With drought, climate change and overuse of the Colorado River leading to increasingly dire conditions in the West, the federal Bureau of Reclamation is looking at fallowing as a way to cut water use
“Given the volume of water that is used by agriculture in the Colorado River system, you can’t stabilize the system without reductions in agriculture,” said Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources. “That’s just math.”
U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, a Colorado Democrat, said fallowing has to be on the table. The challenge is figuring out fair payments when farmers work land of varying quality and plant crops of varying value, he said. Water officials from cities and other states with less demand from farms say agriculture’s large take from the river allows wasteful farming practices to continue even as water grows scarcer. They note that Western water law, which gives preference to more senior users, allows farmers with those rights to grow thirsty crops in converted desert even as key reservoirs fed by the Colorado dip to all-time lows.
Larry Cox, who has grown produce and grasses in the Imperial Valley for decades, said he idled a few hundred of his 4,000 acres back then. He used the payments to buy sprinkler pipes and other equipment to make his irrigation systems more efficient. But he also let go between 5% and 10% of his workforce of irrigators, farm hands and tractor drivers.
“Farming is just like any other business," Brierley said."They’ve got capital invested, they’ve got employees, they’ve got markets for their products. You can’t just farm part of the time and not the rest.” Buschatzke said farmers in Arizona felt even the $1,500 offer was lower than they deserved based on what they make on the produce — let alone how important it is to consumers, he said.
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