Preserving Irrigation for Sidney and Kinsey Irrigation Leader: Please introduce yourselves and tell us about your backgrounds. Raymond Bell: I was born and raised in Sidney, Montana, on a farm in the SWUID. I haven’t gone far from home. After I got married, my dad got us into the trucking business, in which I worked for about 25 years before selling our trucking company and going back to farming. We invested in some more land for the farm in the irrigation district, put in some irrigation pivots, and made some other irrigation improvements. I joined the SWUID board in 1996 and became president of the district in 1998. I’ve held that position ever since. The SWUID has been pumping water since the early 1940s. The district was put together and founded in 1937 through the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and was granted Pick-Sloan power in 1946. That power source was pretty much what got the district going. Right now, we support about 48 families. The district serves about 5,000 acres. The Yellowstone River is our source of water. We have four pump stations along the Yellowstone River as well as a couple of relift stations.
Raymond Bell (left) and Doug Martin (right) meet with Annick Miller Rivera, a professional staff member for the House Natural Resources Committee, on Capitol Hill.
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8 | IRRIGATION LEADER | February 2021
irrigationleadermagazine.com
PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE SWUID.
n 2017, two Montana irrigation water entities, the Kinsey Irrigation Company (KIC) of Custer County and the Sidney Water Users Irrigation District (SWUID) of Richland County, were informed that their contract for affordable project use power (PUP) generated by the Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program would not be renewed. Both entities had been using PUP for 75 years, and an end to their eligibility would likely have put them out of business. The only solution to this problem was specific congressional authorization for the two entities to use PUP. Thanks to determined work by Montana’s congressional delegation in Washington, DC, President Trump signed Public Law 116-191 on October 30, 2020, which allowed the KIC and the SWUID to continue using PUP. In this interview, SWUID President Raymond Bell and KIC Project Coordinator Doug Martin tell Irrigation Leader about their experience with the legislative process.
Doug Martin: I was raised in Ohio and Pennsylvania, leaving in 1986. I bounced around Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming for a decade before settling in Custer County, Montana, in 1996. My cousin had a family farm, and all I ever wanted to do was have one of my own, but it didn’t work out given the state of the dairy industry in the early 1980s. I ended up going into general contracting, and I had been a carpenter for about 25 years before I had the opportunity to buy a farm in Kinsey, Montana, in 2006. That is how I got involved with the KIC. I had never been around irrigation prior to that. The irrigation system run by the KIC has been around for well over 100 years. The water right on the Yellowstone River goes back to 1896. Two projects were started and failed before the current one was instituted in 1936 by the WPA and the federal government. They built 80 units out here—basically homes with land to which people could move to get started farming, later paying back the Farm Service Agency at a low rate. In 1946, the farmers served by the irrigation system bought the Kinsey Irrigation Project from the federal government; it has been a private company ever since. In 1946, the KIC also signed an agreement with the Bureau of Reclamation to receive power from the Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program. We have done that ever since. Kinsey’s service area is currently 6,640 acres. About 80 families make a living off those acres.
