{"id":9655,"date":"2010-12-02T19:46:32","date_gmt":"2010-12-03T03:46:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kqed.org\/climatewatch\/?p=9655"},"modified":"2023-05-25T00:05:04","modified_gmt":"2023-05-25T00:05:04","slug":"imperial-valley-confronts-its-water-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ww2.kqed.org\/climatewatch\/2010\/12\/02\/imperial-valley-confronts-its-water-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Imperial Valley Confronts its Water Future"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
Peter Osterkamp is one of the next generation of farmers in the Imperial Valley. He hopes not to be the last.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Clich\u00e9s about water in California can seem more abundant than the water itself these days.\u00a0 But that doesn\u2019t make the clich\u00e9s any less true.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s that Mark Twain saw about how \u201cwhiskey is for drinkin’ and water is for fightin’,\u201d and the line about how water flows uphill toward money.\u00a0 And then there\u2019s the time Twain fell into a California river and \u201ccame out all dusty.\u201d<\/p>\n

All those quips seemed fairly dead-on when I was down in the desert of southeastern California recently.\u00a0 I was reporting for two radio stories<\/a> on how Imperial Valley<\/a> farmers are facing the double wallop of an eleven-year drought (and counting) in the Colorado River basin, and the expected effects of climate change.\u00a0 Recent models suggest that Lake Mead \u2014 the giant reservoir that stores Colorado River water for Imperial farmers and much of the Southwest \u2014 has a 50% chance of drying up in the next 50 years.\u00a0 Talk about dusty.\u00a0 And because the Colorado is so over-allocated already, no water is left by the time the river reaches — make that attempts to reach — the Colorado delta in Mexico.\u00a0 More dust.<\/p>\n

That clich\u00e9 about water flowing toward money actually cuts both ways in the Imperial Valley.\u00a0 It once benefited farmers here.\u00a0 As Marc Reisner reminds us in his seminal book, Cadillac Desert<\/em><\/a>, the main reason this piece of desert can grow anything, let alone supply the U.S. up to 90% of its winter vegetables, is thanks to a handful of wealthy land owners and railroad magnates. In the early 1900s they helped secure priority rights to about a fifth of the Colorado River\u2019s total flow, funded construction of irrigation canals through nearly 100 miles of desert, and later used their considerable political clout to help convince the federal government to improve those canals and build Hoover Dam<\/a>. Though, to be fair, the canals are completely gravity fed.\u00a0 So the water never technically flowed uphill to Imperial Valley.<\/p>\n

But as populations continue to grow in California cities, and farmers\u2019 political clout shrinks, water has started flowing away from Imperial Valley, up over the coastal range, to Los Angeles and San Diego.\u00a0 Phoenix and Las Vegas are thirsty for some of it too. California cities are already paying farmers to fallow some of their fields and to make their operations more water-efficient.\u00a0 In exchange, farmers have agreed to start transferring more than 300,000 acre-feet of water annually to cities, enough to serve about 500,000 households.<\/p>\n

\"\"
A dry irrigation channel in the Imperial Valley along side a fallowed field.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Farmers still have rights to more than two million acre-feet, but if the drought continues and climate models are correct, they may be pressured to give up more.\u00a0 John Pierre Menvielle, a retired farmer on the Imperial Irrigation District<\/a> Board, says farmers can\u2019t afford to transfer more water without doing real damage to the agricultural economy, though they may not have a choice.\u00a0 \u201cWe do worry about the voting populace on the coast.\u00a0 You\u2019ve got 17 million votes over there.\u201d\u00a0 Then he squints his eyes and adds \u201cthat\u2019s why we have lawyers,” lending credence to Twain\u2019s water-is-for-fightin’ remark.<\/p>\n

Doug Kenney, of the Western Water Policy Institute at the University of Colorado, says the tug-of-war over water between farmers and cities is more complicated than just who has the most money or political clout.\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s not just the agricultural community that wants to keep its water.\u00a0 The urban community typically likes to be surrounded by an agricultural community, and its viewed as a valuable amenity.\u201d But at some point, Kenney says, economics wins.\u00a0 \u201cIf the cities need more water, and that water is currently in use by farms, and the cities are willing to pay 10, 20, and maybe 100 times more for that water than the farmer can, at some point that water has to move to the cities.\u201d<\/p>\n

But if climate in the Colorado River basin continues its arid trajectory, a massive water transfer away from farms to support more urban growth has risks. \u201cIf you\u2019re a farmer and one year comes along and you only have half your normal water supply, well, you can probably get by,\u201d says Kenney.\u00a0\u00a0 But cities are less flexible in a drought.\u00a0 If \u201cthe city grows up on that water supply, and then you have a situation where one year there\u2019s only half of that supply, it\u2019s a little more problematic,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Whiskey may be for drinking, but contemplating the future of this corner of California in the face of dwindling water supplies, is pretty sobering.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Development, climate change, and a decade of drought on the Colorado cast doubt on the future of an irrigated cornucopia. Includes SLIDE SHOW.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":238,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[17,133,135,291],"coauthors":[709],"series":[],"affiliates":[],"programs":[],"collections":[],"interests":[],"class_list":["post-9655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-water","tag-agriculture","tag-colorado-river","tag-conservation","tag-imperial-valley"],"acf":{"template_type":"standard","featured_image_type":"standard","is_audio_post":false},"yoast_head":"\nImperial Valley Confronts its Water Future | Climate Watch<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/ww2.kqed.org\/climatewatch\/2010\/12\/02\/imperial-valley-confronts-its-water-future\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Imperial Valley Confronts its Water Future | Climate Watch\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Development, climate change, and a decade of drought on the Colorado cast doubt on the future of an irrigated cornucopia. 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