Century-old irrigation maps are helping farmers plan for drier years
Survey sheets from 1918 recorded something satellites cannot see: where the water used to go.
The sheets sat in a district records room for eight decades. Scanned last winter, they are now the most requested dataset the agricultural office holds.
What the surveyors recorded
The 1918 teams mapped seasonal channels — the ones that only carry water in a wet year. Satellite imagery reads the present, and the present is dry.
Farmers are using the overlays to site recharge pits along paths that carried water within living memory, rather than guessing from current terrain.
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