Working to Resolve Kinsey Irrigation Company’s Power Dilemma
Doug Martin in an irrigated field.
T
he Kinsey Irrigation Company, located in Custer County, Montana, provides water to farming across 6,640 acres of land, supporting 80 families. The company was recently informed that its existing power contract with the Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program will not be eligible for renewal when it expires. This casts the future of the company in question, as alternate power sources would cost 6½–20 times as much as its current supply. In this interview, Doug Martin, the project coordinator for the Kinsey Irrigation Company’s legislative efforts on the Pick-Sloan issue, lays out for us the company’s current situation and how it could be resolved. Irrigation Leader: Please tell us about your background.
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Irrigation Leader: Please tell us about the Kinsey Irrigation Company. Doug Martin: The irrigation system has been around for well over 100 years. The water right goes back to 1896. Two projects were started and then failed before the current one was instituted in 1936 by the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal–era federal agency. It 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 Kinsey Irrigation Company also signed an agreement with the Bureau of Reclamation to receive power from the PickSloan 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. irrigationleadermagazine.com
PHOTO COURTESY OF DOUG MARTIN.
Doug Martin: I was raised in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and my family moved to 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 with 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 35 years before I had the opportunity to buy a farm in Kinsey, Montana, in 2006. That is how I got involved with
the Kinsey Irrigation Company. I had never been around irrigation prior to that.
