Killing an ecosystem for hay

June 8, 2023 7:49 AM

Agriculture slurps 80% of the Colorado River in the U.S. each year, and a single forage crop, alfalfa hay, is responsible for over a third of that drain. You've probably read about the drought in the southwestern US and how Lake Powell hit historic lows (though this winter has improved things somewhat). But the real problem is not the drought, but overuse. The classic analysis, Cadillac Desert, first published in 1986, is no less true now than it was 40 years ago.

The problem is how farming makes money off a distorted system. Not only does alfalfa dominate agriculture in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah, the four driest states in the country, it's also a big crop in California, which also draws from the Colorado. But 40% of the alfalfa grown in California in 2020 was shrink-wrapped, containerized, and shipped to cows on the other side of Earth.

Another measure of the distortion is pumping. California's water system uses approximately 20% of the state's electricity to move water from places where it naturally flows, to places where it's used, which are often desert climates, suitable for farming only because the water needed is hijacked from elsewhere.

While a new "historic" agreement is touted as conserving 3 million acre-feet of water, it's mostly a mirage. Farmers are being paid for not using water for the next three years. After that, it's back to business as usually, unless bigger changes are made.

posted by CheeseDigestsAll (24 comments total)

Cadillac Desert is such a good book, recommended even if you’re not that interested in the subject. Pairs well with The Monkey Wrench Gang.
posted by gottabefunky at 7:54 AM on June 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

The Salt Lake Tribune had a good article on this last year. Hay and alfalfa feed beef and dairy production and support rural life, but together, they soak up two-thirds of Utah’s water..........it takes 1.38 acre-feet, or about 450,000 gallons, to produce a ton of alfalfa — about as much water as two Utah homes typically use in a year.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 8:19 AM on June 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

Meanwhile south east Pennsylvania farmland, where hay grows great without irrigation, is being stripped and turned into sprawling mcmansion developments because that is more profitable.
posted by sepviva at 8:26 AM on June 8, 2023 [21 favorites]

Chiming in to fave Cadillac Desert. PBS made a documentary miniseries from it in the 1990s.

I also recommend Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River, David Own, 2017
posted by neuron at 8:42 AM on June 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

It's almost like valuing nothing but capital is not a great idea!

In theory strong regulation can force businesses to be responsible for their destructive practices, but in practice I don't see any way out without tackling the disease at its root.
posted by SaltySalticid at 8:45 AM on June 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

The whole point of pastoralism was that you could use grasslands unsuitable for cultivation for animal rearing instead. That's why the steppes are almost exclusively pastoral in nature. Land that had otherwise zero productivity suddenly had calories coming out of it. Growing water thirsty crops for intensive meat raising? It's so ridiculously inefficient. Somewhere along the lines we lost the fucking plot as a species.

The sad thing is we could remake and restore our lost ecosystems and work with them. The Sonoran Desert wasn't always a desert. It was once grasslands. We could restore the lost savannahs of Arizona and graze animals (extensively, Australian style, not intensively) there instead. So much land available for us to work with it instead of churning what little arable land we have left into fucking animal feed.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 8:48 AM on June 8, 2023 [10 favorites]

Thanks for the post! I don’t know how alfalfa stores seasonally, but one of the reason it’s so profitable in the Southwest is that there can be 3-4 harvests per year. Of course the cows in Saudi Arabia don’t care if their feed came from California, Chile, or South Africa, but they probably want good year round
posted by CostcoCultist at 9:28 AM on June 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

> Thanks for the post! I don’t know how alfalfa stores seasonally, but one of the reason it’s so profitable in the Southwest is that there can be 3-4 harvests per year

i've also heard that a key reason it's profitable is that since there's way more demand for shipping from china to the west coast of the u.s. than there is for the return trip, it's economically feasible (because very cheap) to ship low-value goods (i.e. alfalfa) to china because the only other option for shipping companies is to send back the container ships empty.

but also i don't have a clue what i'm talking about so i'm mainly mentioning this in the hopes that someone who knows what they're talking about can chime in
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:35 AM on June 8, 2023 [8 favorites]

bombastic, that's exactly right. China ships a huge volume (in the 3D sense) of containers to the US and almost all come back empty. I wasn't able to find a great source for this, but some rough estimates I saw were a million containers a month. (Yes, the average American is receiving roughly a checked suitcase worth of Chinese imports every month.) Goods from China are bulky for the dollar value, goods from the US tend to be high-value (precision manufacturing, expensive commodities like almonds or chicken feet), so that leaves lots and lots of space. Ocean freight is extremely cheap in that direction.

