by John Fleck
The best estimate is that between 70 and 80 percent of the basin’s “developed” water—water turned out of the river for human use—goes to agriculture, much of that to alfalfa and other animal feed.12 In the higher-elevation states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico, colder temperatures and shorter growing seasons make animal feed by far the most suitable crops to grow in all but a handful of farming valleys. In the Lower Basin states of Arizona and California (Nevada farm acreage irrigated with Colorado River Basin water is tiny), warmer temperatures and longer growing seasons expand farmers’ options, but feed crops still take up a major portion of the irrigated land.13
An estimated 4.5 million acres of land in the US portion of the basin are irrigated at least in part with water from the Colorado River—an area the size of New Jersey. Total agricultural sales attributable to crops grown with Colorado River water were an estimated $5 billion in 2007.14
No crop meets the need for quality animal feed better than alfalfa, the “queen of forage.” Its history as a cultivated crop goes back at least 6,000 years, to the region that is today Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Kashmir. Humans were almost certainly using it as a wild crop even earlier.15 The history of alfalfa’s earliest use in the United States is murky, but it took off during the California gold rush of 1849, when it became clear that, with sunshine and irrigation water, it could be an agricultural winner.16 From the early years of irrigated agriculture in the Colorado River Basin, alfalfa has been an important crop. In 2014, Colorado River Basin farmers were growing alfalfa on 1.4 million acres of land, more than was devoted to any other crop.17 Planted once, alfalfa can produce crops over multiple years. Cut and baled more than once a summer, it is stubbornly resilient in the face of drought and is a quality feed for horses, beef cattle, and dairy cows. Yet alfalfa and pasture grass provide the lowest agricultural return on water among the West’s irrigated crops. In 2015, a University of California team estimated that vegetables and similar high-dollar crops return forty times more money per gallon of water than does alfalfa.18
And despite the low return, alfalfa uses a lot of water—some ten times as much Colorado River water as Las Vegas, by one estimate—because we eat a lot of burgers and pizza cheese, and the animals that produce them need something to eat.19 That high use and low value has made alfalfa an attractive target in the struggle over allocation of the Colorado River Basin’s water. City water users, scrambling to meet their needs in the face of scarce supplies and growing population, look at this and ask whether, in the twenty-first century, this allocation of water makes sense. “We all like farmers,” Carl Boronkay, the director of Southern California’s largest municipal water agency, said in 1991, “but there is no way people are going to be denied while farmers are spraying it on alfalfa.”20
Unfortunately for the Carl Boronkays of the world, the solution is not as simple as pronouncing that the water should be given to rich city dwellers rather than squandered on cow food. Farmers like Corky Herkenhoff have good reasons for planting alfalfa. It is relatively easy and inexpensive to grow, and provides flexibility that other crops do not. As long as meat and dairy are staples of the American diet, the alfalfa to feed our animals will be part of our agricultural mix. It is often suggested that simply switching to vegetarian diets would solve our nation’s water problems. But there is no policy lever to pull and make that happen. Most importantly, the allocation system set up a century ago gave farmers first dibs on the water—a system that has proven hard to change. We built checks and balances into our water allocation system that make it hard for someone like Boronkay to muscle in and simply grab the water away from farmers like Herkenhoff. The fact that alfalfa farmers hold more water rights than Las Vegas is proof that the old saw “water flows uphill to money” is wrong.
But if, rather than demonizing alfalfa, we embrace it, we’ll find that the crop can actually help solve our water problems. A more expansive view of alfalfa and other low-dollar crops shows they play a key role in providing the adaptive capacity we need to adjust to a changing climate and changing values about how to use water.
Alfalfa makes our water system more resilient in three important ways. The first is the crop itself, which is wonderfully adapted to drought. It is a rich and easy-to-grow source of protein for animal feed, which is what makes it so popular. Its deep roots allow it to hunker down when water is scarce. That has long made it popular in places where water supply is variable. If the snowpack this year means you can’t irrigate as much in the summer, that means fewer bales to sell, but not that your investment is lost.
