The Alfalfa Fallacy

There are no "obvious" solutions to the Colorado River crisis

Idle sprinkler system in southwestern Colorado. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

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 piece on 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.

Data Dump: The alfalfa question

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.

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🐟 Colorado River Chronicles 💧

Today’s vocabulary term is: Present Perfected Rights, a term you may be hearing a lot more of in coming months.

Article VIII of the Colorado River Compact states:

Present perfected rights to the beneficial use of waters of the Colorado River System are unimpaired by this compact.

Later, the Boulder Canyon Project Act of 1928 decreed that the “dam and reservoir” of the title (which would become Hoover Dam and Lake Mead) shall be used for the “satisfaction of present perfected rights … .”

That’s fine and good, but what are present perfected rights, or PPRs? The Compact never says what that term means. In fact, it wasn’t clearly defined until the Supreme Court laid it out in its 1964 Arizona v. California decision, a key document in the Law of the River:

‘Perfected right’ means a water right acquired in accordance with State law, which right has been exercised by the actual diversion of a specific quantity of water that has been applied to a defined area of land or to definite municipal or industrial works …

Clear as mud, right?

Generally speaking, PPRs are the most senior rights on the Colorado River, they predate the Colorado River Compact, and are the last rights subject to curtailment in times of shortage. They are the “first” in the “first in time, first in right” summation of the prior appropriation doctrine, which is the foundation of Western water law.

Arizona v. California goes on to say that “in any year where there is fewer than 7.5 million acre-feet available for use in California, Nevada, and Arizona, the Secretary of the Interior must first supply water to the PPRs in order of priority, regardless of state lines.” Similarly, the Upper Basin’s PPRs will be the last to be cut if curtailments are necessary to meet its non-depletion/minimum-delivery obligation to the Lower Basin.

The Supreme Court required the Lower Basin to submit a list of its PPRs, and here they are from the document itself as submitted in 1967. Some of these, especially the tribal rights, were updated and added to later on.

The first set is for tribal nations in the Lower Basin only:

These are the top six non-tribal PPRs in the Lower Basin by order of size of diversion. There are many more smaller PPRs that are not listed here:

🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

I’m not sure if I’ve featured this one before, but if so, it’s worth re-upping due to its heightened relevance this year. It’s the Open ET mapping tool, with ET standing for evapotranspiration. It uses satellite imagery to calculate evapotranspiration from individual fields, which is an indicator of how much irrigation is being used and what crop is being grown. Hovering over a field will bring up a chart showing ET for each month, the acreage, and the crop type.

The screenshot below is of the Montezuma Valley between Dolores and Cortez. The fields, a vast majority of which are planted with alfalfa or other hay crops, are irrigated from the Dolores River and McPhee Reservoir. Try it out here: https://etdata.org/

1. Source: Imperial County Agricultural Commissioner