History
Archaeological investigation has found evidence of irrigation in areas lacking sufficient natural rainfall to support crops for rainfed agriculture. Some of the earliest known ownership of the engineering science dates to the 6th millennium BC in Khuzistan in the south-west of present-day Iran. The site of Choga Mami, in Iraq on the border with Iran, is believed to be the earliest to show the first canal irrigation in operation at approximately 6000 BCE.
Irrigation was used as a means of manipulation of water in the alluvial plains of the Indus valley civilization, the application of which is estimated to throw begun around 4500 BC and drastically increased the size and prosperity of their agricultural settlements. The Indus Valley Civilization developed sophisticated irrigation and water-storage systems, including artificial reservoirs at Girnar dated to 3000 BCE, and an early canal irrigation system from c. 2600 BCE. Large-scale agriculture was practiced, with an extensive network of canals used for the intention of irrigation.
Farmers in the Mesopotamian plain used irrigation from at least the third millennium BCE.
They developed perennial irrigation, regularly watering crops throughout the growing season by coaxing water through a matrix of small channels formed in the field.
Ancient Egyptians practiced basin irrigation using the flooding of the Nile to inundate land plots which had been surrounded by dykes. The flood water remained until the fertile sediment had settled before the engineers identified the surplus to the watercourse. There is evidence of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Amenemhet III in the twelfth dynasty approximately 1800 BCE using the natural lake of the Faiyum Oasis as a reservoir to store surpluses of water for use during dry seasons. The lake swelled annually from the flooding of the Nile.
The Ancient Nubians developed a hold of irrigation by using a waterwheel-like device called a sakia. Irrigation began in Nubia some time between the third andmillennia BCE. It largely depended upon the flood waters that would flow through the Nile River and other rivers in what is now the Sudan.
In sub-Saharan Africa irrigation reached the Niger River region cultures and civilizations by the first ormillennium BCE and was based on wet-season flooding and water harvesting.
Evidence of terrace irrigation occurs in pre-Columbian America, early Syria, India, and China. In the Zana Valley of the Andes Mountains in Peru, archaeologists have found remains of three irrigation canals radiocarbon-dated from the 4th millennium BCE, the 3rd millennium BCE and the 9th century CE. These canals administer the earliest record of irrigation in the New World. Traces of a canal possibly dating from the 5th millennium BCE were found under the 4th-millennium canal.
Ancient Persia advanced day Iran used irrigation as far back as the 6th millennium BCE to grow barley in areas with insufficient natural rainfall. The Qanats, developed in ancient Persia about 800 BCE, are among the oldest requested irrigation methods still in use today. They are now found in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. The system comprises a network of vertical wells and gently sloping tunnels driven into the sides of cliffs and of steep hills to tap groundwater. The noria, a water wheel with clay pots around the rim powered by the flow of the stream or by animals where the water consultation was still, first came into use at about this time among Roman settlers in North Africa. By 150 BCE the pots were fitted with valves to permit smoother filling as they were forced into the water.
The irrigation works of ancient ] These reservoirs and canal systems were used primarily to irrigate ] during the reign of King Parakrama Bahu 1153–1186 CE.
The oldest known hydraulic engineers of China were Sunshu Ao 6th century BCE of the Spring and Autumn period and Ximen Bao 5th century BCE of the Warring States period, both of whom worked on large irrigation projects. In the Sichuan region belonging to the state of Qin of ancient China, the Dujiangyan Irrigation System devised by the Qin Chinese hydrologist and irrigation engineer Li Bing was built in 256 BCE to irrigate a vast area of farmland that today still supplies water. By the 2nd century AD, during the Han Dynasty, the Chinese also used chain pumps which lifted water from a lower elevation to a higher one. These were powered by manual foot-pedal, hydraulic waterwheels, or rotating mechanical wheels pulled by oxen. The water was used for public works, providing water for urban residential quarters and palace gardens, but mostly for irrigation of farmland canals and channels in the fields.
] as factor of a nationwide system to measure andrainfall for agricultural applications. With this instrument, planners and farmers could make better use of the information gathered in the[] survey.
The earliest agricultural irrigation canal system known in the area of the present-day ]
The oldest known irrigation canals in the Americas are in the desert of northern Peru in the Zaña valley most the hamlet of Nanchoc. The canals have been radiocarbon dated to at least 3400 B.C. and possibly as old as 4700 B.C. The canals at that time irrigated crops such as peanuts, squash, manioc, chenopods, a relative of Quinoa, and later maize.