Cadillac Desert is the book that finally convinced me that California, especially, has plenty of water. If it didn't, there would be no need to spend 10% of all the electricity generated in the state just to pump that abundant water from place to place. If water were scarce we wouldn't be exporting millions of tons of low-value forage crops like alfalfa to China. There are places in California, especially in the higher parts of the state, where there are severe water shortages, I don't mean to say that nowhere is legitimately short of water. But as a whole there is plenty of water for the population to have modest grass yards if that's what they want, most of the almond, grape, and stone fruit growers to produce the nation's valuable agriculture, and still have plenty left over for wildlife. If only it weren't so profitable to waste the water, California would have more than enough.
posted by wnissen at 9:53 AM on June 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

Someone gets a water share based off of bad science or corrupt governments.

Now, the less water there is, the more that share is worth. And under the taking clause, to remove that water share the government has to pay them market rates for that forever-share of water.

Can the takings clause be avoided by taxing water on a pure volume basis? You'd think so; otherwise, every time you raised income taxes you'd have to pay everyone their expected future income taxes up front.
posted by NotAYakk at 10:46 AM on June 8, 2023

economically feasible

Aside from the container ship part, the economics are totally out of whack because those farms in the desert are artificially subsidized, first by the millions it cost to build the dams in the first place (without which there'd be no water), then by the government paying to lower the cost of pumping the water, and finally, the environmental damage that being caused as a result, which is only just starting to come due.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 10:49 AM on June 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

The water problems of the Colorado include over a 10% evaporation rate in reservoirs and major electrical transmission loss over distance, plus seven feuding states claiming a share. The alfalfa problem is the water use that competes directly with fish and bird habitat, and suburban home or lawn use. However, alfalfa is a partial solution to a trade imbalance while charging ground water sources from irrigation. It also grows best in a dry sunny climate. One solution would be to use greenhouses to reduce most of the water, weeds, pests and poisons, while supporting harvesting equipment, with solar and wind power for heating and lighting for growing all seasons.

The Sonoran Desert wasn't always a desert. It was once grasslands.

You might be thinking of the Chihuahuan desert. The Sonoran is prehistoric.
posted by Brian B. at 11:10 AM on June 8, 2023

Cadillac Desert really is a fascinating book; one of the minor takeaways is that the hydropower of the Pacific Northwest may have been one of the deciding factors in America's victory over Japan in WWII--there was so much electricity that it greatly aided the aluminum industry in producing enough of the metal to rapidly replace lost aircraft. There's even a villain of sorts: Floyd Dominy, who was to building dams across the United States roughly what Robert Moses was to building public infrastructure in the NYC area, and probably an even worse person.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:29 PM on June 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

Re: The Sonoran Desert wasn't always a desert. It was once grasslands. We could restore the lost savannahs of Arizona and graze animals

The Sonoran desert is relatively young (10,000 years or so in its current outline) but transforming it into a grassland would be devastating to some very unique and treasured life that has evolved here and nowhere else, largely because sonoran plants evolved without grass and thus without any persistent threat of large wildfires.

A drive through Arivaca and the northern reaches of the Buenos Aires national wildlife refuge shows the threat of bringing grass back to the desert: dry fields of buffelgrass as far as the eye can see, interspersed with burnt mesquite. Much of the conservation effort in the sonoran desert is focused on eradicating grasses for this reason.
posted by Tsifus at 12:58 PM on June 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

Cadillac Desert. PBS
posted by srboisvert at 2:04 PM on June 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

Aside from the container ship part, the economics are totally out of whack because those farms in the desert are artificially subsidized, first by the millions it cost to build the dams in the first place (without which there'd be no water), then by the government paying to lower the cost of pumping the water, and finally, the environmental damage that being caused as a result, which is only just starting to come due.

