Progress is being made on the construction of the Bayou Meto Irrigation Project, which will eventually distribute water to farmers in Lonoke, Prairie, Jefferson, Arkansas and Pulaski counties, but additional funding will be needed to complete the project.

The project was designed to help farmers manage water use more efficiently and reduce their reliance on the Sparta and alluvial aquifers.

"At 2019 dollar levels, this was before the recent inflation, we still needed $762 million to finish the entire project," said Edward Swaim, executive director of Bayou Meto Water Management District.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service has allocated grants to the project to cover construction of more than 25 pump stations and the pipelines needed to improve water flow on eight miles of Indian Bayou, according to an Agricultural Council of Arkansas news release in July 2020.

The USDA has awarded the project about $45.1 million for construction and $3.5 million for technical, system design and engineering work, to be matched with money borrowed from the state, Swaim said.

Like the Grand Prairie Irrigation Project, which will create a canal system for agriculture using water from the White River, the Bayou Meto project is also going to be completed in phases.

To date $109 million is available for the first phase of the Bayou Meto project, expected to be finished by 2025. Funding has come from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the USDA and the state of Arkansas.

"We're looking at being able to run our pumps and supply the very first farms at the beginning of our canal system within a couple of years if the current canal construction finishes by then, so we're waiting on the canal to be built by the Corps of Engineers," Swaim said.

The problem with drawing water from the alluvial aquifer is that water is being removed from it faster than it can recharge, said University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture Extension Soil and Water Conservation scientist Mike Daniels.

Rainfall will help replenish it but there's a limit to how fast that can happen, he said.

"We have a surplus of surface water running through our state, through the Arkansas River, White River and the Mississippi River, that makes us a very water rich state and there's not many states that have as much water going through as we do. We just don't hang on to much of it," Daniels said.

"So these irrigation districts are very important to our future as far diverting water from the Arkansas or the White River and turning that into irrigation water that can be bought by farmers. We don't know when, but we know there's a [water] decline going on, and we've got to stop that decline," he said.

The Bayou Meto project's canal system includes natural channels, or bayous, that will transport water through the project area and keep the bayous filled during irrigation season, when farmers can pump some from the canal and some directly from the bayou as they do now, though more water will be added to it to make it more reliable, Swaim said.

The Bayou Meto Irrigation District will additionally own pump sites along the bayous that will pull water out and push it to farms and buried pipelines.

Current work on the irrigation project is being done on the eastern edge of the project area where it adjoins the White River Irrigation District.

"Eventually, it will get over to farms in that area, but right now, we're still in what we call the Indian Bayou Watershed," Swaim said.

A pumping station near Scott was completed in 2014 and turned over to the state and to the Bayou Meto Irrigation District in 2015. That station will pull water from the Arkansas River.

"There's a substantial amount of canal that starts at that pumping station and moves east to near Highway 161 in Scott and there's current construction on that canal from Highway 161 over along Bearskin Lake Road for about a three-mile stretch and that construction is happening right now," Swaim said.

The Bayou Meto Irrigation District is working with the state Department of Transportation, which recently awarded the district two contracts to build bridges on Ark. 161 and U.S. 165 that could be completed by next year, Swaim said.

"Those highway bridges will go over the canal and the bridge contractors will build the canal portion right underneath it. ... We'll have those two bridges that will be built within the next year," Swaim said.

The Bayou Meto State Wildlife Management Area, which has more than 33,000 acres of waterfowl habitat and is owned by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, in the lower end of the Bayou Meto project area, will also benefit.

"Our project will have a lot of benefits for that area; we own a pumping station in that area on the lower end," Swaim said.

"It hasn't operated yet, because we, and Game and Fish, and the Corps of Engineers and others will have to build infrastructure to feed that station with water but it was built several years ago as part of the project. The Game and Fish Commission put money into that pumping station as well as that district."

"It's all part of one very large project."

Print Headline: Irrigation build-out targets 5 counties

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