Our History
In March 1900, a California farmer, Henry Stirring, opened a gate and let water from a TID irrigation canal flow onto his newly planted corn field. It was a momentous occasion and one that attracted droves of people to Stirring’s Stanislaus County farm to witness history in the making.
On that day, Stirring's name was etched into the annals of California history as the first grower in the state to receive water supplied by the state’s very first publicly owned irrigation district. The upstart outfit with huge aspirations was none other than the Turlock Irrigation District.
The introduction of irrigation in 1900 paved the way for the introduction of a number of high value crops to a semi-arid region of the Northern San Joaquin Valley that until then was limited to vast tracts of wheat and other dry land farm crops. Those crops relied solely on what Mother Nature provided as rain during the spring and early summer.
Established in 1887, the Turlock Irrigation District was the first publicly owned irrigation district in the state and one of only four in California today that also provides electric retail energy directly to homes, farms and businesses.
In partnership with the neighboring Modesto Irrigation District, TID built La Grange Dam in 1893 to divert water out of the river and into the districts’ respective canals.
The districts joined forces again in the 1920s and built the original Don Pedro Dam to store water for a full irrigation season as river flows frequently dwindled to a mere trickle in late summers.
After several dry winters, the districts decided to build a much larger dam to replace the original one in order to store water necessary to bridge multiple years of drought. New Don Pedro Dam, with a capacity seven times larger than the original reservoir, was completed in 1971.
With the first dam came the opportunity to generate power hydroelectrically. The districts’ customers voted overwhelmingly in 1923 to keep the power for local use versus selling it to investor-owned utilities, then operating in the area, thus becoming the first of the state’s irrigation districts to also enter the retail power business.
When customer demand for electricity exceeded the District’s hydroelectric capacity, it began buying power on the wholesale market to supplement its needs while investigating new energy opportunities.
In the late1970s, TID built the first of eight hydroelectric plants on its canal system and on the canals of two nearby irrigation districts. About this time, TID also acquired more clean renewable power with an interest in a geothermal power plant in the Geysers Steam Field in Lake County.
The District built its first fossil fuel power plant near Turlock in 1986. A second natural gas-fired power plant also capable of generating about 50 megawatts of power was completed in 1995. A third fossil fuel plant, the Walnut Energy Center, went into service in early 2006 with a generating capacity of 250 megawatts.
Today, the District is capable of generating over 505 megawatts of electricity.
TID serves a population of approximately 220,000 people and 97,000 retail accounts in portions of Merced County and Stanislaus County and small sections of Tuolumne and Mariposa counties. The 662-square-mile electric service area incorporates the communities of Turlock, Ceres, South Modesto, La Grange, Patterson, Crows Landing, Hilmar, Keyes, Denair, Hughson, Delhi, Ballico, Hickman and Diablo Grande.
Our 307-square-mile irrigation service area is generally located in those portions of Merced and Stanislaus counties situated between the Merced and Tuolumne Rivers from the foothills on the east to the San Joaquin River on the west. The Tuolumne River is the primary source of irrigation water, supplied by the spring snowmelt in the 1,884-square-mile Tuolumne River watershed.
For a detailed history on the Turlock Irrigation District, read Land, Water and Power, A History of the Turlock Irrigation District, 1887-1987, by Alan M. Paterson. The book is available at most Stanislaus County libraries.
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