Elwood Mead identified himself as the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s “Expert in Charge of Irrigation Investigations” in 1902, the year he supervised a big study on rice irrigation that said the Louisiana prairies were the place to visit to see the way things should be done.
“Rice growing in southwestern Louisiana and southeastern Texas during the past five or six years has developed from an experiment into a stable industry of greatest importance to the United States,” according to “Irrigation of Rice in the United States.”
The report said our canals were one of the most inventive of the reasons for that growth; while other people dug canals into the ground we most often built ours on top of it…