The second advantage of alfalfa is its low value relative to other crops frequently grown in the Colorado River Basin. Compared to winter lettuce or durum wheat, you won’t make as much money per acre of land and acre-foot of water with alfalfa. That means that when water becomes scarce, or there is a need to reallocate it, alfalfa is often the first crop to be fallowed, shifting water either to municipal users or to other, more valuable crops. It is a simple buffer if we offer farmers some benefit in return for relinquishing some of their irrigation water.
The third way in which alfalfa provides adaptive capacity is its portability. It is difficult under the laws governing the Colorado River Basin’s water allocation to move water across state lines. But alfalfa is easy to move. When water runs short in New Mexico, a dairy can have its alfalfa shipped in from the Midwest. Bales of alfalfa on flatbed trailers provide one of the ultimate forms of flexibility in dealing with water shortages and allocation problems.
In order to capitalize on this flexibility, we need to develop institutions that both respect current water users and provide tools for moving water around more easily. Some of the changes happen on the farm itself, as farmers adjust to their shifting water supplies. But some require relationships—farm communities and municipal water managers building trust and developing new management rules that benefit both. Ultimately, that mutual understanding can lead to changes in the laws and institutions that allocate the basin’s scarce water. There is no one big policy lever that can be pulled to make this happen, but there are many small switches that cumulatively will add up to the necessary change.
Farming the Desert
To understand alfalfa’s complex role in helping to solve the Colorado River Basin’s problems, we need to travel to the deserts of southern Arizona and California, where agriculture squeezes out the last drops of the river’s US allocation before sending what remains to Mexico. Arizona’s Yuma County and California’s Imperial County, which flank the river here, began their modern agricultural life as alfalfa country. One observer in 1917 called alfalfa the “backbone of permanent fertility of Imperial Valley soil.”21 Today you can still find the crop here, but the region’s transition toward more-lucrative lines of farming illustrates the opportunities, bringing more money to farmers and taking less water from the Colorado River.
Yuma is a historic Colorado River town. It grew on the southern side of one of the few good Colorado River crossings for a hundred miles in either direction. Miners heading to the gold fields of California in the mid-nineteenth century crossed there, and the Southern Pacific Railroad chose the bluffs that flank the river at Yuma for its rail crossing in 1877. But while life as a way station provided Yuma with an economic start, the real action looked like it would be in farming. The river flowed through a broad, flat valley that stretched fifty miles to the east, up the drainage of the Gila River. Yuma also had what seemed like an unlimited supply of water from the Colorado River slicing through the middle of the valley. But getting the plumbing right took decades. Early diversions left farmers’ fields waterlogged, and flooding was an ever-present danger until the US government completed Hoover Dam.
Alfalfa was the principal crop grown in Yuma in the early years,22 and by the 1940s nearly half of Yuma County’s acreage was planted in alfalfa and other forage crops.23 But over the last three decades, Yuma County’s shift away from alfalfa has made agriculture there both more water-effic
ient and more economically productive. Alfalfa production fell from utilizing half of Yuma County’s agricultural acreage in 1940 to one sixth in 2012.24 In its place is a winter-vegetable empire that feeds the desires of the nation’s consumers for year-round fresh salad greens. Yuma’s farmers are making more money and using less water.
Across the river in California’s Imperial County, getting the plumbing right was harder, eventually requiring a massive intervention by the US government to build an eighty-mile canal bigger than many western rivers to get water to desert farmland. By the late twentieth century, the majority of that water went to alfalfa fields.
