UC Davis team puts 2015 California drought impacts at 4 percent of the state’s ag economy

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The U.C. Davis drought team today released its estimates for the economic impact of the drought this year. Spoiler alert – it’s worse than last year.

Highlights:

  • 560,000 acres fallowed, which is 6 to 7 percent
  • $1.8 billion in direct ag losses (increased groundwater pumping costs and reduced sales), which is about 4 percent
  • Total agricultural employment will continue to grow, but the team estimates job losses, including spillovers, at 18,600 (meaning that without the drought, it would have grown even more)

The full report (pdf)

Hauling water: Navajo

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Many Navajo homes lack running water. Many more draw from shallow wells with poor quality water and resulting health problems. Now, my friends Olivier Uyttebrouck and Roberto Rosales report, this community could also lose its hauler, the grandma who trucks in the only clean water available:

As she pulls up outside a house, residents quickly emerge with barrels, jugs, even a large cooking pot – anything that will hold the precious liquid.
“These people really depend on the water truck,” especially the elderly and those who lack transportation, she said, tearing up as she described the living conditions of some families and children she serves. “That’s why I love my job.”

“Miracle May” leaves Colorado River reservoirs in much better shape than when the month started

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Precipitation departure from average. Source: PRISM

Precipitation departure from average. Source: PRISM

A month that Eric Kuhn of the Colorado River Water Conservation District in western Colorado called a “miracle May” has left the Colorado River’s two largest reservoirs in much better shape than we might have expected given the glum projections of doomsayers like me. Precipitation across the Colorado River Basin has been well above average, and while it has not been enough to make up for a dismal winter snowpack, it has been enough to improve things significantly at the margins, at a time when “at the margins” is where the basin’s managers have been eking out a scary existence.

In particular, a 2016 Lower Basin shortage declaration, which would have mandated reduced water deliveries to Central Arizona, seems a lot less likely.

Lake Powell is ending May with a surface elevation above 3,596 feet above sea level, four feet above the projection when the month began. That’s an extra 400,000 acre feet of water. Lake Mead, less dependent on weather and more dependent on releases from upstream, is nevertheless a foot above its projections, an elevation above 1,076.

The result is a forecast of more than 5 million acre feet of April-July runoff into Lake Powell, up from a forecast of just 3 million acre feet just a month ago. That is still well below the long term mean of just above 7 maf for April through July, but given the slim margins facing water managers right now the bonus water provides a crucial boost.

Before the storms hit, the Bureau of Reclamation forecast showed Lake Powell flirting with a key elevation threshold – elevation 3,575 come Jan. 1. The 2007 reservoir operation guidelines set that as a trigger point that would require water managers to hold more water upstream and reduce deliveries to Lake Mead. That would have meant a lot less water being sent downstream to Lake Mead beginning in October, setting off a cascade of decisions that could have triggered a shortage declaration in the Lower Basin as early as next Jan. 1.

I’ve been joking with basin water managers that they really need to try to avoid a Jan. 1, 2016 shortage declaration, because my book isn’t done. I want the book on the shelves when the shortage declaration hits, so I’ll be the person they call to go on the NewsHour and Diane Rehm and stuff. Fame and fortune seem within reach, but timing is everything.

The water managers often seem not to be amused by this schtick, for which I fully and completely apologize.

With an extra 4 feet of water in Powell as of today, and more likely because of our “miracle May”, a 2016 shortage is looking far less likely, though we won’t know for sure until the next round of model results come out after the first of the month. My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest we’re still at risk of a 2017 shortage declaration, but the risk of one in 2016 has dropped dramatically.

Tree Rings and Megadroughts

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Mount Holyoke’s “Academic Minute” has a nice interview with Park Williams, who’s been using tree rings to flesh out the story of the current drought in the context of historic droughts, as it pertains to forests in the Southwest:

I study the year-by-year records left by these rings, and they tell a fascinating story more than a thousand years long, about life in a water-limited world. One of the most interesting chapters is a five-hundred year stretch ending in 1300 AD, when the Southwest was ravaged by a series of prolonged droughts. Climate scientists call them “megadroughts.”

Each megadrought lasted longer than a decade, and probably contributed to the abandonment of ancient cliff-dwelling cities such as Mesa Verde, in Colorado.

Currently, the Southwest is entrenched in a 15-year drought. Tree rings and climate data suggest that this ongoing drought is on par with some of the worst megadroughts of the past millennium.

Click through to listen to audio of Park telling the story himself. And just FYI, if you think this stuff is interesting and want to share it with a youngster you know, I wrote a book a few years back called The Tree Rings’ Tale for middle school-aged kids.

Rio Grande flows again through southern New Mexico

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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. The Rio Grande here, below Elephant Butte and Caballo dams, is turned off in the fall after irrigation season to store water. In the spring, it’s turned back on again, to deliver water to downstream farmers, who grow chiles, onions, pecans, and other crops with it. The dam was built in 1916, and irrigation season (even during the drought of the 1950s) always started in March at the latest. As Elephant Butte Reservoir dropped in the recent drought, that changed. 2013 was the first year irrigation did not start until May (skipping right over April). This is now the third year in a row the farmers have not received their first water until May.

