Dams.

     Often in modern society when you hear about dams it's when people are pointing out the negative. Today's post is about the positive. I'll be using one dam to illustrated my point.

     Somewhat hidden by the mists is the Owyhee Dam. It's hard to get scale from this range but it's pretty big. 417 feet tall and 833 feet long to be exact. I probably don't have to tell you that it can hold a lot of water, (around 391 billion gallons) and right now, it's very full.

     While it looks pretty close to the top when viewed from the back, it still has just under 10% of it's capacity that it can fill. Before you say that 10% isn't that much, remember how much volume we're dealing with here. In order to regulate the amount of water in the dam it has this:

     What looks like a hole in the universe is actually a large pipe that sticks up from the depths of the lake. It can move up and down to regulate the rate of flow. The water that goes in here comes out the front of the dam. That's the water shooting out that you can see in the top picture.
     The dam is actually in Oregon, but being so close to the border it waters a lot of Idaho as well, including (you guessed it) Owyhee County. It was built during the depression and for 5 years the construction of the dam provided jobs for many people from the region. After it was built, the increase in irrigated land allowed those same people to have jobs on the new farms.

     As I've said before, this is dry country out here. The dam changes all that. All that water you see in the picture above can be spread over 120,000 acres. It's brought to us in great big pipes.

     That's the pipe on either side of the picture. That little black dot at the bottom end of the left side of the pipe is actually a SUV. The pipe goes under the river and road here. The weight of the water is enough to push the water over the hills it must cross before reaching its destination.
     To explain what 120,000 acres means, I'll do a little math. The average yield for wheat in Owyhee County over the last three years is about 100 bushels (a bushel is 8 gallons) per acre. So (theoretically) if all 120,000 acres was planted in wheat, it could produce as much as 12,000,000 bushels of wheat. A bushel of wheat, when ground, produces 42 pounds of white flour or 60 pounds of whole wheat flour. That translates to 504,000,000 pounds of white flour or 504,000,000 loaves of commercial white bread; or 720,000,000 pounds of whole wheat flour or 1,080,000,000 loaves of whole wheat bread. That's a fair bit of food.
     Now obviously all the ground (Much of which is outside Owyhee County) that the dam waters isn't growing wheat. In reality, last year, Owyhee County produced around 750,000 bushels of wheat because there are a great many different crops grown here. Every crop is equally useful, though, and they all eventually make their way to you. Whether on your table, in your clothes, or in the myriad of other places plant products end up, they started out on a farm. And a great many of these farms are made possible by dams. Few other public works can claim such a noble achievement.