Note to self: invest my next $31.8 million in Palo Verde real estate

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All the cool kids seem to be buying up real estate in the Palo Verde Irrigation District. First it was the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which has upped its stake in the Colorado River farming valley to 22,000 acres. Now comes news that Almarai, a dairy company, bought 1,790 acres to grow food for its cows. I have no idea whether $18,000 an acre is a good price for California farmland with senior water rights. I do know that, based on the Law of the River, is there’s any water at all leaking through Hoover Dam, Palo Verde is among the first in line to get it, so Almarai’s lucky cows will be first in line to be fed while all those loser cows with junior water rights will be off to the hamburger grinder.

alfalfa exports

Palo Verde Irrigation District alfalfa, Blythe Calif., February 2015, photo copyright Joh Fleck

Palo Verde Irrigation District alfalfa, Blythe Calif., February 2015, photo copyright John Fleck

Almarai’s dairies are in Saudi Arabia, which does complicate the already complicated conversations we have about the use of Colorado River Basin water. Concerned about the overuse of water there, they are essentially buying virtual water here. How much? In 2014, consumptive water use in PVID average about 4 1/2 feet (4.5 af/acre), meaning this is the equivalent of ~8,000 acre feet of water, or about 1/10th of one percent of the U.S. water use on the Lower Colorado.

I don’t worry much about the export part. We use water to produce all sorts of things in our economy that we then export (computer chips in Chandler and Albuquerque, to pick the low-hanging fruit). We also import all sorts of “virtual water” from other countries in the form of food grown and products made there. It remains the case that the vast majority of the alfalfa grown in this country (97 percent by my calculation) is eaten by domestic critters, so it’s not like the export market, whether to China or Japan or Saudi Arabia, is a major driver at this point in the use of water on alfalfa fields in the United States.

the future of Palo Verde

The more interesting thing, it seems to me, is the future of farming in the Palo Verde Valley. As we head into a Water Knife future of armed helicopters defending the Law of the River, the attractiveness of Palo Verde land for its water rights is becoming an increasingly edgy topic for the community around Blythe, California. Met has tried to provide assurances that it plans to keep its PVID land in production, and I take the agency at its word. Clearly other folks were in line to try to buy the land when MWD swooped in and grabbed it. Those other buyers seem to have had other ideas, which apparently pointed toward shutting down farming and moving the water elsewhere. Nervous or not, Met seems preferable to the alternatives. To now have another couple of thousand acres bought up by Almarai, which seems to be committed to growing food on it rather than selling off the water seems to be to Blythe’s benefit.

But if I was in Blythe, I’d be nervous too.

Low-flush at the Home Depot: bending the water use curve down

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U.S. per capita water use has been declining for two decades

U.S. per capita water use has been declining for two decades

Every toilet currently in stock at my local Home Depot has the EPA WaterSense label, even the cheapest ones, meaning they uses 1.28 gallons per flush or less. This is a big part of why we see water use – on a per capita basis, but also in some cases on an absolute basis – going down in the United States.

The current U.S. legal standard, set in the Energy Policy Act of 1992 (signed during the first Bush administration), is 1.6 gallons per flush. Prior to that, most toilets used more than 3 gallons, some of them 5. The EPA program simply offers a catchy label and bragging rights for going lower, but if my Home Depot is any indication it appears to have caught on. The ’92 federal law also set standards for urinals, faucets, and showers. The result is that every new plumbing fixture in an old building uses less water than the one it replaces, and every new building starts off with a baseline water use far lower than the old stuff.

You can see the curve start to bend down in the 1990s, which I think must be related to the new plumbing standards.

states’ tougher standards

total U.S. municipal water use is now declining

total U.S. municipal water use is now declining

A number of states, including California and that drought-plagued bastion of liberty Texas, have made the lower EPA number a state mandate, along with tougher standards for other fixtures.

You can see how, over time, that would push down per capita use. But population’s still growing, right? The USGS’s 2010 Water Use in the United States report, however, documented an important milestone. For the first time in the data (which goes back to 1955), total municipal water use actually went down, even as population rose by more than 10 million since the 2005 report. Conservation reductions are outpacing population growth in the United States.

Work begins this year on the next iteration of the USGS series. I’m looking forward to seeing whether 2015 continues the trend.

New Mexico’s population history, now with added sheeply goodness

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In response to my cattle v. people post earlier today, Tom Swetnam asked if I had data for sheep:

 

USDA’s data only go back to 1920, but it is as Tom suspected:

the decline of the sheep

the decline of the sheep

New Mexico population (cattle v. people) through history

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Lauren Villagran’s story in this morning’s Albuquerque Journal about the impact of the Boxing Day blizzard on New Mexico dairies is a reminder of the single most important trend in New Mexico agriculture in the last few decades – the remarkable growth of the state’s dairy industry. Some numbers on that below, but it reminded me of a point that one of my UNM Water Resources Program colleagues likes to make about our state’s history: across the 20th century, cattle outnumbered humans until 1984:

New Mexico cattle, New Mexico humans

New Mexico cattle, New Mexico humans

 

New Mexico dairy

For much of the state’s history, these were beef cattle, but the dairy industry here exploded beginning in the 1990s, with big industrial-scale operations taking advantage of economies of scale:

New Mexico dairy

New Mexico dairy

At $1.8 billion dollars per year in milk sales, dairy is by far the largest component of our agricultural sector. By comparison the largest single crop type, alfalfa, grossed $264 million in 2014. (source)

The dairy family Lauren interviewed are a good example of the scale involved. They run three dairies near Clovis on New Mexico’s east side, with a total of 10,000 producing cows. We’ve heard a widely quoted figure of 30,000 cows killed by the storm, which would be in the neighborhood of 10 percent of the state’s dairy herd, but Lauren’s story notes that’s just a WAG:

An estimate of 30,000 dead cows, quoted widely in the media, is speculative, said Hagevoort, Idsinga and officials with the Farm Service Agency. It is still too early to tell, Hagevoort said.

