Flooding alfalfa to *save* water?

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Alfalfa, east side Phoenix, February 2015, by John Fleck

Alfalfa, east side Phoenix, February 2015, by John Fleck

University of California researchers have a novel idea: what if we dump more water on alfalfa and use that to recharge aquifers?

Over a six-week period in February, March and April, Dahlke oversaw a test in Siskiyou County in which 140 acre-feet of water were applied to 10 acres of alfalfa. That’s well over twice the amount of irrigation water the field typically gets in an entire year.

“It was just pouring into the ground,” Dahlke said.

The water percolated readily into the earth and the groundwater table in the vicinity of the farm rose quickly. Just as important: by June the alfalfa field that had been watered so heavily was just as healthy as a control plot. Alfalfa is known to “drown” if watered very heavily in summer months, but it appears that the winter dormancy of alfalfa is helping the crop to tolerate saturated soils for some time. Field trials near the UC Davis campus have corroborated the Siskiyou County results, Dahlke said, though additional tests in more soil types and warmer climates (e.g. the southern Central Valley) are needed.

The premise: recharge is good if you have the chance, but land set aside exclusively for the purpose is at a premium. But there’s plenty of alfalfa land where you could try this.

One more example of the adaptive capacity offered by the queen of forages.

Ten amazing weeks in the Colorado River Basin

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On the first of May, the official forecast for the 2015 water year on the Colorado River was 6.4 million acre feet. The July mid-month forecast is up to 10.2 million acre feet (pdf).

That’s been enough to prevent the need for a Lower Basin shortage declaration (which would have forced water curtailment in Arizona) in 2016, and very likely now in 2017 as well. Lake Mead remains at record lows, and the deeper structural deficit, in which Lower Basin states are using more water than the system can provide over the long run, remain, but this has bought some breathing room.

One hopes it is well used.

Eat when you can

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I joined the Albuquerque Journal in 1990 in what I now think of as “the golden age of journalism”. That’s shorthand for reliable access to expense account travel, but something more. If, as it often was, the story happened to be at a nuclear waste dump in southeastern New Mexico, or at an Air Force Base on the eastern plains, or a paleontological dig in the bootheel, a writer and a photographer would jump in a Ford Bronco and go. I do not, by this, mean luxurious or extravagant expense account travel. The Flume, the restaurant at the Stevens Inn in Carlsbad, New Mexico, is not an extravagant place. The extravagance was in the time, the freedom to go to places and spend time learning and thinking about them, a freedom that the culture and economics of the 21st century newspaper has constrained.

Richard Pipes, workin' it. Photo courtesy Randy Montoya

Richard Pipes, workin’ it. Photo courtesy Randy Montoya

Those writers who did these things at the Albuquerque Journal at that moment in history almost always did them with a photographer named Richard Pipes. For many years, Richard was the Journal’s road trip guy. The scheduling ritual was hilarious. If we wanted to plan a trip, we’d first check with the other road trip reporters to see who needed Richard when.

Richard was a pro, by which I mean two things. First, he always came back with the pictures we needed to tell our story. Second, he always knew where to eat, and always took responsibility for putting the meals on his company credit card. I was young and nervous about my place in the organization, and my place in the business of making news for readers. On both counts – getting the news, and justifying the expense reports – Richard gave me confidence.

Richard taught me some basic rules of journalism that have held me in good stead:

  • Eat when you can.
  • Pee when you can.
  • Always bring something to read.

But here is the most important thing I learned. When we got to a place, Richard would go through his ritual of assembling the camera gear – two camera bodies, more lenses, film (yes). Then there was a second phase of the ritual that I was slow to grasp but, once learned, became the most important thing Richard taught me. His eyes would dart around, looking for the first picture, and he wouldn’t relax until he was sure he had at least one thing in the camera that would work. Then he would settle, and we’d keep working for hours (sometimes days) in an easier rhythm. But he was never quite happy until that moment when he knew he had an image that would carry us if suddenly we had to stop working and go home. Once you’ve got that, you can always make it better, but you never come home empty handed.

Richard was one of many photographers I’ve worked with in my years as a journalist, relationships that I treasure. There is something about the bond of writer and photographer collaborating on a story, and I don’t mean to single out Richard’s skills here as a photojournalist. Richard’s place was special to me because he was at my side during a most important time in my life, teaching me and taking pictures for my stories and putting our dinner on the company card.

Richard died Sunday. Sad face.

updated 7/24/2015 with a nice picture Randy Montoya sent me of Richard working

Coachella groundwater management: it’s complicated

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Aquifer replenishment works. Sort of. And depending on what you mean by “works”.

