THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 1929. IRRIGATION AND ITS CONTROL.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20690, 12 April 1929, Page 8

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 1929. IRRIGATION AND ITS CONTROL.

Attention was lately invited in these columns to the somewhat singular obscurity which, as far as we have been able to observe, seems to surround the question whether the direct and incidental expenses attending.the application of State-provided water to the average irrigated farm are generally such as to leave from the enterprise an adequate reward for the cost and labour involved. A uniformly favourable reply, desirable and, it may with some confidence be hoped, satisfactory as it may be, has perhaps been too readily assumed, as it was in Australia in the early days of State irrigation in that country, with results unpleasantly notorious at the time. The article in the official Journal of Agriculture upon which we were commenting, and the author of which was the present Director of Field Services in the Agricultural Department, was in the main a friendly reminder to irrigation fanners of the “ handicap ” inevitably placed upon them by the accompanying expenses of their enterprise as compared with the case of those more favourably situated in the matter of natural rainfall. It was coupled with some thoughtful' advice on the most promising directions in which to direct their energies to the overcoming as far as possible of this considerable initial disadvantage. The particular department, however, in which the author (Mr Tennent) holds a high office does not happen, to be the one principally concerned in the design and execution, or even of the subsequent financial administration, of the State irrigation schemes. All these functions have from the first been assigned solely to the Department of Public Works —probably, ‘ indeed, rather too exclusively, at least as regards such ramifications of a complicated enterprise as are not concerned with-purely executive engineering and construction. Farmers as a class are inclined instinctively to associate themselves and the activities provided for their guidance rather with the department to which Mr Tennent belongs than with the real prime mover in these matters. As a result the public, in reviewing certain puzzling phases of these undertakings which occasionally crop up for discussion, may sometimes have a difficulty in directing its comments of praise or blame with entire accuracy to the officially correct quarter.

An instance, in fact, may, be found in the article in which we had remarked on the apparently greater attention given to the designing and control of irrigation schemes and the collecting of dues, as compared with any adequate examination of very important points as to the net economic results over a series of years to the actual beneficiaries, of the State’s activities. The department with which we had associated this observation was the Department of Agriculture. This inadvertence on our part certainly might have been avoided, since the whole history of State irrigation in Otago is consistent only with the ascription officially of all three functions—design, execution, and financial control —to the sister department of Public Works. That this is, in fact,

the case, does not, however, involve concurrence in the appatent official opinion that it ought to be the case. We think it is quite arguable that, on the contrary, it ought not to be the case, at least, in’ the complete degree which the bare statement of official technicalities would imply. The still unsettled controversies and complaints that have been seething in the irrigation districts for a long time past, and, by the way, have been the subject of a detailed report of which nothing has been heard officially since it was first published several months ago, might well have arisen in less acute, degree, if at all, had the three Departments of Lands, Public Works, and Agriculture been in close association from the outset, and if they had jointly directed not only the engineering skill at their command, but also the business acumen and wise financial prevision that would probably have been equally available in such a combination, to the many-sided aspects of these ambitious enterprises. Fortunately, in actual practice, the theoretical rigidity of the separation of functions, at least as regards the two departments last named, has not been maintained with the completeness which each separately seems inclined to claim for itself. Mr Tennent himself, for instance—while, as we have pointed out, his department was not associated with matters of design and control—nevertheless deals usefully, under his official designation, with the intimate details of practical irrigation, and does so in a publication which proclaims as its controlling authority not the Minister of Public Works, but the latter’s colleague presiding over the Department of Agriculture. The Department of Agriculture, moreover, represented in this matter by Mr Tennent himself, has lately assumed the administration of an irrigated area at Galloway which presumably had first received the executive attention of the Public Works engineers. If in the course of this intimate combination Mr Tennent has, as he may have, entered a plea for a more extensive association of the expert officers of his department with all stages and in all situations of irrigation enterprise, he may depend on the support of the public. The innovation, if such it would really be, must make for enhanced efficiency as well as for diminished confusion.