WATER POLITICS

This spring, I had the pleasure to sit on a panel on water in the West with Paolo Bacigalupi and Heather Hansman, two writers I’ve long admired. During the question & answer period, a local woman lamented the fact that some ditches were being piped or lined with concrete, because it would dry out the wetlands and ecosystems that had come to rely on the leaky laterals and ditches. And she was angry because the point, as she understood it, was to save water only to send it downstream to California. Her beloved valley, it seemed, was being dried out to fill up LA pools, which just seems wrong.

I’ve thought about this a lot in the months since, because I think it gets down to the big, conceptual tug-of-war that’s happening around the Colorado River. There’s one battle between the different users of the river’s water. And then there’s another in which the values different communities hold are clashing with the “law of the river” and the overwhelming math that is driving the need to make massive changes.

The following meditation on this clash was catalyzed by a slide a friend sent me from a Family Farm Alliance presentation at the Colorado Water Congress’s summer meeting. It accused me — via a piece I wrote for High Country News — of “demonizing” alfalfa.

Well, Family Farm Alliance, this is my response to you:

VALUES

The woman at the panel was referring to the North Fork Valley in western Colorado, a place with an extensive network of open canals, laterals, and ditches that irrigate peach, apple, and pear orchards, small vineyards, organic farms, and alfalfa fields. A handful of center-pivot sprinkler systems reveal themselves in the geometric perfection of their dependent fields, but most of the farms rely on older methods to bring water to the crops, namely by flooding the field or directing water down dirt rows where they soak into the plants’ roots.

Most of the canals and ditches are unlined and uncovered, and have been that way since they were built over a century ago. Many of them leak, some prolifically, their fugitive water blanketing the beige-gray earth with grass and nourishing cottonwoods, feral apricot and plum trees, sunflowers, willows, cosmos, reeds, sweet peas, milkweed, and cattails — along with a host of fauna that depend on those plants.

The intentional and accidental irrigation combine to form an irregular, pastoral patchwork of relative lushness amid the arid landscape of the kind that can be found in northern New Mexico, where a network of acequias irrigate long, rock-lined fields, or McElmo Canyon, where voluptuous pink sandstone rises up from a sea of emerald alfalfa. These places, where the cultivated and feral and wild collide, evoke the Provence of Jean Giono’s novels.

These are artificial landscapes, colonial ones, even, created by damming rivers and diverting their waters away from the fish and aquatic life in the streams and throwing off the natural balance of things. They rely heavily on inefficiencies in the system, from leaky laterals and ditches to flood-irrigation runoff. But they are, to my eye, lovely nonetheless, and contrast favorably with the more efficient farming areas, where high-tech irrigation systems deliver every drop of water to the linearly planted crops in laser-leveled fields.

And yet, because of math and water laws and compacts and the need to devote every drop of the shrinking Colorado River to “beneficial uses,” the character of these landscapes is likely doomed. It won’t happen next month or even next year, but over time. Nor will the lands be dried up altogether: In places like the North Fork the ditches — at least the ones with senior water rights — will continue to deliver water to the fields.

But more and more, those old leaky ditches will be upgraded, lined with concrete or other impermeable materials, or even put into pipes so that all of the water goes to those who hold the rights to that water, not to evaporation or the accidental ecosystems that have sprung up along the ditches’ banks. The farmers, too, may be forced or incentivized to become more efficient, replacing the flood irrigation with sprinklers or drip lines. Some will be paid to not irrigate at all. Most of the open ditches like the ones my cousins and I held stick-boat races in on my grandparents’ Animas Valley farm will be gone, along with the runoff of the kind that spilled from their corn and alfalfa fields to fill the cattail- and willow-tangled slough down below.

It is this loss that the woman in Paonia is mourning. It is heartbreaking. And it’s something I think about every time I write about the Colorado River and the looming crisis it and the communities and industries that rely on it face in the not-so-distant future.

If the crisis could only be solved — and the needed cuts in consumption made — based on our values alone, things would certainly be a lot easier. There would likely be fairly wide agreement that we should fallow the golf courses and drain the swimming pools before drying up the leaky-ditch wetlands and leaving the red-winged blackbird homeless. Farmers might join me in calling for tearing out thirsty turf lawns from Denver to San Diego, implementing progressive water rates to stem gluttony, and putting hard limits on household water use — if it meant keeping the sprinklers flowing to food crops, including alfalfa and other forage. After all, I value cheese and ice cream and green-chile burgers over the Sultan of Brunei or Miriam Adelson, who guzzled 12 million and 10 million gallons of water, respectively, last year to keep their Las Vegas estates green.

