WATER POLITICS

Oh dear. You’d best get your skiing in now, because it looks like the spring melt will hit a lot earlier than usual. A big heat wave is on its way to the West, with the most unseasonably warm temperatures occurring in the Southwest and Four Corners regions, further dimming hopes for a spring snowpack-bolstering miracle. This could mean that mountain snowpack in the Colorado River Basin has already peaked, which would be dire for streamflows.

My apologies for bringing you more doom and gloom climate news. At least it’s cold in Alaska, though.

And that’s topping off the warmest winter on record in the Upper Colorado River Basin.

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?? Annals of Alfalfa ?

As the Colorado River shrinks, the “simple” and “obvious” solutions to the crisis seem to multiply.

You know, it’s a lot of: “Whatchya gotta do is …. “

• “… stop watering them golf courses.”
• “… stop population growth.”
• “… keep people from moving to deserts.”
• “… shut down dem data centers!”

And then, the most common one: “ … stop raising cattle and hay in the desert.”

Kenny Torrella, who writes for Vox, brought up that last one on the social media platform Blue Sky recently:

While this fix holds more water (so to speak) than the preceding ones, it is not actually a solution — at least not a workable one.

There is only one obvious remedy for the Colorado River crisis, and that is for its collective users to consume less of the river’s water. Since irrigating alfalfa takes up a larger share of the river’s water than any other single use, it seems to follow that growing less of the crop would leave more water in the river. But this does not account for the way water law works.

Let’s imagine that California could designate alfalfa as an illicit crop and ban cultivation of it and other livestock forage crops. That would force a bunch of big farmers in the Imperial Valley — home of the largest single water user on the entire river — to tear up about 200,000 acres of water-guzzling alfalfa.

Problem solved? Not quite.

The Imperial Irrigation District has senior rights to use a buttload of Colorado River water for “beneficial use,” which in this case means agriculture. Specific farmers may decide that without alfalfa, they’ll simply throw in the towel and stop irrigating altogether. But there’s no way the irrigation district as a whole is going to stop diverting that water without some sort of compensation, because while farmers pay the irrigation district a negligible amount for water, the irrigation district gets it virtually for free. That means the district is incentivized to continue using all of the water to which it has rights, and rather than leaving it in the river, they would most likely sell it to another farmer growing another crop. The result: No net reduction in water consumption.

Torrella’s claim that alfalfa’s water use gets “almost no air time” is a little off. I’ve written about it at least a zillion times at the Land Desk and at High Country News, but many a mainstream news outlet has done the same. Even the Paris Review had a pieceon it. The reason “growing less alfalfa” doesn’t show up in talks about negotiations over the Colorado River, or as an alternative in the feds’ proposed operating plan, is not because of “agricultural exceptionalism,” but because these aren’t crop-level negotiations.

The two Colorado River basins and the feds are currently looking at the macro level, and trying to hash out which basin will take what level of cuts, how those cuts will be determined, and what if anything will be done to fend off dead pool at Glen Canyon Dam. Only when all of that is settled can the individual states in each basin duke it out over respective consumption cuts, followed by the biggest users within each state. Finally, those users can make decisions about how to use their now smaller share of water, and really just about anything goes so long as it fits the definition of “beneficial use.”

Maybe they’ll continue to grow alfalfa using less water via deficit irrigation, maybe they’ll opt for a higher-value, less water-intensive crop like broccoli, maybe they’ll use it to grow cacti, but what counts is that they’ll be taking less water out of the Colorado River, regardless.

It’s not that the alfalfaphobes are wrong; it probably is a good idea to grow less alfalfa and fewer cows in the desert. For that matter, we should fallow golf courses, restrict urban growth, and take other steps to live within our means. But what’s needed now is an agreement on drastic and immediate cuts in water consumption. What that means for alfalfa or golf courses or Arizona suburbs will be dealt with later.

Now for a little data dump re alfalfa and other irrigated crops in Imperial County, California1:

• $238,752,000: Gross value of alfalfa hay harvested in Imperial County, California, in 2024.
• 183,252: Harvested acres of alfalfa hay in 2024.
• $1,300/acre: Per-acre value of alfalfa hay harvested in 2024.
• 6 acre-feet: Approximate amount of water required to irrigate one acre of alfalfa in the Imperial Valley for a year.
• $20/acre-foot: Amount Imperial Valley farmers pay for water.
• $134,822,000: Gross value of broccoli harvested in Imperial County in 2024.
• $12,136/acre: Per-acre value of broccoli harvested in 2024.
• 3 acre-feet: Approximate amount of water required to irrigate one acre of broccoli in the Imperial Valley.
• $259,861,000: Gross value of head and leaf lettuce harvested in 2024.
• $9,012/acre: Per-acre value of head and leaf lettuce harvested in 2024.
• 2-3 acre-feet: Approximate amount of water required to irrigate one acre of lettuce in the Imperial Valley.