My friend Phil King, a professor at New Mexico State University and water advisor to the Elephant Butte Irrigation District, has been following the water down through the Rio Grande southern New Mexico valleys as irrigation season starts: For those unfamiliar with water management practices in Southern New Mexico, this is an odd place. …
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Abrahm Lustgarten and Naveena Sadasivam at ProPublica have launched their eagerly awaited western water series with a great piece today on the impact of agricultural subsidies on water use in the Colorado River Basin. They focus on cotton, which uses a lot of water and, they argue, only gets grown because of the structure of …
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Kathleen Ferris of the Arizona Municipal Water Users Association on the difficulty of comparative water use analysis: [C]omprehensive information on conservation and reuse implemented to date is not available. Each of the water providers within the ten metropolitan areas track information about their conservation programs differently. For example, water use in central Arizona is tracked by …
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In 1952, Robert Gottlieb and Margaret FitzSimmons explain in their 1991 book Thirst for Growth, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California essentially extended a promise to the communities it served: build away, we’ll get you the water as needed. It came in the form of the “Laguna Declaration” (so named because of the lovely …
I’m not great with plants, so feel a little silly for not realizing the green plants in the foreground (which I’ve been seeing in our Albuquerque riverside bosque for years) are alfalfa. But after spending time in alfalfa farms recently, I snapped to the connection and sent a picture to Tim Lowrey, a University of …
Amid the rhetoric of doom, California agriculture has so far been growing its way through drought: Even as many farmers cut back their planting, California’s farm economy overall has been surprisingly resilient. Farm employment increased by more than 1 percent last year. Gross farm revenue from crop production actually increased by two-tenths of 1 percent …
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Minute 242, an addenda to the U.S.-Mexico Colorado River Treaty, (pdf) contemplated construction of a drain to safely carry high salinity U.S. drainage past municipal and agricultural intakes and dump it into a slough near the Sea of Cortez. It was a time of tension between the two countries over the salinity issue. (Evan Ward’s …
Water managers increased the release this afternoon (Thurs. May 21) from Cochiti Dam into New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley to 3,000 cubic feet per second, which will increase flows yet more tomorrow through Albuquerque. As I explained yesterday, May storms and some clever water management twiddling with stored supplies is providing the opportunity for …
For the first time since January 2011, less than half of New Mexico is classified in “drought” this morning in the weekly federal “Drought Monitor” (“drought” is the oranges and browns): Driving back across the state from a meeting in Arizona last week, things looked greener than I’ve seen in a long time, though I …
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Water from our recent storms, combined with the some clever twiddling by federal and local water managers, is pushing the Rio Grande through Albuquerque in the next few days to the highest spring runoff levels we’ve seen since 2010. Water managers are taking advantage of the May storms to add some water and create a …
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