Ah, and yes, if all of this could be solved by prioritizing cuts based on values, alone, the Family Farm Alliance would have no reason to accuse me of “demonizing” alfalfa and other livestock forage crops (though I imagine the golf groupies would get me for vilifying them). But, alas, it’s just not that simple. Why? Because even the most lofty values are trumped by the cold, hard math.

MATH

The pertinent numbers in the equation include:

• 16.5 million acre-feet: Total human-related consumptive use of Colorado River water in 2020. This means all of the water that was withdrawn from the river and not put back into it, including reservoir evaporation. It does not include the 2.8 million acre-feet consumed via riparian and wetland evapotranspiration, nor does it include the 1.7 million acre-feet of water use from the Gila River, a tributary to the Colorado.
• 14.5 million acre-feet: The Colorado River’s median “natural flow” at the Lee Ferry stream gage, which is the official dividing line between the Upper Basin and Lower Basin, from 1906 through 2023. This is used as a measure of how much water is in the Colorado River, since downstream tributaries are relatively insignificant.
• 12.4 million acre-feet: The Colorado River’s average natural flow at Lee Ferry from 2000 through 2023.

This leaves us a few options for the big math problem that needs solving:

• The optimistic equation (assumes the last 20 years was an anomaly and the river will go back to its old-normal flow soon, i.e. the median for 1906-2023):
  • 14.5 million – 16.5 million = 2 million acre-feet deficit
• The new-normal equation (assumes the next few decades will look like the most recent couple of decades — which is to say a megadrought) :
  • 12.4 million – 16.5 million = 4.1 million acre-feet deficit

• The pessimistic (realistic?) equation (assumes human-caused climate change will continue to deplete the river):
  • 10.4 million – 16.5 million = 6.1 million acre-feet deficit

Which is to say … we’re screwed no matter how you juggle the numbers! Sorry, that’s not very solution-oriented is it? No matter how you cut it, though, the Colorado River budget is running a massive deficit and has been for a while. That’s why Lake Powell, the Upper Basin’s savings account, has been shrinking and now is less than 40% full — even after a couple of decent winters. A couple of consecutive new-normal winters could bring the reservoir down below minimum power pool, shutting down the hydropower turbines and potentially setting the scene for a mega plumbing disaster.

While it’s highly unlikely that the Colorado River’s flows will increase enough to fill Lakes Powell and Mead to capacity anytime soon, it’s not impossible. During the extraordinarily wet and snowy four years between 1983 and 1986, nearly 80 million acre-feet of water ran into Lake Powell — which should be enough to fill both reservoirs and still deliver adequate flows downstream. If it happens, great! It would be foolish and potentially catastrophic to bet on a repeat, however.

That means the users of the river must erase the deficit by cutting anywhere from 2 million to 6 million acre-feet of consumption annually. The big question, and one that the basins and their member states have been debating, is: Where will those cuts come from? I’m not going to get into the many layers of these negotiations here, as that’s not the purpose of this essay, which is a bit of a thought experiment. Suffice it to say it’s complicated, and made more so by glaring errors and injustices committed when the Colorado River Compact was originally crafted.

Let’s say we’re going to make these cuts based on values. Obviously everyone has different values, so we’ll just go with those expressed at the Q&A session I lead this piece with, which can be summed up as prioritizing rural farmland, food crops, and the artificial wetlands that can be found in the North Fork Valley over urban lawns, golf courses, and billionaires’ estates.

Where better to begin than Las Vegas? Let’s pull up some water user data and, holy cow! Look at those numbers. The Vegas resorts and the rich sure know how to use water:

The Venetian and Mandalay Bay resorts each use more than 500 million gallons of water per year. Meanwhile the top residential water users are mostly billionaires: 99 Spanish Gate Dr. — which goes through 12 million gallons per year — was owned by the Sultan of Brunei until tech-giant Jeff Berns purchased the 37,500 sf mansion for $25 million. Other top water gluttons include Miriam Adelson — a top Trump donor — and UFC CEO Dana White. The average Las Vegas household uses about 120,000 gallons per year, though newer, more efficient homes use far less.