That’s the message in a new paper ($$$-walled) from Brian Thomas and Jay Famiglietti at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory looking at groundwater levels in California’s Coachella Valley.

Replenishmnet (lower block dots), groundwater levels (upper line)

Replenishmnet (lower block dots), groundwater levels (upper line)

Coachella is the northwestern extension of the Salton trough, edging the Salton Sea and spreading up across some pretty sweet desert farm land (add irrigation water and you get dates!) into the golfy oases of Palm Springs. With very little surface water (it’s a desert), it depended for years on unsustainable groundwater pumping. Unsurprisingly, groundwater levels dropped. But beginning in the 1970s, Coachella followed a well-trod path in the West – the use of imported water to recharge depleting aquifers (see LA, Albuquerque, Central Arizona, etc. for other models of this approach, which have worked with varying degrees of success).

As the graph shows, the overall average groundwater level in the basin appears to have “recovered” to ’round about the level it was at in the 1970s when the recharge efforts began. But the key point in the new Thomas and Famiglietti paper is that aquifers and complicated, and a single overall average is misleading. It’s not like a big lake down there, with water easily moving about hither and yon. If you’re an individual pumper, you’re not pumping from the “Average Groundwater”, you’re pumping from a particular spot.

Coachella groundwater levels, 1960-2013

Coachella groundwater levels, 1960-2013

And their spatial work showing where aquifers are rising and falling shows that replenishment is concentrated in a couple of areas, with a large area in between where the aquifer is falling.

This is where governance becomes important. This map shows a region that will succeed or fail depending on the adaptive capacity provided by its water governance structure to move water around, share surplus and shortage, and create the needed equity among the pumpers and water users of a heterogeneous community. The authors write:

Despite a legally complex mix of agreements to secure surface water allocations for groundwater replenishment and irrigation, the spatial patterns of overdraft remain evident.

The paper is:

Thomas, Brian F., and James S. Famiglietti. “Sustainable Groundwater Management in the Arid Southwestern US: Coachella Valley, California.” Water Resources Management (2015): 1-16.

Groundwater in Albuquerque: rising

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USGS groundwater monitoring well 350534106354701, Albuquerque, New Mexico

USGS groundwater monitoring well 350534106354701, Albuquerque, New Mexico

A couple of blocks from my Albuquerque home is Del Sol Park, but everyone in the neighborhood calls it “Twin Parks”, because of the short street that divides it in two. On one side of that street, a nondescript concrete pad marks the spot where the U.S. Geological Survey measures the depth to groundwater beneath our part of Albuquerque.

When I started writing about water for the Albuquerque Journal, the community was in the early stages of a $500 million experiment – a shift beginning in late 2008 to river water as our primary source of drinking water, away from an over reliance on groundwater that was draining our aquifer. And so, doing journalism, I started watching the data from the USGS network of groundwater monitoring stations, especially Del Sol. (If the USGS is measuring the groundwater beneath your house, it’s a good benchmark, right?) I confess: I was waiting for the experiment to fail, and to write the story about how our attempt to save our aquifer wasn’t working. But by 2011, the data convinced me that the effort was succeeding. In my neighborhood, an aquifer that was declining a foot every couple of years has risen nearly 20 feet, a pattern seen all over town:

 

Depth to Groundwater, Del Sol Park, Albuquerque

You can still see the impact of pumping in the graph’s squiggles, as the aquifer drops in summer and rises in winter. We’re not off of groundwater completely, and never will be. But the overall trend is headed in the right direction. It’s driven in part by the fact that, unlike a lot of western states, New Mexico recognizes the connection between groundwater and surface water in our water rights administration. Yay us!

Oh yeah, and in addition to shifting to surface water, Albuquerque’s per capita water consumption has dropped in the last two decades from about 250 gallons per capita per day to what could be as low as 130 this year. So there’s that.

And also oh yeah, it rained this evening.

Just some hopeful notes on a Sunday evening in our droughty summer of discontent.

Yuma: Colorado River produce powerhouse

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William Yardley writes in the Los Angeles Times about the water rights and water fears in Yuma, Arizona:

If you eat a green salad between Thanksgiving and April, whether in Minnesota, Montreal or Modesto, odds are good that some of it was grown in or around Yuma.

The summer freshness on all of those winter plates reflects the marvel of engineering the Colorado has become — and why managing the river in the Southwest’s changing landscape seems so daunting.

