| Twin Falls, Idaho, and the surrounding farmland represent one of the few successful irrigation projects created under the Carey Act of 1894; it draws water from the Snake River to irrigate more than 200,000 acres of land that began its history as a 60-mile-long expanse of sagebrush. After 105 years, the Twin Falls Canal Company continues to exist under the original organizational plan of a shareholder-owned and operated entity. The shareholders are the farmers who own and work the land irrigated by the company. Five creative nonfiction essays weave memoir, family history, and regional history of the Moore property, now inside the city limits of Twin Falls, farmed for three generations by members of the author's family. They address questions of change and transformation over time, choices concerning land use, mid-twentieth-century crops and farming practices in south-central Idaho, and attempts to control soil erosion and the resulting sedimentation of the Snake River. |
