Mark Twain never said "Whiskey's for drinking, water is for fighting over." For one thing, battles over water didn't start until the twentieth century. It's a good line though and it is very true of the twenty-first century west. In today's American west there is still plenty of land available but the demand for water far outstrips the supply. Land without water is almost completely worthless. Bring water to the land and it becomes valuable and productive. Therefore, the story of farming in eastern Oregon is the story of irrigation. If you travel through this region in the summer months, you can read the history of western settlement in the fields if you know what you are looking at. The pioneers irrigated these fields much the same way the ancient Babylonians did. They dug ditches by hand with shovels and picks. They created temporary dams by rolling boulders and mud into the river upstream from their fields. Then the water flowed into the ditches downhill to the fields and the water was distributed by cutting openings in the banks of the ditches and then filling them in. Ditch irrigation has a number of requirements. There has to be a place where a dam can be built upriver, the field must be almost perfectly smooth and it must have a uniform slight slope away from the ditch. Ditch irrigation also requires an extensive infrastructure of culverts and flumes to get the water from the upstream dams to the fields where it is needed. All in all it is very labor intensive. By the mid twentieth century, ditch irrigation was on its way out and hand lines were the standard irrigation method. When I was a teen-ager most of us got our first job moving hand line in the summer. Hand line uses forty foot lengths of two inch aluminum pipe. The sections of pipe are fairly light but it takes a lot of walking to move the lines back and forth across a forty acre field. Instead of dams, pumps, usually gasoline or diesel powered, took water from the river. A two inch diameter pipe forty feet long which is full of water is too heavy to lift. So the first step is to go down to the river and throttle the pump down to idle. Then walk back across the field to the end of the line and remove the end plug so the water will drain out. Unhook each section of line in turn, move it 40 feet and reconnect it to the main line. If you do it right, you will put the end plug in the last piece just before the water fills up the pipe and the water will start to spray again as you walk back to the house. Four hours later you can do it all over again. All summer long. The next step in the development of irrigation technology was the wheel line. Wheel lines used a small gas engine to move the pipe. We didn't need to drain the lines or unhook the pipe sections. Just shut down the pump, start the gas engine, roll the line forty feet, stop the engine and start the pump. Still a lot of back and forth but a whole lot easier. Wheel lines can be used on very rough and irregular fields but they require constant adjustment to keep them rolling straight across a field. And straightening a wheel line that has become skewed can require a lot of physical effort. Today ditches, hand lines and wheel lines have all been almost entirely replaced by pivot irrigation. An electric pump pumps water to a central pivot. Electric motors power the wheels that move the lateral line in an arc around the pivot. Pivots are the most efficient method in terms of quantity of crop produced per gallon of water. Since the pivot moves continuously, it distributes water more evenly than hand or wheel lines can. Ditch irrigation is at an even greater disadvantage due to evaporation from exposed surface and losses through the walls of the ditch. So there we have it: the history of technology written in a hay field. Each step offers more production, uses less human labor and requires a larger capital investment. I expect that in twenty years robots will be doing most of the sowing and mowing unless by then we have moved on to growing our food in stainless steel tanks and the fields stand empty.