When folks start throwing $25 million around for an unfinished house is when you know it’s time for a wealth tax. And when they use 100 times as much water as the average home, it’s also time for a new, progressive water rate structure, that incentivizes conservation and punishes gluttony. Las Vegas already has something like this, but the rates in the upper tiers are too low to be meaningful; they need to be so high that this kind of profligacy will sting even a billionaire’s pocketbook. Hell, better yet, why not just fallow these properties and xeriscape them?

When the numbers are added up, you’ve got:

• 227,243,000 gallons Top 100 Las Vegas residential water users’ combined consumption in 2023.
• 3,774,780,000 gallons Top 10 Las Vegas non-residential water users’ combined consumption in 2023.

Wow, so by shutting down just these folks, we could save 4 billion gallons of water, or … 12,275 acre-feet? Oh, that’s not as much as it seemed.

So how about we go to other cities and tear out turf, mandate low-flow appliances, ban lawn watering and swimming pools. I mean, if you could get Scottsdale and St. George residents to cut back to Tucson or Los Angeles per capita water levels, you’d make some more huge cuts.

You could save millions of gallons through that effort, which is great. The problem is, this problem requires bigger thinking — you’ve got to make multiple cuts in the tens of billions of gallons range for it to make a significant difference. Once again, math, the ultimate buzz killer, raises its ugly head. See, as noble as all of these efforts might be, there just isn’t enough overall water use in the urban sector to come up with all the necessary cuts. You could drain the pools, dry up the lawns, seal up the Bellaggio fountains — hell, even shut off the massive pumps that convey water from Lake Mead to the Las Vegas metro area altogether — and you would still need to come up with at least another 1.6 million acre-feet of cuts. Entirely cutting off all of the Basin’s cities and industrial applications wouldn’t even get you to 4 million acre-feet of cuts. But boy, it sure would be interesting to watch — from afar.

To conclude Part I, some charts that drive the point home:

The math and the charts in Part I of this essay are discouraging to many of us because they mess with our value system. There’s just not enough water in the places that we feel should be cut, for moral or practical or aesthetic reasons, to make much of a difference. I mean, sure, halting evaporation from the reservoirs would get you about 2 million acre-feet in cuts. But the only way to do that is to come up with a couple 250-square-mile swimming pool covers — one for Lake Mead and one for Lake Powell. Or you could just take down the dams, but I won’t wade into that one right yet.

The math dictates that the biggest user, irrigated agriculture, is going to have to make the biggest cuts. And the crop that uses the most water? Alfalfa — by a mile. About 6.3 million acre-feet of Colorado River water is consumed to irrigate alfalfa and other hay crops.

If all irrigation of alfalfa and hay was stopped, it would put more than 6 million acre-feet of water back into the Colorado River system. But it would also wreak havoc — and conflict with the law and values.

This isn’t news to Land Desk readers; I’ve been pointing it out for a long time. And it’s this simple observation, this acknowledgment of the math, that has the Family Farm Alliance demonizing me for supposedly demonizing alfalfa. Apparently those folks would rather we journalists ignore these numbers and fuzzy-up the math, make some insignificant cuts here and there while continuing to send gobs of water to hay fields, and continue drawing down the reservoirs until there’s no savings account left. Then, when we have another year like 2002 or 2021, when there were 10 million acre-feet deficits, the entire region will devolve into chaos. Seems like a bad idea to me.

Alfalfa has a lot of uses: It can be made into pellets for rabbits and other animals, it is a good cover crop that retains soil nutrients, it can be fed to horses, and you can even go down to your health food store and pay a small fortune for some alfalfa extract, which is apparently full of nutrients. But mostly it goes to livestock, especially cattle.

Over the past five decades, the Colorado River states have grown more and more alfalfa. There are a number of reasons for this. Alfalfa is a valuable crop that is relatively drought tolerant, it can be harvested a couple of times each summer even in cold climates — more than that in southern California — and it’s a perennial, meaning you don’t have to till the soil every year.