And also the uneven costing of water; if you are a human person buying water for your house, a dollar will buy you on the order of 100 gallons of water (2020 rates); as low as 60 in the Bay Area. If you are a farm buying water for alfalfa, a dollar will buy you 715 gallons of water according to the current cost.

If everybody using water paid the same cost, then farmers would pay about 7 times as much as they currently do. Based on various UC Davis estimates for production costs (on an ongoing basis, of an established farm), that would increase the production cost of strawberries by 6%, of table grapes 15%, of romaine lettuce by 29%, of Cabernet Sauvignon grapes 49%. Famously thirsty almonds would have cost increases of 74%, and alfalfa costs would more than double; 114% increase. It would make alfalfa production for export uneconomical basically instantly. (The fruit and veg have lower cost increases in part because they use less water - 15-30 inches of water vs. 40-42 for alfalfa and almonds; but also because they have more labour and packaging costs.)
posted by Superilla at 3:31 PM on June 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

A drive through Arivaca and the northern reaches of the Buenos Aires national wildlife refuge shows the threat of bringing grass back to the desert: dry fields of buffelgrass as far as the eye can see, interspersed with burnt mesquite. Much of the conservation effort in the sonoran desert is focused on eradicating grasses for this reason.

I'm not so much talking about planting bufflegrass everywhere. I'm more about the Santa Cruz Flats needing dire restoration. Like they've been doing down in Avra Valley and restoring what the desert has encroached on over the decades since we came along and fucked it all up.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 4:27 PM on June 8, 2023

> Re: The Sonoran Desert wasn't always a desert. It was once grasslands.

I don't know anything about the Sonoran Desert, but I do happen to know about the Arizona Strip. This is an area of some 7900 square miles - larger than the state of Massachussetts - comprising roughly 7% of the entire state of Arizona. It lies between the Colorado River/Grand Canyon to the south and the Arizona state line to the north.

When the first Mormons reached the area, it was a reported to be some millions of acres of a luscious, prairie-like landscape covered in grass belly high to a horse.

That was in the 1860s. By that time, portions of the area had already suffered severe overgrazing over the course of some 30 years, as large cattle herds brought along the Old Spanish Trail close-cropped a wide swath of ground making their way along the trail to California.

The Mormon settlers and their herds dominated the area starting in the 1860s, and by 1880 we see reports like these:

The foothills that yielded hundreds of acres of sunflowers which produced quantities of rich seed, the grass also that grew so luxuriantly when you were here, the seed of which was gathered with little labor, and many other plants that produced food for the natives is all eat out by stock.

Ten years ago the desert spaces outspreading to the southward were covered with abundant grasses, affording rich pasturage to horses and cattle. . . . feeding of cattle [has] wholly destroyed the grass by cropping it clean before the seeds were mature, as has been the case very generally throughout Utah and Nevada.

Here is what millions of acres of the area looks like now - after some 160 years of continual grazing. You would call that mostly sand, I suppose.

Herds of cattle and sheep in area totaled somewhere north of 100,000 in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Predators were systematically culled - leading the deer herd in the area to bloom from about 4000 to over 100,000 in the 1920s and 30s. That didn't help the situation.

Here is one attempt at reconstructing what the grasslands might have looked like prior to the grazing.

The area never really was a "fertile prairie" as you might find in, say, Iowa. But it was indeed a vast, delicate grassland that had figured out how to survive for eons in a very, very arid area. And it would have looked like a vast, lush, green grassland spring through early summer each year.

And now it is more like a giant sand waste dotted with few sagebrush.

I'm not pointing fingers at others here. Pretty much every one of my direct ancestors and a giant wheelbarrowload of my esteemed relatives contributed, and continue to contribute, substantially to this massive environmental catastrophe. They all thought/think they were doing some combination of the Lord's Own Work and just surviving as best they can in a harsh climate.

Not coincidentally, this is the area the nutty Bundy family - you know, Cliven, Ammon, Ryan, and the others we see plastered all over the news all too often - got their start. They bought up a bunch of the grazing and land rights in the area of Mount Trumbull in the early 1900s, about the time the Mormon Church was selling its main ranching and timber interests in the area. The little outpost soon become known as Bundyville.