Much of it still does. Imperial’s turn from alfalfa has been less pronounced, but given its size as the largest single user on the Colorado River, it is no less important. In the early 2000s, 60,000 acres of alfalfa were taken out of production, with water shifted to other uses and some of the conserved water transferred to Southern California’s cities.25
The shift away from alfalfa on the Lower Colorado has taken two forms. The first is simply the evolution of the farm economy. Yuma farmers in the last quarter of the twentieth century took up high-profit winter lettuce farming with enthusiasm. Water conservation was not the goal here, but rather a happy accident. The second is institutional. As regional water managers have come looking for opportunities to reallocate the Colorado River’s scarce water, they have been able to make deals that take low-value alfalfa land out of production, moving the water to meet other needs and leaving the higher-value crops of the region’s winter vegetable trade.
Isn’t this the Carl Boronkay plan—to stop growing alfalfa and use the water for cities and more-profitable crops? The difference is in degree and agency. Farmers here are still growing some alfalfa. When there is sufficient water, they can grow more. When they grow less, it’s by choice. Rather than being forced out of the market and facing dramatic economic upheaval, farmers can make a slower, more comfortable transition—often with sizable profits.
The Lettuce Empire
If you live in the United States or Canada, chances are good that the lettuce you eat during the winter came from one of these two counties at the tail end of the Colorado River. The sunny desert, good soil, and plentiful Colorado River water make the Yuma-Imperial farming district the perfect place—really the only place in United States—to grow lettuce in the dead of winter. Beginning in September, crews are sorting through orders from the big produce shippers, timing their plantings so that by November wave after wave of cauliflower, broccoli, iceberg lettuce, romaine lettuce, red leaf and green leaf lettuce, and celery are ready for picking. That precise schedule ensures that Kroger supermarkets and Taco Bell fast-food restaurants never go without. From December through February, more than 90 percent of the nation’s lettuce comes from either Yuma or Imperial, with most of it passing through the refrigerated packing houses on a bluff above the Yuma County farm fields where it is grown.26 As agriculture goes in the Colorado River Basin, this is some of the highest-value use of water, dollar per irrigated acre, that you will find.27
The farmers here and their irrigation district managers have turned the application of limited water onto rich desert soils into a combination of technology and high art. Tractors tow trapezoidal-wheeled metal devices known as “bolas” down irrigation furrows to tamp down the soil to exactly the right density and angle to efficiently move water between ridged rows of lettuce. Over the decades, they have tuned the length of irrigation run—the distance from the ditch turnout to the berm at the end of the field—to get the right amount of water to the plants without wasting any. Where runs three decades ago might have been as long as half a mile, you will rarely see one now longer than 600 feet.28
The whole enterprise represents a complex system of skilled labor, deft irrigation, and integrated production and distribution that has turned these valleys over the last forty years into some of the highest-value agricultural land in the country. Water use has gone down because the high-intensity irrigation has shifted to the cooler winter months, while agricultural revenue has gone up.29
In the mid-1970s, at the peak of Yuma County’s water use, farmers there consumed more than 967,000 acre-feet of water, nearly as much water as the entire share diverted west to Los Angeles. Half of the valley’s irrigated farmland—114,000 acres—was planted in alfalfa or cotton, also a crop that returns little money for each gallon of water consumed. By the early 2010s, the acreage devoted to alfalfa and cotton was cut nearly in half and the amount of water consumed dropped by nearly a third.30
In that time, total agricultural sales in Yuma County rose from $900 million in the mid-1970s (in inflation-adjusted dollars) to an average of $1.2 billion per year since 2010.31 Yuma County (and, as we shall see, other communities like it) are evidence that flexibility in the agricultural system provides a big part of the adaptive capacity we need to make our way through a water-scarce twenty-first century.
Deficit Irrigation
Often a straight transition away from alfalfa is the best choice for farmers and the basin as a whole. But in other instances, the cutbacks can be more complex. Just up the river from Yuma, in the Palo Verde Valley, we see how alfalfa may fit into the region’s future. Palo Verde has some of the oldest farmland on the river, with some of the most valuable senior water rights. In 2007, it played host to a promising water-conservation experiment. Working with local farmers, University of California researcher Khaled Bali tried simply not watering alfalfa fields during the heat of summer.