“That will tell you the extent of the storm,” he said. “We’re still trying to figure out where we’re at. It’s obvious the losses are extensive.”

a note on data and design: Cattle numbers from USDA’s NASS Quick Stats. Census data via FRED. The strange color scheme on the first graph is the colorblind pallet from Jeffrey Arnold’s excellent ggthemes toolkit for R graphics. I’ll be lecturing a bit in the spring semester on data visualization for the UNM Water Resources students, and I’m experimenting.

In Iraq, a problem like the Sacramento Delta, except with actual war

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In this week’s Science, Andrew Lawler reports from Basra (paywalled) on problems strikingly similar to the risks in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, as upstream water use shuts down a delta river discharge, allowing saltwater intrusion:

The Persian Gulf is creeping relentlessly up rivers and canals shrunken by water diversions upstream and by years of drought. The result is a growing crisis for farmers and the 2.5 million residents of Iraq’s booming southern metropolis of Basra. The rising salinity also threatens attempts to restore the region’s famous marshes—the most extensive wetlands in the Middle East—which nearly disappeared during the reign of Saddam Hussein.

“If we allow nature to take its course, the gulf will move inland,” says Ali Douabul, a marine chemist at the Marine Science Center at the University of Basra.

Preliminary forecast for above average flow on New Mexico’s Rio Grande

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With snow on the mountains to the north, the preliminary forecast circulated yesterday by the Natural Resources Conservation Service calls for 11 percent above average flow on the Rio Grande through central New Mexico into Elephant Butte reservoir. This is early in the season, so there are still huge error bars on the numbers, with the 90th percentile possibility at 75 percent above normal (meaning a one in ten chance it’ll be that high) and a 10th percentile forecast (again, one in ten on the low side) that it’ll 55 percent below.

The forecast calls for above average flows on every major river gauge measurement point in the state.

This is the best early season forecast since 2009.

The importance of local knowledge in groundwater management

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UC Davis’s Thomas Harter makes an important point in a recent Public Policy Institute of California blog post about California’s evolving effort to manage its groundwater:

The state’s new groundwater law requires locals to form groundwater sustainability agencies and develop sustainability plans, and it will be important for farmers and rural communities to actively engage in that process. Locals have a lot of information and ideas that regulators in Sacramento may never come up with, so working on this issue together is key.

PPIC’s fact sheet is a helpful overview of California’s current groundwater scene.

Turning on Davis Dam, 65 years ago tomorrow

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Davis Dam, courtesy USBR

Davis Dam, courtesy USBR

Davis Dam has always been overshadowed by its Lower Colorado River siblings – the scale of Hoover Dam, the striking architecture of Parker Dam, the ability of Imperial Dam to move all that water to the farms to the south and west. Davis mostly generates power, and power generation has always been a bit of a stepchild in western river management. Federal surveyors had scoped out the site, across Pyramid Canyon just upstream of Laughlin and Bullhead City, as early as 1902, but until Hoover Dam was built upstream to knock down the river’s peak flows, there was no point even trying to put a dam there.

It’s named after Arthur Powell Davis, head of the Bureau of Reclamation from 1914 to 1932, and you’ve got to love this old-school Bureau rhetoric explaining just who this Davis fellow was:

Davis was one of a small group of men whose courage, foresight and vision sparked the beginning of Colorado River development.

You can almost hear the patriotic music swelling in the background.

Turning on the power at Davis Dam

Poor Davis Dam, Interior Secretary Oscar Chapman couldn’t be bothered to show up in person, so they rigged a way for him to turn the power plant on by remote control, which he did on Jan. 5, 1951, 65 years ago tomorrow:

Davis-Mead bay of upper 230-KV switchyard. View west-southwest. - Davis Dam, Switchyards, Southeast of Davis Dam, Kingman, Mohave County, AZ, HAER AZ-77-A-5, courtesy Library of Congress

Davis-Mead bay of upper 230-KV switchyard. View west-southwest. – Davis Dam, Switchyards, Southeast of Davis Dam, Kingman, Mohave County, AZ, HAER AZ-77-A-5, courtesy Library of Congress

On January 5, 1951, Reclamation placed Unit 1 of the Davis power plant into service, when, from his office in Washington, D.C., Secretary of Interior Oscar Chapman pressed a telegraph key that transmitted the signal to Davis Dam, energizing power operations. Two weeks later, Unit 2 started for the first time, but its thrust bearings quickly overheated and the equipment failed. Maintenance crews put Unit 2 back into service by mid-April 1951. The remaining three generating units went on line from mid-April to mid-June 1951. The Davis 230-kV switchyard and transmission lines were fully operating facilities by the end of 1951.

That’s from the Park Service/Interior’s Historic American Engineering Record survey of Davis Dam, pdf. The HAER surveys are a terrific record of our nation’s built environment, and it’s where I often turn (via the Library of Congress photo archive) when I’m looking for photos to illustrate blog posts.