Also very relevant to the Bundy situation: None of the cattle operations, emphatically including the Bundys, ever owned more than a small fraction of the range they used.

Early on the Mormons grabbed all the water sources, which gave them de facto control of millions of acres of dry land between them. This was enough to drive out and starve the Native Americans who lived in the region - mostly the Kaibab Band of Pauiute Indians.

At first, these claims had no to very thin legal ground to them. But in the early 1900s the federal government came up with the so-called "scrip system" that allowed people to buy up vast tracks of previously unclaimed federal land. This allowed a few ranchers to obtain clear legal title to the water sources and other valuable bits of property. This further tightened the grip a few ranchers had over the remaining, completely dry, millions of acres of government range surrounding these prime bits of private property.

Make no mistake - even at this stage, the ranchers owned but a relatively small percentage of the land they used. Their interest in the federal land was largely in grazing rights. But owning all the water, no one else had much interest in using - or even visiting - all this federal land, and those with the water and grazing rights surely felt as though they owned it all.

And it's all you need to graze, and continue the desertification of, the entire area - including the parts you don't own.

This is the system the Bundys came waltzing into in the early 1900s. And it's the root of their grievance down to today: They felt in their hearts that they really owned everything, but reality was far different.

If you're wondering why they are so crazy, it's because pretty much everything they think they own is actually owned by someone else. They only have the rights to destroy it.

Just in case anyone wants a more comprehensive history of cattle operations in the area, see this source (pp. 22-29) or this source (pp. 16-26).

FWIW, back in the 1920s through 1940s my grandpa spent every winter with his sheep herd on the Arizona Strip. And every weekend, after a long, lonely week of stripping the ecosystem bare with his herd, he would make his way to the nearest outpost of civilization, where other herders and ranchers gathered for their bit of socializing, dancing, and a visit to the post office.

That's where he sent and received some really touching love letters to and from his best girl - later my grandmother.

It's only too bad in the year of our Lord 2023 that each and every one of those love letters has that address of ill repute BUNDYVILLE scrawled all over it.
posted by flug at 5:17 PM on June 8, 2023 [10 favorites]

The Arizona Strip

It's worth mentioning, too, that the Arizona Strip is immediately adjacent to the Colorado River and comprises about 3% of the total Colorado River drainage.

So of course it receives literally no Colorado River water.

Not a drop.

That is all reserved for Phoenix, LA, California's Central Valley, etc etc etc. Because they are the ones who own the "water rights".
posted by flug at 5:43 PM on June 8, 2023

?? I don't think there's any way to get Colorado River water to the Central Valley. Do you mean Imperial/Coachella Valleys?
posted by polecat at 6:28 PM on June 8, 2023

> ?? I don't think there's any way to get Colorado River water to the Central Valley. Do you mean Imperial/Coachella Valleys?

Yeah, I don't know how I managed to let that one slip through.

As you say, the main agricultural users of Colorado River water in California are the Imperial Valley (by far the largest, receiving something like 3.1 million acre feet annually), the Coachella Valley, and the Palo Verde Valley.

Palo Verde is at least on the river. The All-American Canal, carrying water to the Imperial Valley etc, is over 80 miles long (though to be fair, 30-ish miles of that is within the Imperial Valley). The Coachella Canal is a whopping 122 miles long and carries around 430,000 acre feet of water annually.

Imperial Valley uses around 3/4ths of California's entire allotment - which amounts to more water usage annually than Arizona, Utah, Mexico, Wyoming, New Mexico, or Nevada.

Coachella, by way of contrast, only uses more than Nevada.

By further way of contrast, on the Arizona Strip, my relatives, the Kaibab Band, and the National Park Service have been bitterly feuding for more than 100 years about two springs that produce 44.14 gallons per minute.

By my calculations, that amounts to 66 acre feet per year, or 0.002% of Imperial Valley's annual allotment. According to the National Park Service, it's enough to maybe cultivate 100 acres.

(With modern methods you could possibly do a bit better than that, but that's what NPS estimated in the 1920s.)

Though a 1933 agreement stipulates that each party will receive 1/3 of the spring output, my understanding is that the Kaibab Band have never received anything like their 1/3 share. The Mormons were, of course, convinced that the Indians will just waste it.