Palo Verde has long been an innovator. As one of the first places in the lower desert where European settlers tried farming in the Colorado River Valley, it has some of the highest-priority water rights on the river, meaning it will be one of the last places to go dry in drought. That has made it an extremely attractive place for urban water agencies looking for deals, which is what makes Bali’s experiments so promising.
This is some of the hottest country in the United States, with average daily temperatures from June through September above 100° F (38° C). In weather like that, it takes a lot of water to grow alfalfa. Importantly for Bali’s purposes, it is so hot that the summer yield in alfalfa crop goes down, even as water use is going up. But recall the remarkable properties of alfalfa. Its deep roots allow it to hunker down in summer. If you deprive it of water, your yield will drop even more. But the crop does not die.
What Bali found when he experimented with side-by-side fields, some irrigated during summer and some not, was that yield went down and water was saved. This is an unsurprising result. Farmers have known for years that when their water supply runs short, they can get away with skipping an irrigation cycle and their plants will survive. They’ll just have fewer bales to feed to their cattle or send off to their dairy industry customers.
Bali’s experiment extended that to the idea of intentionally cutting short the water supply rather than simply doing it out of necessity. This opens up interesting policy options. If, say, the water saved was sufficiently valuable to a municipal water user to compensate the farmer for the lost yield in return for sending the saved water off to the city, you’d have the room for a deal that keeps the land in production and the farmer in business while also providing water to the city.
This sidesteps the biggest criticism of agriculture-to-urban water transfers—that they dry up land and community livelihoods. “Buy-and-dry” has become an epithet in the Colorado River Basin, and deficit irrigation provides an alternative if we can get the institutional arrangements right. By one calculation, widespread use of intentional deficit irrigation in alfalfa fields in Arizona and Colorado irrigated with Colorado River water could save nearly four times as much water per year as the annual consumption of the Las Vegas metro area.32
If this is so straightforward, why do we not see it happening? When I talked to Bali about his alfalfa deficit-irrigation experiment, he made a crucial point: “The science is the easy part.”33 As we will see, getting the institutional infrastructure right�
��arranging a deal between willing buyers and sellers, agreeing on a way to measure the saved water and get it to the alternative uses, changing the rules so it can be moved from one place to another—is a much harder problem.
One Alfalfa Field at a Time
Corky Herkenhoff would be happy to work out a deal, for a price, to share some of the Colorado River water he currently spreads on his alfalfa fields with one of the central New Mexico cities to his north.34
So far, the cities have not been parched enough to need to work out such a deal, but it is easy to imagine what it might look like: In a dry year, the city pays Herkenhoff to lay off the irrigation, sending some of his water to the city’s municipal treatment plant. Herkenhoff takes the money and heads to Florida to go fishing. The barriers here are in the rules and procedures—the institutions through which we manage the water. Currently, New Mexico water law and policy don’t allow a deal like that. But as water gets scarcer, pressure to reduce those barriers will grow.
How much US agriculture might miss a reduction in Colorado River Basin alfalfa remains an open question. One of our most flexible crops, it is currently grown in forty-two of the fifty US states, with places like Wisconsin and the Dakotas growing far more of it than the farm communities being irrigated with Colorado River water.35 Hay has become a global commodity, one that is readily shipped long distances both within the United States and overseas. Dairies, the largest consumers, showed remarkable flexibility in shifting to other feeds as California’s alfalfa production dropped during the drought of 2012–15; milk production stayed relatively stable in the state.36 And using rail transport, growers currently ship alfalfa all the way from Idaho to Florida and Kentucky.37 That diversity suggests plenty of adaptive capacity in the US farm sector to provide the feed crops to meet consumer demand for burgers and pizza cheese, though there remains a risk that the notoriously footloose dairy industry could in the long run migrate to be closer to reliable sources of feed.
