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Rory Pancheri has a family farm in Butte County, irrigated with water delivered by the Blaine County Canal Co., which was established more than a century ago.

“Several farmers in our area are shareholders in the canal company, with about 21 miles of lateral ditches that take water to the farms,” he said.

“Some years back, the canal company approached the NRCS (Natural Resources Conservation Service) to get funding to keep the ditches from losing water,” he said. “There is always some loss, especially in canals this long, with some of the water seeping out. Some of the canals and ditches coming to these farms had 50% to 100% loss.”

Ryan Johnson, an NRCS engineer, said the canal company requested technical and financial help to convert to pipelines.

“The soil in that region is very gravelly so the water loss was extremely high,” Johnson said.

Johnson has done the design work for this project to create the concrete structure in the river for the diversion, and the pipeline.

“The first part was going across BLM ground so we spent a lot of time with them on an environmental assessment to go across their ground,” he said.

Another part of the project was a fish passage diversion where it comes out of the Little Lost River.

“Out in the river we built a concrete structure with a head wall where the water is diverted into a settling pond — with screens on the inlet to the pipe,” he said. There are six rotating screens for debris as well as fish, and a fish bypass.

“The fish that do get in there can get back to the river,” said Johnson.

For the first phase, they built about 6,500 feet of pipeline with 36-inch diameter pipe. The next phase was about 4,000 feet.

“We are currently working on the third phase, which is another 16,000 feet. We are doing it in phases as the canal company can gather the money for it,” Johnson said.

Financial help came from several directions.

“We were able to secure funding through multiple agencies,” said Pancheri. “In the first phase, we had money from Trout Unlimited since we had to construct a new diversion off the Little Lost River and keep fish out of the canal. We also had to secure a new right-of-way through BLM, which took about five years. We were able to secure that right-of-way and Trout Unlimited contributed about $100,000 toward that diversion.”

Through the NRCS, they were able to obtain about $900,000.

“Thus the cost was a little over $1 million for the first phase. We recently received a grant from (the Aging Infrastructure program), which will secure another $1.3 million to help finish the project. We also received money from  (Regional Conservation Partnership Program),” Pancheri said.

With this funding there will be almost enough to complete the project.

Gravity will replace pumps in the system.

“We have 200 feet of elevation drop from the diversion down to our farms,” he said. “Our goal is to eliminate pumping power and use gravity. When it is completed, Rocky Mountain Power will come in with almost $236,000 to the individual farmers who created a credit through them for the use of power.”

The project would not have been possible without the help of all these different agencies, he said.

“We will probably have the rest of the project finished by 2025. Like all farmers in our area, our biggest cost is power for pumping. Our power bill keeps going up. We suggested the idea of reducing shrink in our ditches and also being able to run everything via gravity flow,” Pancheri said.

“We had a field trip a little over a year ago, with people here from all over the county. In the Big Lost River area they were lining many of their canals. Those people looked at our project and said they did all that lining and still had maintenance and evaporation and the liner didn’t solve it,” he said.

They decided to do what we are doing, starting to put pipelines in. Their valley is similar to ours, with elevation drop from diversions, so some of their projects will also be gravity flow irrigation systems,” he said.

Even a lined ditch will lose water — from evaporation as well as into the ground, he said.

“With a pipe, what you put in is what you’ll get out. We are excited about this project. In Idaho, water is valuable, and we can’t farm or ranch without it,” he said.