Palm trees and durum wheat, Gila Valley east of Yuma

Palm trees and durum wheat, Gila Valley east of Yuma, by John Fleck, April 2015

I’m glad to see Yuma get its due. I’ve spent a bunch of time there in the last few years, and it’ll feature prominently in my book, because it’s both historically important (early river crossings always are, stuff grows up around them and influences the human geography that comes after) and because, as Yardley explains, its farming has become a critical piece of the Colorado River water puzzle. Per acre, Yuma and the Imperial County across the river are the most valuable farm land in the Colorado River Basin. That’s one of a number of lines of evidence suggesting that, in economic terms, they’re putting their water to good use. But for better or worse (often worse) Imperial seems to get most of the press.

Notably, the shift to winter produced described in Yardley’s story has been accompanied by a significant reduction in water use in Yuma, even as farmers are making more money. This isn’t a water policy-driven water conservation story. This is an agricultural economics-driven water conservation story. This is why I’m so interested in understanding and writing about Yuma (and the story of Imperial in California, where water use also is down, though for more complex reasons).

red lettuce, Yuma County, Arizona, April 2015, by John Fleck

red lettuce, Yuma County, Arizona, April 2015, by John Fleck

The deal here is that Yuma has some of the best rights on the Colorado River, meaning that under the law, as the river gets lower and lower, the Yuma County farmers continue to get water while other people get cut off. Other people in particular meaning the greater Phoenix metro area. This worries the Yumans*:

They know they have water priority but not necessarily political priority.

“They believe there’s a target on their backs,” said Tom Buschatzke, who leads the Arizona Department of Water Resources. “I believe they’re right.”

Farmers here do not intend to go quietly. Some come from families that were here when the big cities of the modern Southwest were little more than crossroads.

“We have a legal right to this,” said Mark Smith, who farms about 500 acres in Yuma and leads one of six irrigation districts in the area. “The guys who say this is an easy fix — it’s not an easy fix. We’re growing vital crops.”

I heard a lot of talk when I was in Yuma along these lines, fears about the target on their back. I personally don’t see the risk as great. For reasons that I’ll argue in detail in the book, I think the only way water moves out of the Yuma area to other purposes will be on the Yuma farmers’ and water districts’ own terms. I don’t see the big metro areas taking it by force.

But that’s just me. No doubt Tom Buschatzke knows much better than I what the risks are, so I’ll defer to his judgment about target placement.

If you’re down there in the winter, be sure to drive across the river to Bard, too, and stop off at one of the blood orange stands. Yum. It’s technically in California, but it’s really part of the greater Yuma farming community, and it’s especially lovely. I mean, I realize irrigated desert farming is an acquired taste, but I’ve grown quite fond of the place.

* Yup. They’re called “Yumans”. The name derives from the native people who have lived here a really long time. Before the European immigrants moved in and muscled them out of the way, the Yumans practiced flood recession farming, starting to plant as the high water from the spring floods receded and following the water down, planting in the wet soil as the river dwindled through the summer. I love Yuma.

How I ended the New Mexico drought

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I would like to point out that the first six months of 2015, which roughly coincides with the time since I quite writing about drought for the Albuquerque Journal, have seen the wettest statewide average precipitation since the epic year of 1941:

Courtesy National Centers for Environmental Information

Courtesy National Centers for Environmental Information

You’re welcome, and you have my deepest apologies for not doing this sooner.

Risks of 2016 Colorado River shortage declaration pretty much gone, risks of 2017 also shrinking

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The Bureau of Reclamation’s latest 24-month study, out this afternoon (pdf), shows continued improvement on the Colorado River system’s big reservoirs as a result of the hella rainy spring and summer, and therefore a continued reduction in the risk of a Lower Basin shortage declaration.

the May precipitation anomalies that bailed out the Colorado

the May precipitation anomalies that bailed out the Colorado

The number to watch is a Lake Mead elevation of 1,075, and the date to watch is January 1. The forecast in the latest 24-month study puts us at 1,082.12 on Jan. 1, 2016. That means that unless something crazy happens, like El Chapo’s tunnel dudes drill a hole in the bottom of Hoover Dam and steal 700,000 acre feet of water, it looks like a 2016 shortage declaration is completely off the table.

For 2017, things are also looking better. The current 24-month forecast puts it at 1,078.13 on Jan. 1, 2017, three feet above the danger line. That’s the midpoint of the forecast, meaning that there’s a better than 50-50 chance we won’t have a shortage in 2017. Three feet is not much, so the risk is clearly non-zero. The Bureau’s been running more sophisticated probability analyses, but I haven’t seen them, so I don’t know what the numbers say.