An Idaho family that has farmed 1,000 acres near the Snake River for three generations has sued the state after an emergency water order forced them to shut off their irrigation pumps. The order dried their fields and destroyed their crops. Jerry Bingham and his family have grown wheat, alfalfa, and potatoes near Blackfoot since 1950. They filed a lawsuit in the Seventh Judicial District Court of Idaho in Bingham County. The lawsuit challenges an order from the Idaho Department of Water Resources (IDWR) that stopped groundwater pumping across large areas of the Eastern Snake River Plain. The Binghams are represented by the nonprofit public interest law group Pacific Legal Foundation. They argue that state regulators broke Idaho's long-standing water priority laws and effectively took their private property rights without paying them.
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