Feds want to pay farmers to leave fields unplanted to fight drought in the West

WASHINGTON. Tom Brandi, an alfalfa grower in California’s Imperial Valley, says farmers dependent on the shrinking Colorado River can do more to conserve water and use it more efficiently. That’s why he’s installed water sensors and monitors to prevent waste from nearly two-thirds of his 3,000 acres.

But one practice that is off-limits to Brandi is leaving the fields unsown to conserve water that would otherwise irrigate the crops. This would save a lot of water, Brandi said, but economically threaten both farmers and rural communities.

“It’s not very productive because you just don’t farm,” Brandi said.

Many Western farmers feel the same way, despite growing awareness that some fallow work must be part of the solution to an increasingly desperate drought in the West, where the Colorado River serves 40 million people.

“Given the amount of water that is used for agriculture in the Colorado River system, you can’t stabilize the system without reducing agriculture,” said Tom Buschatske, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources. “It’s just math.”

The US Bureau of Reclamation is considering paying farmers to stand idle in some fields, many of which are in California’s vast Imperial Valley and Arizona’s Yuma County, where most of the country’s winter vegetables are grown and depend on the river. The funding will come from $4 billion in drought relief Western aid under the Inflation Reduction Act.

Federal officials and major irrigators have been negotiating for months. Neither side disclosed the details of the talks or how much money is being requested or offered.

US Senator John Hickenlooper, Democrat of Colorado, said the parry should be on the table. The challenge, he said, is to determine fair payments when farmers cultivate land of varying quality and grow crops of varying value.

“Water in some parts of the Colorado River Basin costs more than water in other parts. And somehow the Bureau of Reclamation has to address this issue in a fair or at least perceived way,” Hickenlooper said in an interview. .

Agriculture uses 70% to 80% of the Colorado River’s water, and ideas to reduce that have long been controversial. The farmers and irrigators who serve them say their use of the water is justified, as almost the entire country is fed on produce grown in the region, as well as the meat of cattle fed on local herbs.

Water officials from cities and other states with less demand from farms say farming’s high water use allows wasteful farming practices to continue even as water becomes scarce. They note that Western water law, which favors older users, allows farmers with such rights to grow starvation crops in the transformed desert even as key Colorado-fed reservoirs dip to record lows.

Tina Shields, water manager for the Imperial Irrigation District, advises farmers to prioritize saving water through efficiency gains such as drip irrigation, choosing less water-intensive crops, and using water sensors to reduce waste. But she acknowledged fallowing should be part of the equation as states heed the federal government’s call to cut their use by 15% to 30%.

“As much as we love to soar,” Shields said, joking that the practice is known as the “F-word here,” she said it would take some water to keep the extra 250,000 acre feet of water in the county. said it would save – or about 8% of his allotment from the Colorado River. (An acre foot of water is enough to flood one acre of land with a foot of water, and about that much water is used by two or three American households a year.)

In the Imperial Valley, leaving fields idle to conserve water is not a new idea.

For 15 years, the Imperial Irrigation District has run fallow aging programs as part of a historic 2003 water transfer agreement with San Diego. The programs expired in 2017. Nearly 300,000 acres of farmland were turned fallow, saving 1.8 million acre-feet of water and costing $161 million in payments to farmers, according to the county.

The Colorado River is now in a worse state, but Imperial Valley has memories of this program. And the farmers want much more than they were paid then.

Larry Cox, who has been growing food and herbs in the Imperial Valley for decades, said he was idle for several hundred of his 4,000 acres at the time. He used these payments to buy sprinkler pipes and other equipment to make his irrigation systems more efficient. But he also laid off 5% to 10% of his workforce of irrigators, farm workers and tractor drivers.

Today, he worries about the impact of fumes on rural communities. In addition to potential economic losses for farmers, businesses that supply them with tires, fertilizers, gas and other needs have suffered.

“This is detrimental to our community as a whole,” he said.

Many farmers also fear that once the land is taken out of circulation, it will no longer be cultivated. Part of the fear comes from the way water rights work in the West, and also from the fact that parrying could degrade soil quality and make it harder for the land to return to production later.

Paul Brierley, executive director of the Hume Center of Excellence for Desert Agriculture at the University of Arizona, said the disruption to the farm has consequences.

“Farming is no different than any other business,” Brierley said. “They have invested capital, they have employees, they have markets for their products. You can’t just farm part of the time and not the rest of the time.”

A failed bid from Yuma County farmers last year showed just how difficult it is for federal officials and the farmers they target to strike a deal. In this case, the farmers offered the government to pay them about $1,500 per acre-foot of water left unused for four years, but the deal went nowhere.

The measure of how much Reclamation is willing to pay was a separate offer made to farmers in the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada for $400 per acre foot.

Bushatzke said farmers in Arizona felt that even a $1,500 offer was lower than they deserved based on what they do with the produce, not to mention how important it is to consumers, he said.

“This is definitely a business, but they also believe that what they grow there in Yuma is of great benefit to the entire nation,” Busacke said.

Since farmers in the Imperial Valley have preferential rights to the Colorado River, it’s almost impossible to ban blackouts there without a lawsuit.

“We can’t force our manufacturers to get involved,” Shields said. “We have to provide them with a business solution.”