Western water: Where values, math, and the "Law of the River" collide, Part II

Part II of a two-part Data Dump and essay

Note: Here’s the second and final part of this little essay/data dump. Yeah, it’s paywalled AGAIN! I know, I know. I’ll be back next week with more good content for you free-riders. In the meantime, consider becoming a paid supporter of the Land Desk and knock down that paywall in the process.

Read Part I here.

The math and the charts in Part I of this essay are discouraging to many of us because they mess with our value system. There’s just not enough water in the places that we feel should be cut, for moral or practical or aesthetic reasons, to make much of a difference. I mean, sure, halting evaporation from the reservoirs would get you about 2 million acre-feet in cuts. But the only way to do that is to come up with a couple 250-square-mile swimming pool covers — one for Lake Mead and one for Lake Powell. Or you could just take down the dams, but I won’t wade into that one right yet.

The math dictates that the biggest user, irrigated agriculture, is going to have to make the biggest cuts. And the crop that uses the most water? Alfalfa — by a mile. About 6.3 million acre-feet of Colorado River water is consumed to irrigate alfalfa and other hay crops.

If all irrigation of alfalfa and hay was stopped, it would put more than 6 million acre-feet of water back into the Colorado River system. But it would also wreak havoc — and conflict with the law and values.

This isn’t news to Land Desk readers; I’ve been pointing it out for a long time. And it’s this simple observation, this acknowledgment of the math, that has the Family Farm Alliance demonizing me for supposedly demonizing alfalfa. Apparently those folks would rather we journalists ignore these numbers and fuzzy-up the math, make some insignificant cuts here and there while continuing to send gobs of water to hay fields, and continue drawing down the reservoirs until there’s no savings account left. Then, when we have another year like 2002 or 2021, when there were 10 million acre-feet deficits, the entire region will devolve into chaos. Seems like a bad idea to me.