ProPublica on the Colorado River Basin solution space

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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 federal subsidies:

Wuertz could plant any number of crops that use far less water than cotton and fill grocery store shelves from Maine to Minnesota. But along with hundreds of farmers across Arizona, he has kept planting his fields with cotton instead. He says he has done it out of habit, pride, practicality, and even a self-deprecating sense that he wouldn’t be good at anything else. But in truth, one reason outweighs all the others: The federal government has long offered him so many financial incentives to do it that he can’t afford not to.

I’m less disturbed than Lustgarten and Sadasivam by the specifics of the cotton subsidy in Arizona (some data that I’ll slip in below suggests why), but their underlying argument is incredibly important, because federal agricultural policy’s weaknesses here nevertheless provide the sort of opportunity that, properly managed, could allow us to wriggle out of the mess we’ve created for ourselves:

According to research by the Pacific Institute, simply irrigating alfalfa fields less frequently, stressing the plant and slightly reducing its yield, could decrease the amount of water needed across the seven Colorado River basin states by roughly 10 percent. If Arizona’s cotton farmers switched to wheat but didn’t fallow a single field, it would save some 207,000 acre-feet of water — enough to supply as many as 1.4 million people for a year.

There’s little financial reason not to do this. The government is willing to consider spending huge amounts to get new water supplies, including building billion-dollar desalinization plants to purify ocean water. It would cost a tiny fraction of that to pay farmers in Arizona and California more to grow wheat rather than cotton, and for the cost of converting their fields. The billions of dollars of existing subsidies already allocated by Congress could be redirected to support those goals, or spent, as the Congressional Budget Office suggested, on equipment and infrastructure that helps farmers use less water.

This, as a journalist/water nerd, is the particular strength of the piece (and makes me eager to read the rest) – not just identifying the problem, but also noting where the solutions might be found.

Now to the Arizona data. Despite the subsidies, Arizona cotton farming has steadily declined, with this year’s 115,000 planted acres the lowest going back at least through the 1950s:

 

Arizona annual cotton acres

The difficulty in U.S. municipal water use comparisons

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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 the state Department of Water Resources based on reports that cities are required to file annually. We have been collecting that data for over 30 years. Most metro areas track their information separately. On top of this, there are no consistent accounting categories or definitions and that makes comparing efforts virtually impossible.

Having wrestled with this problem myself, I “+1” Ferris’s observation.

Not my grandpa’s MWD

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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 beach community where the declaration was signed):

When and as additional water resources are required to meet increasing needs for domestic, industrial and municipal water, The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California shall be prepared to deliver such supplies.

Time was, that meant flexing the political muscle needed to build the State Water Project, to bring northern California water south over the Tehachapis to the Southern California coastal plain, or trying to get a Peripheral Canal or a couple of big water-moving tunnels built to run water past the Sacramento Delta. It’s the sort of thing my late grandfather John S. Berry, a Republican Realtor of the old Southern California-building kind, could get behind. He loved the big water projects.

These days, it apparently means tearing out lawns. Bradley Fikes in the Union Tribune:

Southern California’s largest water agency, Metropolitan Water District, will consider dramatically increasing its conservation budget by a record $350 million, which it says will make the water-saving program the nation’s largest.

The additional expense could also raise water rates by 21 percent, according to one of its board members.

With all the attention to drought, MWD has had a huge burst of interest in its subsidized water conservation programs, especially paying residents and businesses to rip out there lawns.

Here’s the meat of the proposal:

 

For comparison, 172 million square feet is just a tad shy of 4,000 acres, the equivalent of less than one percent of the acreage currently under irrigation with Colorado River water in Imperial County. In 2012-13, MWD sold 1.68 million acre feet of water, so the 23,000 acre feet of water savings a year from the lawn piece is a bit more than 1 percent. (Click on the excerpt to see the full staff report.) Not a lot of water, though if you keep doing it year after year, it could add up.

Back in grandpa’s day, “deliver such supplies” meant a new dam and a canal or pipe. These days it’s tearing out lawns, I guess.

Feral alfalfa

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Feral alfalfa, getting an impromptu irrigation as the Rio Grande overbanks through Albuquerque

Feral alfalfa, getting an impromptu irrigation as the Rio Grande overbanks through Albuquerque

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 New Mexico professor who’s my go-to plant helper, to confirm the identification.

Tim’s also one of the coauthors of the Field Guide to the Plants and Animals of the Middle Rio Grande Bosque, which of course I should have realized has alfalfa listed as one of the commonly found bosque plants. It’s not terribly invasive, Tim told me, but it does like a nice bit of disturbed ground and the chance to stick its roots down into the water table. In this case, the alfalfa (and a baby cottonwood) are growing on a shelf next to the river, which is currently a bit underwater with the high flows we’re having.