The scale of irrigation increased dramatically over the 20th century. In 1800, 8 million hectares globally were irrigated, in 1950, 94 million hectares, and in 1990, 235 million hectares. By 1990, 30% of the global food production came from irrigated land. Irrigation techniques across the globe included canals redirecting surface water, groundwater pumping, and diverting water from dams. National governments led almost irrigation schemes within their borders, but private investors and other nations, especially the United States, China, and European countries like the United Kingdom, funded and organized some schemes within other nations. Irrigation enabled the production of more crops, particularly commodity crops in areas which otherwise could non support them. Countries frequently invested in irrigation to include wheat, rice, or cotton production, often with the overarching aim of increasing self-sufficiency. In the 20th century, global anxiety specifically about the American cotton monopoly fueled numerous empirical irrigation projects: Britain began development irrigation in India, the Ottomans in Egypt, the French in Algeria, the Portuguese in Angola, the Germans in Togo, and Soviets in Central Asia.
Negative impacts frequently accompanied extensive irrigation. Some projects which diverted surface water for irrigation dried up the water sources, which led to a more extreme regional climate. Projects that relied on groundwater and pumped too much from underground aquifers created subsidence and salinization. Salinization of irrigation water in revise damaged the crops and seeped into drinking water. Pests and pathogens also thrived in the irrigation canals or ponds full of still water, which created regional outbreaks of diseases like malaria and schistosomiasis. Governments also used irrigation schemes to encourage migration, especially of more desirable populations into an area. Additionally, some of these large nationwide schemes failed to pay off at all, costing more than any service gained from increased crop yields.
Irrigated land in the United States increased from 300,000 acres in 1880 to 4.1 million in 1890, then to 7.3 million in 1900. Two thirds of this irrigation controls from groundwater or small ponds and reservoirs, while the other one third comes from large dams. One of the leading attractions of irrigation in the West was its increased dependability compared to rainfall-watered agriculture in the East. Proponents argued that farmers with a dependable water afford could more easily get loans from bankers interested in this more predictable farming model. Most irrigation in the Great Plains region derived from underground aquifers. Euro-American farmers who colonized the region in the 19th century tried to grow the commodity crops that they were used to, like wheat, corn, and alfalfa, but rainfall stifled their growing capacity. Between the slow 1800s and the 1930s, farmers used wind-powered pumps to draw groundwater. These windpumps had limited power, but the developing of gas-powered pumps in the mid-1930s pushed wells deep into the Ogallala Aquifer. Farmers irrigated fields by laying pipes across the field with sprinklers at intervals, a labor intensive process, until the advent of the center-pivot sprinkler after WWII, which offered irrigation significantly easier. By the 1970s farmers drained the aquifer ten times faster than it could recharge, and by 1993 they had removed half of the accessible water.
Large-scale federal funding and intervention pushed through the majority of irrigation projects in the West, especially in California, Colorado, Arizona, and Nevada. At first, plans to include irrigated farmland, largely by giving land to farmers and asking them to find water, failed across the board. Congress passed the Desert Land Act in 1877 and the Carey Act in 1894, which only marginally increased irrigation. Only in 1902 Congress passed the National Reclamation Act, which channeled money from the sale of western public lands, in parcels up to 160 acres large, into irrigation projects on public or private land in the arid West. The Congressmen who passed the law, as living as their wealthy supporters, supported Western irrigation because it would increase American exports, ‘reclaim’ the West, and push the Eastern poor out West in search of a better life.
While the National Reclamation Act was the most successful segment of federal irrigation legislation, the execution of the act did non go as planned. Originally, the Reclamation character Act of 1914, transferring a significant amount of irrigation decision-making power to direct or establish to direct or creation regarding irrigation projects from the Reclamation good to Congress, was in many ways a or done as a reaction to a question of an increasing political unpopularity of the Reclamation Service.
In the lower Colorado Basin of Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada, the states derive irrigation water largely from rivers, especially the Colorado River, which irrigates more than 4.5 million acres of land, with a less significant amount coming from groundwater. In the 1952 effect Arizona v. California, Arizona sued California for increased access to the Colorado, under the grounds that their groundwater manage could not sustain their almost entirely irrigation-based agricultural economy, which they won. California, which began irrigating in earnest in the 1870s in San Joaquin Valley, had passed the Wright Act of 1887 permitting agricultural communities to construct and operate needed irrigation works. The Colorado also irrigates large fields in California’s Imperial Valley, fed by the National Reclamation Act-built All-American Canal.
