SE Oregon here and alfalfa growers are following water down on almost an annual basis. Don't buy a pivot without thoroughly checking the well's history. If agr. wants to put down a new well now, they have to plug an old one.
A few primo trout fishing holes have lost their historic spring inputs and dried up. Nearby 1/2 section pivots are likely the culprit.
There is no place in Idaho where you can put in an ag or industrial well without buying someone else's water right, first. Water is, as we say, "fully allocated". Irrigation, industry, domestic, stream flow, hydro, native tribes, lots of different water rights.
The Idaho water doctrine is "first in right, first in time". The spring I operate on has one of the oldest rights in Idaho, 1864. No one can, in any way, diminish that spring. If someone in the watershed drills a well, and affects the spring flow, I can make a "call for water", and they will have to shut down. Period, end of story.
There is a stretch around the Twin Falls area that is called the "thousand springs reach", where the chasm created by the flood that drained the ice age inland sea cuts through the lava rock and intersects the Snake River Plain aquifer, and a million gallons of spring flow PER MINUTE comes out of the canyon walls. Trout farms filed for the spring flow rights, and had their operations for half a century and more. Then the droughts started, irrigation practices changed, and farmers up stream (way, way, WAY upstream -- as far as Mud Lake and the Idaho Falls / Blackfoot regions 160 miles away) started putting in BIG wells. Springs started dropping, slowly at first, then faster.
The spring flow was roughly cut in half from the 1967 peak by 2000, and the fish farmers made a call for water. Long story short, the irrigators ended up buying the fish farmer's water rights in a state brokered deal, for roughly $200K per CFS (cubic feet per second, about an acre foot per day). Now the fish farmers are renting back their water right and old facilities, but since they don't own the rights, they can no longer call on water.
The irrigators most certainly paid for water, and a HECK of a lot more than the proposal in Kali.
