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Farming Opportunities (promotional booklet)

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Pages (4)

Cover front
Cover front
Cover back
Cover back
Inside left
Inside left
Inside right
Inside right

Background

Water promised for fall 1947 or spring 1948 — this Bureau of Reclamation Q&A booklet addressed to returning World War II veterans lays out the Columbia Basin Project's Pasco Pump Unit: 5,361 irrigable acres divided into 76 farm units, roughly twelve miles northwest of Pasco, Washington.

The Columbia Basin Project is one of the largest irrigation undertakings in American history, built around the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River in eastern Washington. The Bureau of Reclamation's plan was to deliver water through hundreds of miles of canals and laterals to nearly a million acres of semi-arid land in the central Washington basin — land capable of growing wheat and potatoes but bone-dry without water.

The 1943 Columbia Basin Project Act gave returning veterans preference in drawing for farm units, making irrigated land one of the federal government's tools for postwar resettlement. This booklet, directed from the Bureau's Ephrata, Washington office (in Grant County, chosen as the project's administrative hub for its central position in the basin), is a Q&A primer for veterans and other prospective settlers who had been writing in with questions. The tone is careful and bureaucratic: answers acknowledge delays, withdrawals, and uncertainty alongside the pitch.

The first land to receive water was the Pasco Pump Unit — unusual because, unlike the gravity-fed sections supplied from Grand Coulee's reservoir, this one required pumping water directly from the Columbia River and served as an engineering testbed using experimental asphalt-lined canals. Irrigation water finally arrived in May 1948. The booklet's text already shows one timeline correction: "fall of 1947" is struck through, replaced by spring 1948 — a small but telling sign of a project running behind schedule.

  • Approximately 1,029,000 acres are described as suitable for irrigation across the full project.
  • About 300,000 of those had been withdrawn — largely by wheat farmers who, with wartime grain prices high and wet years reducing the appeal of irrigation, pulled their land from the project.
  • An additional block of 1,300 acres on the Burbank Bench, a few miles south of Pasco, is mentioned as a second candidate for early water delivery.

Researched with claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 on May 24, 2026. AI-assisted — verify before citing.

Highlights

  • The cover photograph shows a man, woman, and small child standing in open scrubland; the man points toward the horizon — a stock image of settler aspiration that recurs across dozens of federal land-promotion campaigns.
  • The title 'FARMING OPPORTUNITIES / COLUMBIA BASIN PROJECT' is set in large block capitals directly below the photograph.
  • The opening paragraph explicitly targets 'World War II veterans and others who are interested in farming on the Columbia Basin Project,' framing irrigation land as a veterans benefit.
  • Contact for further information is given as the Bureau of Reclamation, Ephrata, Washington — the project's administrative center in Grant County.
  • In the answer to question 2, a strikethrough is visible on what appears to be 'fall of 1947 or,' leaving 'spring of 1948' as the projected date for first water — evidence the document was revised after an earlier deadline slipped.
  • A handwritten '25/50' appears in the lower-left margin — likely an archival or print-run notation, possibly copy 25 of a run of 50.

Further reading