But the main driver is demand, and demand is growing because people want more beef, right? Well, yeah, maybe. But — to the chagrin of my vegetarian friends — beef is not the primary culprit, it’s the world’s ever-growing hunger for dairy. Because of the specific nutrients in alfalfa, it is favored by dairy operators: At least 75% of the 3 million tons of alfalfa grown annually in California goes to milk cows. Which is to say that my ice-cream and cheese habit is playing an even bigger role in draining the Colorado River dry than my green-chile hamburger. The growing demand is regional: Over the past several decades there has the astronomical rise in the number of large-scale dairies in the West, especially in California and New Mexico.

There’s also been an explosion of demand on the global level, as other nations that once mostly relied on goat or sheep milk have developed a taste for cow’s milk. That has led to a rise in alfalfa exports from Western states — hitting over $1 billion in value in 2022. However, exports still represent a small proportion of total production.

So, that’s the math. And it seems to suggest the Colorado River’s problems all could be solved if growing alfalfa stopped, right?

Maybe. But I kind of doubt it. This isn’t about a crop. It’s about water consumption.

This is where the law comes in and screws with both the math-oriented and the value-oriented solutions.

I mean, first of all, I doubt that a state or federal decree banning alfalfa growing would fly in the courts unless alfalfa was determined to be an illicit drug or something. And even if you could pull that one off, it wouldn’t accomplish much.

Alfalfa tends to be thirstier than other crops, but not significantly so. It uses such a huge percentage of Colorado River mostly because there’s so much of it and because of its long growing season. That means that if you were to replace all the alfalfa with other crops, you wouldn’t necessarily cut water consumption by that much. Maybe the new crop would use less water, but would the farmers then simply return the surplus water to the river? Not likely. Probably they would just grow more of the new crop and, ultimately, consume the same amount of water.

The only thing that would work is cutting off irrigation to all of those alfalfa fields, no matter what is being grown there. That would certainly be effective, though it would probably lead to a Dust Bowl, would make Ben & Jerry’s ice cream — and a lot of other food products — more expensive, and would wreck economies. And legally? I think not.

Western water law can be distilled down to one sentence: First in time, first in right. It is an almost sacred concept among Western water users, akin to the first lines of the U.S. Constitution or even the Bible.

It means, in the simplest of terms, that whoever appropriates a set amount of water for “beneficial use” first has the most senior rights to it1. When there’s not enough water in the river to fulfill all of the rights, then the senior users can make a “call,” forcing the most junior rights-holders to take the first cuts, and it goes on down the line from there. These rights are usually for a particular ditch or diversion, not an individual user. In the North Fork Valley, for example, the Farmers Ditch has some of the most senior rights, with 1896 appropriation and 1901 adjudication dates; individual property owners own shares of that ditch and the water in it. During dry years, Farmers Ditch is usually among the last to lose water. But if a downstream, more senior user were to put a legitimate call on the river, Farmers Ditch might also be shut down. These water rights are administered state-by-state.

If you have two shares of the Farmers Ditch, then you have no incentive to use less than that. If you conserve, the surplus water will simply keep going down the ditch to the next person. In fact, in most states there’s a “use it or lose it” provision. Though rarely enforced, and revoked in some places, it is still a dominant mindset; I’ve seen property owners pull their full share of water out of the ditch just to let it run down their driveway, perhaps because they just want what’s “theirs,” or maybe because they worry about losing their rights due to non-use.

The largest single water user on the Colorado River, which happens to have some of the most senior water rights, is the Imperial Irrigation District in southern California. They grow a lot of crops, but their primary one is alfalfa. The Colorado River Compact — and a series of compacts and court cases that ensued — adds another layer to all of this by apportioning water between the basins and the states2. Under this set of laws, California and the Imperial Irrigation District are senior, for example, to the Central Arizona Project, which conveys Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson.

In theory, the Upper Basin states and Lower Basin states are on an equal footing: Each gets 7.5 million acre-feet of water from the river. Since the Upper Basin uses less than its full allotment, it should be able to continue to use water at its current rate. But there’s one little provision in the Compact that makes that impossible, and that essentially makes the Upper Basin into the junior water rights holders. It reads:

“The States of the Upper Division will not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75,000,000 acre-feet for any period of ten consecutive years … .” 