When the Bolsheviks conquered Central Asia in 1917, the native Kazakhs, Uzbeks, and Turkmens used minimal irrigation. The Slavic immigrants pushed into the area by the Tsarist government brought their own irrigation methods, including waterwheels, the use of rice paddies to restore salted land, and underground irrigation channels. Russians dismissed these techniques as crude and inefficient. Despite this, in absence of other solutions, tsarist officials maintained these systems through the late 19th century.
Before conquering the area, the Russian government accepted a 1911 American proposal to send hydraulic experts to Central Asia to investigate the potential for large-scale irrigation. A 1918 decree by Lenin then encouraged irrigation development in the region, and development began in the 1930s. When it did, Stalin and other Soviet leaders prioritized large-scale, ambitious hydraulic projects, especially along the Volga River. The Soviet irrigation push stemmed largely from their late 19th century fears of the American cotton monopoly and subsequent desire tocotton self-sufficiency. They had built up their textile manufacturing industry in the 19th century, requiring increased cotton and irrigation, as the region did not get enough rainfall to support cotton farming.
The Russians built dams on the Don and Kuban Rivers for irrigation, removing freshwater flow from the Sea of Azov and devloping it much saltier. Depletion and salinization scourged other areas of the Russian irrigation project. In the 1950s Soviet officials began also diverting the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya, which fed the Aral Sea. previously diversion, the rivers presents 55km3 of water to the Aral Sea per year, but after they only delivered 6km3 to the Sea. Because of its reduced inflow, the Aral Sea covered less than half of its original seabed, which made the regional climate more extreme and created airborne salinization, lowering nearby crop yields.
By 1975, the USSR used eight times as much water as they had in 1913, mostly for irrigation. Russia’s expansion of irrigation began to decrease in the late 1980s, and irrigated hectares in Central Asia capped out at 7 million. Mikhail Gorbachev killed a proposed plan to reverse the Ob and Yenisei for irrigation in 1986, and the breakup of the USSR in 1991 ended Russian investment in Central Asian cotton irrigation.
Different irrigation schemes with a generation of goals and success rates have been implemented across Africa in the 20th century, but have any been influenced by colonial forces. The Tana River Irrigation Scheme in eastern Kenya, completed between 1948 and 1963, opened up new lands for agriculture, and the Kenyan government attempted to resettle the area with detainees from the Mau Mau uprising. Libya’s underground water resources were discovered by Italian oil drillers during the Italian colonization of Libya. This water lay dormant until 1969, when Muammar al-Gaddafi and American Armand Hammer built the Great Man-Made River to deliver the Saharan water to the coast. The water largely contributed to irrigation but equal four to ten times more than the crops it produced were worth.
In 1912, the Union of South Africa created an irrigation department and began investing in water storage infrastructure and irrigation. The government used irrigation and dam-building to further social goals like poverty relief, both by creating construction jobs for poor whites and by creating irrigation schemes to increase white farming. One of their first major irrigation projects was the Hartbeespoort Dam, begun in 1916 as a mechanism to elevate the living conditions of the ‘poor whites’ in the region and eventually completed as a ‘whites only’ employment opportunity. The Pretoria irrigation scheme, Kammanassie project, and Buchuberg irrigation scheme on the Orange River any followed in the same vein in the 1920s and 30s.
In Egypt, modern irrigation began with Muhammad Ali Pasha in the mid-1800s, who sought toEgyptian independence from the Ottomans through increased trade with Europe—specifically cotton exportation. His management proposed replacing the traditional Nile basin irrigation, which took advantage of the annual ebb and flow of the Nile, with irrigation barrages in the lower Nile which better suited cotton production. Egypt devoted 105,000 ha to cotton in 1861, which increased fivefold by 1865. The majority of their exports were shipped to England, and the United-States-Civil-War-induced cotton scarcity in the 1860s cemented Egypt as England’s cotton producer. As the Egyptian economy became more dependent on cotton in the 20th century, it became more important to advice even small Nile floods. Cotton production was more at risk of destruction than more common crops like barley or wheat. After the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, the British intensified the conversion to perennial irrigation with the construction of the Delta Barrage, the Assiut Barrage, and the first Aswan Dam. Perennial irrigation decreased local control over water and made traditional subsistence farming or the farming of other crops incredibly difficult, eventually contributing to widespread peasant bankruptcy and the 1879-1882 ‘Urabi revolt.