Throughout the Colorado River Basin, ongoing drought is pushing agricultural technology to its limits.
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Throughout the Colorado River Basin, ongoing drought is pushing agricultural technology to its limits.
November 6, 2024
Irrigated farmland in the desert of the Imperial Valley. (Photo credit: Steve Proehl, Getty Images)
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Just north of the U.S.-Mexico border, California’s Imperial Valley is both a desert and an agricultural wonder. Bordered by sand dunes and barren mountains, the region receives less than three inches of rainfall per year, 27 inches less than the U.S. average. From June to September, high temperatures here often exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit. By most measures, the Imperial Valley is not a great place to grow food. Yet carrots, cauliflower, sweet onions, honeydew, broccoli, and alfalfa all grow here, incongruous crops that spread across half a million acres of cultivated land.
Ronald Leimgruber farms 3,500 of those acres. Given the lack of rain in the region, Leimgruber says he has “about seven” different irrigation projects on his farm, where he grows an array of crops, including carrots, lettuce, watermelon, and hay. Leimgruber, a third-generation farmer whose grandparents helped build the All American Canal, estimates he has spent millions of dollars on various water conservation techniques over the years. Some of that spending was subsidized by the federal government; some came out of his own pocket. He’s not sure it was worth it, especially because the government does not fund the upkeep of new systems.
“The jury’s still out,” he says. “Short term, there’s no maintenance. Long term, these things don’t last. Technology changes. They get worn out. We get a government grant to get them put in, and they look good at first, and then all of a sudden, we have to operate them.”
“I use about 7,000 gallons of diesel per field per year. . . . And everybody says that’s real efficient. Well, it is efficient around water, but that’s the only thing it’s efficient on.”
Leimgruber has implemented a number of projects—including drip, linear, and solid set irrigation systems, plus more—all designed to improve efficiency. But many of these drought mitigation techniques are costing him tens of thousands of dollars each year to maintain. And they are less efficient than they seem.
“I use about 7,000 gallons of diesel per field per year,” he says. “The system itself has 1,000 plastic nozzles and regulators and hoses. It has 35 rubber tires on it. It has 15 electric motors on it, a 300-horsepower diesel engine blaring away, emitting carbon into the atmosphere. And everybody says that’s real efficient. Well, it is efficient around water, but that’s the only thing it’s efficient on.”
Illustration by Nhatt Nichols. Source: “Review and Synopsis of Natural and Human Controls on Fluvial Channel Processes in the Arid West,” by John J. Field and Robert W. Lichvar.
Leimgruber and countless farmers like him are the beneficiaries of massive government efforts to make the arid western United States more habitable.
This level of agriculture was not possible in the Imperial Valley until the construction of the Alamo Canal, also known as the Imperial Canal, in 1901, which diverted water from the Colorado River. Now, climate change is challenging these efforts, and forcing an unsettling question: On a warming planet, how much tech will it take to farm an increasingly hostile environment?
In the desert, getting water to crops often requires irrigation. The USDA’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) provides both technical and financial assistance to farmers for conserving ground and surface water, reducing soil erosion, and mitigating drought through increased irrigation efficiency.
Critics, however, say these programs don’t address the bigger picture, and may not be of much help as the climate shifts weather patterns, precipitation, and temperature. In June, the nonprofit Environmental Working Group (EWG) published a report admonishing the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a lack of programs to help farmers to make major changes.
Farmers received more than $6 billion from the USDA from 2017 to 2023, the report notes, including $521.7 million from EQIP (and $5.6 billion in payments from the agency’s crop insurance program). California and Colorado alone received more than $1 billion. The EWG estimates that only around 30 percent of EQIP funding goes toward helping farmers reduce their emissions and adapt to climate change.
“Conservation dollars spent to update irrigation systems are funds that aren’t spent helping Western farmers adapt and become more resilient to climate change,” EWG’s Midwest Director Anne Schechinger says in the report. Instead, she writes, EQIP funding needs to help farmers in the Colorado River region better adapt. “[Funding] should focus more on paying farmers to switch to more drought-tolerant crops, to incorporate conservation crop rotations and to adopt other conservation practices that make their operations more resilient to climate change.”
One tool for resiliency is the Water Adaptation Techniques Atlas (WATA), another USDA initiative, which provides an online resource for users to explore different techniques being applied in the Colorado River Basin. At the Yuma Agricultural Center at the University of Arizona, for example, a company called Desert Control is working to improve soil moisture retention by “spraying a mix of nano clay particles and water onto the soil surface.”
And along the Colorado River, the Cocopah Tribe is clearing out invasive, water-sucking plant species and replacing them with native trees. Users of the atlas can explore projects that might help them with their own water adaptation. That’s important, since the simple act of watering crops is, in much of the West, incredibly complex.
“Maybe somebody’s first thought is, well, what if we just converted to more efficient irrigation systems?” says Noah Silber-Coats, a research scientist at the USDA Southwest Climate Hub who helped create the WATA. “Well, now we’re potentially increasing the amount of water that a crop is taking up, right, and we’re reducing the return flow downstream.”
More efficient watering, in other words, could mean healthier crops and higher yields, but an increase in overall water use.
“So from the get-go, we’re kind of aware of all the tradeoffs involved in any sort of solution to water scarcity,” Silber-Coats says.
Silber-Coats acknowledges that some of the most popular crops in the West, like alfalfa, are driven by demand—not solely by subsidies—which means farmers are loath to leave them. Alfalfa is primarily used as an animal feed, and as demand for animal products increases worldwide, experts expect the alfalfa market to increase, too. And it grows well in the arid West, where there is a lot of sunshine. However, alfalfa is an incredibly thirsty crop, requiring 20 to 46 inches of water per season. In a region that receives less than three inches of rain per year, almost all of the water for alfalfa growth must come from irrigation.
