When it comes to water issues in the western U.S. — specifically the seven states dependent on the Colorado River system for their lives and livelihoods — John Boelts thinks farmers are giving up more than their share.
“Agriculture has historic rights to three-fourths of the Colorado River,” said the farmer who co-owns and operates the 3,000-acre Desert Premium Farms near Yuma, Arizona. “The only reason there hasn’t been a catastrophic collapse of power generation and water deliveries is because agriculture has not used its full allocation of water.”
As Boelts sees it, farmers have done a better job of managing their water use over the years while cities and non-ag users have often used more than their allocation without repercussions.
“The shortage on the Colorado River is a man-made shortage,” said Boelts. Parts of their farm actually border the Colorado River.
Desert Premium Farms is a small piece of about 140,000 acres in the Yuma area that relies on the Colorado River for surface irrigation systems to grow everything from lettuce and broccoli to durum wheat and cotton.
Over the past three decades, agriculture in the region has become 20% more efficient in water use, often using sprinklers rather than flood irrigation, according to Boelts. The cost of more efficient methods like subsurface and drip irrigation is prohibitive.
“We need a system to encourage farmers to switch from flood irrigation, which is still used on about half the crop acres in the region — to drip irrigation,” said Robert Glennon, an attorney, water law expert, and regent’s professor emeritus at the University of Arizona. “Those systems cost a lot of money and farmers are often cash flow-challenged but land rich.”
“What we certainly don’t want is farmers to sell land and get out of the business,” Glennon said. “We need to maintain the stability of rural agricultural communities while, at the same time, solving water problems.”
As Boelts sees it, what won’t solve the problem is more subdivisions moving onto former farm ground.
“We’re not growing anything that people don’t need,” said Boelts. “When someone says, ‘Can’t you just not grow that crop,’ they don’t realize this region grows a large portion of the produce consumed in the U.S. and Canada.” As it is, the U.S. became a net importer of food for the first time in 2023, according to USDA.
The Colorado River serves seven U.S. states, 22 Native American tribal organizations and two states in Mexico. In the U.S. the needs of the seven states are considered in two segments, the Upper Basin consisting of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada and the Lower Basin made up of California, Arizona and New Mexico. More than 40 million people in those states along with 5.5 million acres of farmland benefit from the river.
Jonathan Overpeck, University of MichiganDroughts in recent years, along with growing populations, have contributed to a decline in what’s available. Two years ago, water levels in the basin reached a record low of 20.3 million acre-feet, which was only 34% of the system’s total capacity.
However, by last fall federal officials said conditions had improved on the Colorado River to the point that a plan by California, Arizona, and Nevada to voluntarily reduce water should keep the river basin on stable footing for the next few years. Even Boelts said their situation this winter improved with more rainfall. They went nearly three weeks in January and February without using irrigation for crops other than those they were getting to germinate.
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While farmers, states and other interests have made inroads on water conservation, most of the moves represent “Band-Aids on a really major problem,” said Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist and dean of the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan.
“The debate is all about how to come up with the appropriate size cuts in water use so the reservoirs on the river, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, don’t go below where they are now,” said Overpeck. The situation will only be exacerbated by ongoing climate change. “If we don’t stop climate change, we’ll have less and less water going into the river in the first place.”
Overpeck maintains climate change is one of two problems that exacerbate any natural fluctuations in water levels. The second is that the annual allocations of water simply exceed the supply of water flowing into the river in the first place.
When it comes to climate change, solutions are politically harder, according to Overpeck. While California, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico are “firmly committed” to climate action, politicians in Utah, Wyoming, and Arizona “don’t even acknowledge that human-caused climate change is a grave threat to their water, their forests, their economies and their region.”
This group of red, blue, and purple states committed together on climate action policies “would send a message to the rest of the country,” Overpeck said.
The issue of who gets how much water often comes down to a farm versus city showdown, according to Glennon.
“I’m tired of reading headlines in the LA Times that farms should grow less alfalfa,” he says. “They may well need to grow less alfalfa, but when you put that in print it seems like a Trojan horse: They [urban interests] are coming in with money, but what they really want is the entire ranch and this is the first step.”
Boelts, the farmer, said “we keep whistling past the graveyard” on water issues. In his view, California should have been developing desalination plants 30 years ago. And he’s critical that southern California, with its burgeoning population, uses more than its allocation of water. He said it costs $30 to $40 per acre-foot to deliver the water his farm uses, which he considers a relatively low price.
“The public doesn’t realize that we don’t really pay for water itself but for the structures to move the water,” he said.
In the same way the federal government helps invest in infrastructure like bridges and roads and power plants, it needs to invest in water projects like desalination plants, he believes. “Let’s build things again in this country,” Boelts said.
As for conservation, beyond what they’ve already done, there are more experiments using drip irrigation on produce crops. So far, Boelts says only seen the practice work well in melon production.
Over time, agriculture has been at the forefront of forestalling water shortages in the Colorado River basin, according to Boelts. “When the Secretary of the Interior said 'You folks in the Colorado River basin need to solve it yourselves or we’ll have to,' … Yuma County went to agriculture and its users and the Imperial Valley went to its users and ag came together with a plan.”
A year ago the federal government, along with the seven states, came up with measures to save 3 million acre-feet of water through the end of 2026. What comes after 2026 has yet to be determined; states in the Colorado River basin have conflicting views about what should be done.
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