Almonds get all the attention, but hay, that most pedestrian of crops, still covers more acres of California farmland. But less than it used to. In the drought of 2015, California farmers are planning to plant and maintain past plantings of 1.23 million acres of hay, according to new USDA data published last week. That’s …
This cemetery, on the “banks” of the All-American Canal overlooking Bard on the California-Arizona desert, has no grass: Immediately behind me as I stood to take this picture last week was the All-American Canal, an artificial river built in the 1930s to carry Colorado River water to the Imperial Valley. A lot of water. The …
update, June 24, 2015: Since this post was written in April 2015, a wet spring has reduced the chance of a “shortage” in 2016. It now appears 2017 is the earliest this could happen. The situation described in rest of the post, detailing what happens when a “shortage” is declared, remains the same. previously tl;dr …
Continue reading ‘1,075: What a Lake Mead “shortage” would mean in practice’ »
Some interesting stats from Charles Fishman (whose book The Big Thirst is a timely read): Looking at California water stats for Bloomberg TV appearance. A stunner: Calif farms use less water today (23.1 bgd) than in 1970 (33 bgd) — Charles Fishman (@cfishman) April 13, 2015 2/ In 45 years, California farmers have cut water …
Michael Wines in Monday’s New York Times: The perils of drought are on ample display along the Rio Grande, where a rising thirst has tested farmers, fueled environmental battles over vanishing fish and pushed a water-rights dispute between Texas and New Mexico to the Supreme Court. But you can also see glimmers of hope. Albuquerque, …
Continue reading ‘On the Rio Grande drought, not exactly optimism, but not pessimism either’ »
Checked in this evening on the snowpack map, which I haven’t been watching closely. Yow, what I missed! On the left is percent of average for March 1, on the right is this morning’s percent of average: Here’s what that looks like summed up across the Colorado River Basin above Lake Powell:
The Wellton-Mohawk Valley is one of those places where you can feel the desert pressing in around you, a ribbon of irrigated green no more than 3 miles wide along the Gila River in southwestern Arizona. The last of the winter vegetables are done, and farmers are getting the ground ready for their spring-summer cover …
Continue reading ‘Water in the desert, Wellton-Mohawk edition’ »
The San Diego County Water Authority is displeased with the state of California’s decision to set the starting point for its water conservation mandate at 2013, arguing that it rewards communities that ignored the need to conserve until recently, and penalizes those that have been at the conservation game for a while: For example, water …
Continue reading ‘San Diego displeased with state water mandate’ »
This is a field fallowed under a 2013 agreement between Yuma Mesa Irrigation and Drainage District and the Central Arizona Groundwater Replenishment District. The deal is small, but it raises all kinds of fascinating issues of both water management and culture down here in Arizona’s southwestern corner, where water is both economically critical and culturally …
Continue reading ‘Fallowed ground: 21st century water institutions on Yuma Mesa’ »
Despite the drier conditions and the apocalyptic headlines, California is unlikely to become a parched, uninhabitable hellscape, experts say. Tia Ghose in LiveScience