And it goes without saying that the bias against the Native Americans goes way back to the beginning, for both the Mormons and the National Park Service staff. The NPS argument was that the whole purpose of the National Monument was to restore the area to the peak greenery it maybe saw for a while under most intensive Mormon cultivation, and retain it at that point, and this priority far outweighed any possible use the (living, breathing) Kaibab Band might have for it.

They might want to grow a bit of corn or who knows, maybe even get a drink. The horror!

Part of my point in bringing this up is just to illustrate how high the stakes really are for people all up and down the river. People have literally killed and been killed over a sliver of the amount of water we are talking about here.

The other half of my point, though, is that a seldom-mentioned aspect of Colorado River Water Rights is the claim of the Native American Tribes on the Colorado River water.

Native American groups have 3.2 million acre-feet annually in recognized Colorado River water rights - and an additional unknown but reasonably large amount that are still under adjudication.

Imperial Valley farmers like to make a lot of bellicose noises about how their water rights are senior to all the others, blah-blah-blah.

Guess whose water rights are far more senior than Imperial Valley's?

You've got it: The Native American water rights.

Obviously, in some imaginary Just World the Native American water rights pre-date any possible California water rights by some thousands of years.

But we don't have to go there - nice though it would be.

For starters, the Imperial Valley water rights don't go back any further than the construction of predecessors to the All-American Canal starting in May 1901. Hmm . . . that is not all so ancient after all.

Meanwhile, it turns out that by federal law, Native American water rights go back at least as far as the date of establishment of the various reservations - and many of those are older than 1901: Navajo 1868, Northern Ute 1860s, Salt River Pima‐Maricopa 1879, Moapa 1869, etc etc etc.

It's funny how little press this gets, in comparison with Imperial Valley's loud and mostly nonsensical protests.

Here are the highlights:

- Federally recognized tribes have recognized rights to 3.2 million acre-feet of CO River water annually - around 26% of the total

- 12 tribes have unresolved claims, which could raise that total significantly

- Tribes' rights are generally senior to state law-based water rights

- Many tribal water rights have remained unclaimed until now, but that is changing fast

- The reserved rights doctrine (the doctrine that creates these Tribal water rights) recognizes rights to a quantity of water sufficient to fulfill the purposes of a reservation

- Again, this is positioned as a very senior water right. It goes back at least as far as the date of the establishment of the reservation.

- Although most water rights in the western United States have a priority based on when they were first put to a beneficial use, rights on Indian lands have a priority dating back to at least as early as the reservations were established

- That is true even if the tribe's actual water use begins long after others have appropriated waters from the stream.

- Establishment of most (though not all) reservations - and thus, their associated water rights - goes back to before the Colorado River Compact itself. So figure that one out . . .

Whoa.

It's all laid out here. Very interesting reading.
posted by flug at 9:46 PM on June 8, 2023 [8 favorites]

Water is somewhat fungible and what Southern CA doesn’t get from the state water project( through the central valley from Northen CA , they get from the Colorado river. Lots of issues with water in the central valley, but as pointed about above the dollar/gallon ratio on fruit and nuts is decent
The Imperial Irrigation District is evil simply uses all the water for animal feed overseas because they can.
posted by CostcoCultist at 10:17 PM on June 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Thank you for sharing your story and your knowledge, flug.
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 9:40 AM on June 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

> The other half of my point, though, is that a seldom-mentioned aspect of Colorado River Water Rights is the claim of the Native American Tribes on the Colorado River water.

paolo bacigalupi's the water knife, set in a day-after-tomorrow wherein the southwest is more of a bone-dry hellscape than it already is and wherein the only tolerable places to live — "tolerable" here understood as physically tolerable rather than morally tolerable — are arcologies that are very diligent indeed about ensuring that their residents are the only ones with access to water, has as its big macguffin a piece of documentation which would cause control of the water going to the arcologies to revert to the actual holders of the senior water rights, i.e. the tribes.

it's a good premise but also bacigalupi has the frank-millerish tendency to have his female leads always be sex workers to whom violence happens so ymmv
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 2:55 PM on June 12, 2023