“You know how, when you’re eight years old, it’s hard to watch a fish just dying out of the water? Stranded? It’s not like catching them on a hook and then killing them and eating them. Partly ‘cause I knew it was us doing it—trapping them in our ditches and then letting them die out in the fields. I couldn’t stand it.” Hal Herring said.
You hear this and it makes you think about how many fish are being killed every year when they are pumped through irrigation pipes into people’s fields. Well Miles City, Montana farmer and pellet mill operator Roger Muggli wanted to make a difference and started 44 years ago. When he was a kid he would pick up fish from the family’s alfalfa fields, from the lowly buffalo and goldeye to sauger, smallmouth, and channel cats, and put them in buckets. These were just a few of the thousands of fish sucked in to the T-Y (Tongue- Yellowstone) Irrigation District’s canal system, and left stranded as the water was used to fill the rich farmland of Yellowstone bottoms. Many Years later he came up with a solution to the problem or something that would save some of the lives of the fish. He knew the real key was to create a bypass around the diversion dam, without sacrificing the water that local agriculture couldn’t do without, and let all those fish- which include locally and nationally imperiled species.
http://www.fieldandstream.com/blogs/fishing/2011/02/yellowstone-tongue-river-irrigation-district-dead-fish
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