There are conflicting interpretations over the clause, “will not cause … to be depleted.” But for now let’s go with the predominant, historic understanding of the whole sentence, which is that an average of 7.5 million acre-feet must come out of Lake Powell, the Upper Basin’s savings account, and pass Lee Ferry each year to be “delivered” to the Lower Basin’s savings account, i.e. Lake Mead.

This is no problem during an especially wet decade, or even during a dry one when Lake Powell is fairly full. But a string of drought years now, when the savings account has been depleted, could theoretically force the Upper Basin to either violate the provision, or to make some seriously painful cuts to comply.

So if values are trumped by math, and math is trumped by law, how the hell are we supposed to make this all work?

All I know for sure is there are no easy answers. We all can eat less cheese and ice cream and beef, we can install low-flow shower-heads and tear out those turf lawns. Cities can limit the size of or ban swimming pools and golf courses, implement tiered and progressive water rates that incentivize efficiency and hit gluttons in the pocketbook, and ban ornamental turf. They can embark on major leak-detecting and repair programs (it’s amazing how much water is lost to leaky pipes). And they can recycle water by treating it and reusing it for, at the very least, irrigation. With today’s treatment technology “toilet-to-tap” is just fine, and is not as gross as it sounds.

Federal and state governments can lease water from farmers for a year or so, paying them to shut off their headgates so the water stays in the river, instead. And they can incentivize folks to put less water on their crops, be it alfalfa or something else. That’s happening in the Imperial Valley, where the federal government is paying farmers some $700 million to stop irrigating alfalfa for 60 days this summer3. The effort is expected to save about 700,000 acre-feet of water, or twice the amount southern Nevada uses each year, through 2026, according to an excellent story by the Desert Sun’s Janet Wilson. Already the effects are being seen, with the IID forecast to pull their lowest amount of water from the Colorado River since 1941, according to John Fleck at his Inkstain blog. That should leave more water for the savings account-reservoirs, and for the river, itself.

As Wilson points out, there are drawbacks to the plan: irrigation runoff from the Imperial Valley fields runs into the Salton Sea. Without as much of it, the waterbody will shrink, exposing an additional 13,000 acres of lakebed, which is bad for the sea and for the air, as it will liberate a lot of pesticide-laden dust that will be picked up by the wind and dropped on nearby communities. The savings are large, but still not large enough. Plus, what happens when the funding runs out?

And, finally, the small ditch companies and farmers, including the ones in the North Fork or McElmo Canyon, are going to have to get more efficient. This will probably mean lining some laterals, piping some ditches, replacing flood irrigation with low-evaporation sprinklers or drip lines, and replacing water-intensive crops with ones that can get by on less irrigation. My question is how can this be done without destroying the distinct, post-irrigation character of these places? Could you leave some leaks to allow water to flow to some of the artificial wetlands? Could you lease water from the guy who allows the ditch to run down his driveway unused and irrigate the cottonwoods, willows, and milkweed? I’d love to hear readers’ ideas on this and, especially, examples of places where efficiency measures have worked to save water — without killing the character.

It’s true that the water saved would likely reach California, eventually, and might even be used to water a lawn or irrigate an alfalfa field. But in the many miles in between the two places, it would also add a little more water to the river for the fish and for boaters and for all of us. Maybe values, math, and Western water law can align.

1

You may be thinking that the tribal nations should have the most senior water rights. And you’re correct, on a moral and ethical level and even legal level. The Winters Doctrine determined that tribal nations have the right to the amount of water necessary to support its “practically irrigable acreage,” and that the date is tied to when the reservation was established. Many Southwestern tribes therefore have 1868 rights to large amounts of water, putting them into a senior position. But not all of those rights have been adjudicated and they don’t always apply in a practical sense. For example, the Ute Mountain Ute tribe has 1868 rights on the Dolores River, but they actually get the water via the Dolores Project, which has a 1968 right, which is junior to other users. That means when the cuts come, the tribe gets cut off sooner than others.

2

There were two major flaws with the Compact: a. It allocated more water than was actually in the river, even back then. And, b. It basically assumed that sovereign tribal nations were — in terms of water use, at least — subdivisions of states. Which is to say that any tribal water rights would come out of the respective states’ portion under the Compact. This is wrong and dumb, because tribal nations are on equal footing with states, and they negotiate water rights with the federal government, not the states.