On the new Farm and Ranch Irrigation Survey, Brett Walton: The 2013 survey reveals two long-term trends in U.S. agriculture: farms are producing more food while using less water, and farms in the typically rainy East are increasingly investing in irrigation equipment that is more commonly found in the arid West.
The Imperial Irrigation District earlier this month threw down a significant marker in the ongoing struggle to deal back overuse of Colorado River water with a petition to the California State Water Resources Control Board demanding action on restoration of the Salton Sea. The sea’s decline is one of the knock-on effects of efforts to …
Continue reading ‘IID to state of California on Salton Sea restoration: “But you guys promised!”’ »
I tend to hear the term “water buffalo” as pejorative – the old, lumbering water managers of a bygone era of dam-building and overconsumption. Not so, say the folks at the Central Arizona Project: Just what is a water buffalo? In Arizona, they are those iconic figures who had the foresight to plan ahead to …
Continue reading ‘Water buffalos – embracing the pejorative?’ »
In High Country News, Cally Carswell has a story about the criollo (“a name that is endlessly fun to recite. These are criollo cows. (Try it: cree-oh-yo.)”: There’s anecdotal evidence that criollo will eat more of the shrubs and tougher grasses on degraded grasslands, but no hard data yet on whether that amounts to a …
Continue reading ‘Annals of adaptation: Cally Carswell on desert cattle’ »
From this morning’s newspaper, a look at the latest proposal to pump rural groundwater to New Mexico’s populous middle (behind Google surveywall): Depending on your view of the issue, this is either: a) an innovative approach to bring new water to the Middle Rio Grande Valley, or b) an inappropriate attempt to privatize a public resource …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: NM water policy tools poorly suited for the job’ »
Kelly Redmond, deputy director of the Western Regional Climate Center in Reno, is being honored at next month’s AGU meeting in San Francisco for being generally awesome. Kelly’s one of the best climate scientists I’ve ever encountered at overcoming the “loading dock problem“, by which scientists do knowledge and leave it out there in a box for non-scientists …
Continue reading ‘Kelly Redmond to be honored for climate work’ »
We’re about 20 percent of the way into the fall-winter-spring snow accumulation season in the Colorado River Basin, and the current snowpack upstream of Lake Powell as estimated by the CBRFC is 61 percent of average: It is worth remembering, as the Bureau of Reclamation notes in its weekly water supply report (pdf), that “values …
Continue reading ‘In the Colorado River Basin, a slow start to the 2014-15 water year’ »
Al Jazeera Counties, mostly in the more rural northern parts of California, are reporting a surge in thefts and illegal diversions of water from wells and streams. The prime suspects are illegal marijuana farmers desperate for water before the fall harvest, which would explain the surge in water thievery over the summer.
Despite California’s epic drought, there were Central Valley persimmons this afternoon in Talin Market, Albuquerque’s international district grocer, when my sister, Lisa, and I stopped by to pick up a few things. They were priced at $1.29 a pound, with the box label suggesting they had come all the way from Gridley, Calif., a little …