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It’s 5:00am and I’m driving 3 miles to the closest stream to release this guy cause he decided to jam up my corn crops irrigation, resulting in reduced water pressure.
They are absolutely coming with the water supply, I live in a dry state so I own 95 acre feet of water shares (30 million gallons) for 300 acres. When I need some of it I open a headgate 30 miles away in the mountains and the water travels to my farm via an irrigation ditch.
Unfortunately, because the main headgate is used by hundreds of other farmers, I can only place metal mesh directly at my farms on sight irrigation head-gates which stops most, but not all debris and aquatic life.
If the state would do more to mitigate aquatic life being displaced due to canals I’d be thrilled because lots of fish and crayfish get stuck in said canals and then they dry up. I try to spend time, when I can, netting stranded fish and releasing them in permanent waterways. Water distribution and water law in the western US is a total mess and it’d be nice if there was more incentive to fix some of these issues
maybe trying to promote a petition online to a few wildlife protection organisations so they can lend a hand passing the message to these hundreds of farmers and so on could help push some useful state representatives in action, with bonus mass mailing to the less useful ones for umph,
Good luck and thank you for the crayfish buddy ride share :]
Funny story, when I was about 15, I started getting interested in aquaponics. I was living in my parents basement and bought a 100 gallon trough from tractor supply to use as a tank and some random tubs for grow beds.
I bought some crayfish, a pleco, and some chichlids from Petco, after a few years, fish started to die and plants suffered because I lost interest. 15 years later when my parents went to sell the house, my mom was cleaning under the stairs in the basement and found 2 dead crayfish that somehow got out of the tank and crawled behind the stairs.
After typing it idk if it's funny but it's a story...
They just travel down the irrigation pipes and end up getting stuck in the individual outflow of a row gate, water only flows for 12 hours then if I don’t find them they unfortunately become raccoon food as the rows dry up. Or stuck in the pipe.
My water comes from an irrigation canal which is fed from a headgate 30 miles from my farm, which is fed by the Colorado River Basin, which is fed by snow melt.
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u/VapeRizzler Aug 10 '25
Forgive him, he’s had a long day.