“Farmers plant alfalfa because it’s the highest-margin crop they can plant,” says Ethan Orr, an agriculture and economics expert at the University of Arizona. “Say you move your alfalfa crops to somewhere like the Midwest, and you said, ‘OK, there’s a lot more water here.’ But you have less sunshine, so you’re going to get five to six cuttings, about half the productivity of [Arizona] alfalfa, and then you’re going to have to ship it here for the dairy farmers. So you’re going to create transportation costs and a large carbon footprint, because you didn’t count all of the inputs.”
Alfalfa farming in the Imperial Valley. (Photo credit: Timothy Hearsum, Getty Images)
Arizona, Nevada, and California—the lower Colorado River Basin states—have each committed to reducing their water usage by 3 million acre-feet (1 acre-foot is about 325,000 gallons) through 2026 as all the Colorado River states negotiate a new water plan amid ongoing drought. It isn’t yet clear exactly how these reductions will happen. Right now, farmers have little incentive to plant alternatives, while there are still programs, like the USDA’s, dedicated to propping up existing irrigation infrastructure.
In the Upper Colorado River Basin, the System Conservation Pilot Program pays farmers to fallow their land to conserve water. But that program is off to a rocky start, with farmers complaining of low offers for payment. Other agencies, like the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, are looking to potentially pay farmers in the Imperial Valley to fallow their land for a season.
“If you were to do anything to limit alfalfa use in Arizona, you’d probably have a farmer that would fallow one field and still plant alfalfa in the other, because the margins are so much better than some of these other crops,” Orr says.
But Schechinger argues that no amount of technical changes can keep up with the depletion rates in the Colorado River Basin.
“We know that 75 percent of the Colorado River water withdrawals go to irrigate crops, and the crops are being grown in an area that’s running out of water,” she says. “So, really, in the not-too-distant future, it’s going to be very difficult for Colorado River state farmers to farm what and how they farm today.”
Schechinger calls for a more holistic approach to water management in the region—one that involves growing different crops each year and not just improving irrigation practices. This approach also involves turning away from planting on marginal acreage that is not ideal for crops.
“When you are growing in a floodplain and you get more rain or more frequent precipitation events because of climate change, then those floodplain acres are really more vulnerable to the increased precipitation,” she says.
“In the not-too-distant future, it’s going to be very difficult for Colorado River state farmers to farm what and how they farm today.”
Orr advocates for an overhaul of the one-size-fits-all system and tailoring practices to each farm. “We need grand ideas,” he says. “I don’t want to solve a one-time problem of using less water and then not take care of the soil and let the salinity go up and let crop productivity go down.”
Tech still has a role to play, he says, including broadband infrastructure in the fields. With expanded broadband, for example, farmers can use global positioning systems and live drone monitoring to measure how thirsty certain plants are. These highly specific monitoring techniques, which have been used in U.S. agriculture since the 1990s, are known as “precision agriculture.”
“One of the issues that precision agriculture gets to is the overuse of inputs,” Orr says. “When you look at the environmental degradation, like the seepage of nitrogen fertilizer into water systems, simply having the ability to know exactly how much fertilizer and water should go on the plants is the best way to avoid that.”
When it comes to water use, precision agriculture can help farmers determine what is best for their own land—which may differ from what their neighbors need.
“[These issues are] basin-wide, but when it comes down to it, it has to be a conversation with an individual farmer,” Orr says. In his role in the extension office, he meets regularly with Arizona farmers to discuss which tools are best for their land. “Every field is different, and so I think that’s really what we have to do is study this before we do it.”
Silber-Coats hopes the WATA can help farmers and researchers begin adapting to water scarcity.
“We want to see specific action affecting water use or availability,” he said. “The atlas part of it helps us remember that context matters, and everything takes place somewhere.”
In other parts of the region, farmers are relying more on conservation techniques than on the tech of the future.
“It’s [a matter] of respecting the water that we’ve been given as a gift, and we use it as many times as we can, as efficiently as we can.”
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD), for example, pays the Quechan Tribe to forgo irrigating part of their land in the Imperial Valley. Through a pilot program, MWD pays the farmers leasing the land and the tribe up to $473 per acre. The farmers, who are both tribal and non-tribal, receive 75 percent of the payment, while the tribe receives the other 25 percent.
The Quechan used the money to contribute to a decades-long conservation project, restoring the wetlands surrounding the Colorado River. The tribe supplants pink saltcedar fronds, an invasive species that pulls water from the river, with native vegetation, including cottonwoods, willows, and honey mesquite.
In the Mojave Desert, 240 miles from the Imperial Valley, Michael Kotutwa Johnson lives and farms 11 acres on the Hopi Reservation. Johnson, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona School of Natural Resources and the Environment, dry farms with Hopi methods that do not require irrigation. These methods include wide row spacing, planting multiple seeds per hole, and planting drought-tolerant varieties of seeds.
“Our crops are suited to fit the environment,” he says. “Our seeds have been adapted for over 3,000 years to be raised with little moisture.”
For him, agricultural resilience in the West means less manipulation of the environment. “The only agriculture left in Arizona after about 20 years will be Indian agriculture,” he says, “because they do have the water rights, they do have the land.” Indigenous agriculture relies on an approach to land that is grounded in time-tested, abiding ecological principles rather than technical innovation.
“We respect the land, and we respect the impact that we can have on the ecosystem,” he says. “It’s [a matter] of respecting the water that we’ve been given as a gift, and we use it as many times as we can, as efficiently as we can.”
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