount of 750,000 acre-feet offered by the American section, and insisted on a minimum amount of 3,480,000 acre-feet, page 69 of that report.

It is also set forth in the report at page 43 that in Mexico the lands irrigable, including the lands irrigated, in the Colorado River delts. without including lands in the upper end of the Gulf of California which had not been explored, had an area of 1,500,000 acres. The total for Mexico, as shown at page 91 of the report, is estimated at 1,961,000 acres.

The total of irrigated and irrigable American lands in the lower basin of the Colorado River, according to that International Water Commission report and their engineers' findings, is estimated at over 2,000,000 acres. The total flow of the Colorado River (not including the Gila River, the water of which never reaches the Colorado River, except in rare flash floods, and then only below all points of diversion to be constructed for irrigation of American lands) as estimated at page 91 of the report, is 17,080,000 acre-feet annually. Of this amount the upper basin States are entitled to the consumptive use of 7,500,000 acre-feet, and contracts have been executed which permit the diversion out of the basin of an additional amount of 1,212,000 acre-feet annually. This leaves an estimated balance of 8,368,000 acre-feet of water for the irrigation of more than 3,500,000 acres of land, counting American and Mexican lands in the lower basin of the Colorado River.

Mr. FITZPATRICK. Does the Government own the land to which you refer?