This is an installment of the Landline, a monthly newsletter from High Country News about land, water, wildlife, climate and conservation in the Western United States. Sign up to get it in your inbox.
In 2018, Brian Richter, a hydrologist and water sustainability expert, hooked a camper trailer to the car, and he and his wife embarked on a road trip up the spine of the Rocky Mountains. It was one of the driest years in a two-decade-long regional megadrought, and the entire Southwest was parched. Wildfires raged from British Columbia to Colorado, while reservoir levels continued to plummet.
As Richter traveled through the West’s uplands, he saw all the expected signs of drought: Tinder-dry forests, diminished streamflows, stressed vegetation and a ubiquitous pall of smoke that irritated eyes and lungs and blotted out the view. But he also noticed something that struck him: Nearly every valley bottom was still relatively verdant, even lush, despite the desiccating conditions.
The reason, of course, was irrigation. A major part of the settler-colonial project has been a determined effort to harness the West’s rivers and streams to raise crops and support a growing population. This has not only succeeded, it has altered much of the landscape, establishing a stark dividing line between irrigated and non-irrigated lands. “It’s part of our aesthetic as Westerners,” Richter said.
While golf courses, turf and booming desert cities gulp up a lot of water, the lion’s share of the West’s water still goes to growing crops and turning rural valleys green. Richter got to wondering: Precisely where was all that water going, and how were the different uses affecting various ecosystems? So he set out with a team of researchers to deconstruct the drivers of Western water consumption.
They found that 86% of the water consumed in the Western U.S. is used to irrigate crops. Everything else — from energy development to swimming pools to Las Vegas’ elaborate casino fountains — gets by on the remaining 14%. In the Colorado River Basin itself, things are marginally more balanced, with agriculture consuming about 79% of the water. Most of that, however, is used to grow food for cattle — alfalfa, hay and grass.
“We were quite surprised to see how large a proportion was going to cattle crops,” Richter told me in a Zoom interview earlier this month. The findings were published in Nature Sustainability in 2020. The article’s title — “Water Scarcity and Fish Imperilment Driven by Beef Production” — grabbed media attention and sparked many a news story that blamed the Colorado River’s demise on our appetite for cheeseburgers and steaks and the hay necessary to create them.
This spring, Richter and his team published an update of sorts, this time focusing entirely on the Colorado River. It’s the first-ever complete accounting of the system, encompassing water use from the Gila River, a tributary in New Mexico and Arizona, and all the consumptive uses[1] of the Colorado’s water, including reservoir evaporation and riparian and wetland evapotranspiration, as well as out-of-basin exports to places like Denver and the Rio Grande watershed, and water use in Mexico.
Sadly, this more complete tabulation exonerates neither bovines or beefeaters. Still, though the percentages going to cows and alfalfa farmers didn’t change significantly, it did provide more detail on those uses. Findings included:
- Irrigated agriculture is by far the dominant consumer of Colorado River water, accounting for 52% of overall consumption (which includes reservoir evaporation and riparian and wetland evapotranspiration) and 74% of direct human consumption.
- Cattle-feed crops (alfalfa and other hay) consume more Colorado River water than any other crop category, accounting for 32% of all water from the basin; 46% of direct water consumption; and 62% of all agricultural water consumed.
- Cattle-feed crops consume 90% of all the agricultural irrigation water in the Upper Basin — three times more than is consumed by municipal, commercial and industrial uses combined.
- 19% of the water supports the natural environment through riparian and wetland vegetation evapotranspiration along river courses.
This accounting can help guide water managers in making the estimated 2-to-4 million acre-feet of cuts from the total annual consumption necessary to stabilize reservoir levels. Even larger reductions will be required to bring water consumption into balance with availability, as climate change-exacerbated drought and heating continues to further diminish the Colorado River. And yet, so far, the Upper Basin and Lower Basin states aren’t even close to agreeing on how those cuts should be made, or who should bear the burden.
Alfalfa and other cattle-feed crops consume 90% of all the agricultural irrigation water in the Colorado River’s Upper Basin.
The Lower Basin states — California, Nevada and Arizona — use far more water than the Upper Basin states. But when drought years shrink the Colorado River, the Upper Basin is forced to cut consumption under the 1922 Colorado River Compact. Therefore, the Upper Basin’s representatives argue, the Lower Basin should bear the burden of future cuts. The Lower Basin is willing to accept 1.5 million acre-feet of cuts, but beyond that, it wants its upstream counterparts to share the load. That amounts to an 814-billion-gallon gap between the competing proposals.
There’s a tendency to believe that rapidly growing desert cities — and ostentatiously profligate water-users, such as golf courses and lawns and swimming pools — ought to bear the burden of the cuts. But even if you cut off all the pumps in Lake Mead that serve Las Vegas, it wouldn’t make much of a difference. Southern Nevada’s consumptive Colorado River water use is about one-tenth of the Imperial Irrigation District’s in Southern California, where monumental amounts of water go to growing alfalfa and other food crops. And even as its population soars, Las Vegas is using less and less water, a phenomenon Richter terms “decoupling.”
“The only dial we have to work with is irrigated farming,” Richter said. His accounting would seem to offer an easy out: Just stop growing alfalfa and fallow the fields, or shift to less water-intensive crops. But it’s not quite that easy.
Alfalfa is a paradoxical crop: It’s thirstier than other crops, yet also relatively drought-tolerant. It doesn’t need to be replanted every year, meaning that less tilling of the soil is required. It can be harvested by machine, so it doesn’t require a lot of increasingly hard-to-find human labor. And it’s always in demand: Though beef cattle numbers are on the decline in some Western states, the dairy industry is burgeoning — and alfalfa is important for dairy operations.
Rather than reducing alfalfa acreage or production, some Colorado River Basin farmers, especially in Utah and Arizona, have begun growing more since the megadrought began. The federal government has forked out millions of dollars to pay farmers to stop growing alfalfa, or at least to stop irrigating their fields. But that can only achieve a fraction of the needed cuts, and it is hardly sustainable over the long term. And, by reducing overall supply, it drives up prices for hay, incentivizing other farmers to switch to alfalfa rather than away from it.
Besides, shutting down farmers’ ditches and spigots would imperil those emerald ribbons of green that curl through the West’s dry rocky valleys. Agricultural irrigation greens up more than crops: The farm fields’ runoff and leaky canals also nurture willows and wetlands as well as the wildlife that depends on them.
It’s quite the quandary, and it’s hard to see a clear path to sustainability. What is clear is that massive changes are long overdue, and those changes will alter the Western landscape, perhaps returning it to something that resembles the days before industrial-scale irrigation began.
“It’s really intriguing to me to think about how the Western landscape is going to have to change,” Richter said. “What we’re talking about is not unlike the fossil fuel industry, especially coal, as it goes into decline. The ramifications for regional and local economies and the culture and social fabric of communities are even going to be greater, especially for agricultural communities.
“It’s going to be an interesting decade ahead,” he added. “And I sure wouldn’t want to be one of those negotiators on the Colorado River.”
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[1] Consumptive use is the amount of water withdrawn from the system and not returned to it. The Southern Nevada Water Authority, for example, withdraws about 450,000 acre-feet from Lake Mead annually — far more than the 300,000 acre-feet it’s entitled to under the Colorado River Compact. But it also returns more than 200,000 acre-feet in the form of treated effluent, giving it a consumptive use of 223,670 acre-feet in 2022.
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