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:
Snowpack above Lake Powell, courtesy CBRFC
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.
Persimmons from California’s Central Valley
They were priced at $1.29 a pound, with the box label suggesting they had come all the way from Gridley, Calif., a little town midway between Yuba City and Chico in the valley’s northern stretch. It’s not a big persimmon hot spot, recording just 78 of California’s 4,091 acres of persimmons in the 2012 Census of Agriculture. (pdf here, not surprisingly Fresno County is the state’s largest persimmon producer)
It is interesting to think about how and why persimmons make their way from Gridley to my local Asian market.
New Mexico has a relatively short part in the conventional story of the making of the United States from east to west. The older, longer-lasting story of a country made from south to north, or in gridwork and patches with contributions from all over the hemisphere and the world, has resumed there. It is a model of US pluralism, in which no community’s culture is fixed, but peculiar traditions can be upheld without compromising overarching political unity.
That’s Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s optimistic words about my adopted home, in Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States
It’s a little thing, this new breed of drought-tolerant alfalfa bred on New Mexico State University research plots in the southern part of my arid state. But it provides another clue (behind a Google surveywall) about what the path forward in western water management might look like:
Adoption of a new crop takes time, so don’t expect NuMex to change agricultural water use overnight. But the crop’s evolution, and other adaptations to water scarcity by U.S. farmers in recent years, illustrates a central finding of a sweeping new federal study released last week: When less water is available, we use less water.
Acequia at La Cienega, outside Santa Fe, New Mexico
People in arid lands have always been very ingenious when it comes to conserving water.
The late New Mexico writer and irrigator Juan Estevan Arrellano, from his new book Enduring Acequias: Wisdom of the Land, Knowledge of the Water
Sandhill cranes in Albuquerque ballfield, November 2014, by John Fleck
The latest USGS “Estimated Use of Water in the US” is out. It says we’re using less water. From 2005-10, a 13 percent drop. “Peak water” happened back in 1980:
Source: USGS
There are lots of caveats. This analysis uses “withdrawals” rather than “consumptive use”. So if a power plant sucks up river water for cooling, that counts as “use” even if most of it is returned to the river. Farmers withdraw a lot, and return some via groundwater seepage and drains. The withdrawal-consumption distinction is really important for water policy, as I tried to explain here.
This big drop also spans the Economic Shitstorm of 2008. Part of the drop could be related to that.
I think a lot of work needs to be done by people smarter than I to sort out the implications of the above two caveats. But those notwithstanding, I think the new data supports the hypothesis (“slogan”?) I’ve been pushing recently: When one has less water, one uses less water. We’re pretty adaptable, we humans.
Sewage treatment plant, Albuquerque
This is from a tour this afternoon of the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority’s Southside Wastewater Reclamation Plant with a couple of University of New Mexico faculty colleagues and a bunch of students, including the graduate students in the Water Resources Program, where I’m an adjunct faculty member. The plant treats about 50 million gallons per day of sewage. Its discharge is the third largest tributary to the Rio Grande, after the Conejos River in Colorado and the Rio Chama in northern New Mexico.
I had a lovely afternoon yesterday walking alongside the Bear Canyon Arroyo in Albuquerque’s northeast heights, talking with fellow water nerds Katherine Yuhas and Amy Ewing, and watching water flow in New Mexico’s first operational aquifer storage and recovery project (behind a Google surveywall):
Nearly 3,000 gallons a minute of water began spurting from a pipe into Bear Canyon Arroyo in Albuquerque’s Northeast heights this week as part of New Mexico’s first operational project to store water in an underground aquifer.
“The whole goal of doing this is to store water when we have excess in the winter to build a drought reserve,” said Katherine Yuhas, water conservation officer for the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority.