Vollman on the economics of Imperial Valley farming

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Imperial Valley housing development, east of Brawley, March 2014

Imperial Valley housing development, east of Brawley, March 2014


Driving up through the Imperial Valley in March, I chanced upon this example of the fading hopes of the town of Brawley.

In his maddeningly intriguing book Imperial, William Vollman briefly slips out of the obtuse into this rare moment of clarity:

When I began to study the history of the period, my mind remained unbiased by knowledge. All I knew was that somehow Imperial County had altered from being one of the richest bits of farmland in the United States to the poorest county in California, and I couldn’t fathom how.

Ghost ship in the blue haze

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Shiprock in the distant haze, seen from Far View, Mesa Verde, May 2014, by John Fleck

Shiprock in the distant haze, seen from Far View, Mesa Verde, May 2014, by John Fleck

 

I was a little kid when I first saw Shiprock, the great volcanic neck on the northeastern edge of Navajo country, and I’ve been staring at it from all conceivable angles, in fascination, ever since.

Most days you can see it through the distant haze from Mesa Verde, the plateau to the north, but only just barely, mysteriously.

Clarence Dutton, in his 1882 “Physical Geology of the Grand Cañon District“, wonderfully described the quality of the light:

Those who are familiar with western scenery have no doubt been impressed with the peculiar character of its haze or atmosphere in the artistic sense of the word and have noted its more prominent qualities. When the air is free from common smoke it has a pale blue color which is quite unlike the neutral gray of the east.

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: El Niño and the carnival barker

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I’ve tried lots of different things to try to communicate the inherent uncertainties (at all time scales) in the forecast business. Here’s another stab at the problem:

I feel a little like a cheap carnival barker foretelling you this, but FYI, it looks like El Niño is coming.

New Mexico water managers, grappling with their fourth straight year of drought, have a tired look in their eyes. Mention El Niño and you’ll see a spark of life. That is because the Pacific climate pattern with the lyrical name is associated with wetter weather.

Step right up folks, come see the Amazing El Niño, bringer of moisture to the parched state of New Mexico! You’ll thrill to its crashing thunderstorms, its snowpacked mountains and brimming rivers!

But you saw what I did there, right? “Is associated with wetter weather.” Already with the weasel words. The carnival barker in me is excited, but the cautious journalist in me has been talking with cautious scientists. El Niño comes with no guarantees.

Mead, Powell to end year at lowest storage since 1968

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The total combined storage in Lake Mead and Lake Powell at the end of September (the close of the “water year”) will be the lowest since 1968, when Powell was first being filled, according to the latest U.S. Bureau of Reclamation “24-Month Study” (pdf).

The current forecast calls for Lake Mead’s elevation to be 1,077.93 feet above sea level on Dec. 31, 2015, which is less than three feet above the trigger level for a shortage in 2016. That’s a little less than last month’s number. (See here for the background on how the shortage decision is made.)

Here’s the data:

water in the desert

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New River outside Brawley, Calif., March 2014, by John Fleck

New River outside Brawley, Calif., March 2014, by John Fleck

But man has in measure changed the desert conditions by storing the waste waters of the mountains and reclaiming the valleys by irrigation. His success has been phenomenal. Out of the wilderness there have sprung farms, houses, towns, cities with their wealth and luxury. But the cultivated conditions are maintained only at the price of eternal vigilance. Nature is compelled to reap where she has not sown and at times she seems almost human in the way she rebels and recurs to former conditions. Two, three; yes, at times, four years in succession she gives little rain. A great drouth follows. Then the desert breaks in upon the valley ranches, upon the fields of barley, the orchards of prunes and peaches and apricots. Then abandoned farms are quite as plentiful as in New England and once abandoned but a few years elapse before the desert has them for its own.

John Van Dyke, The Desert, 1901

Canoeing the Rio Grande pulse flow

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This guy paddled past today as I was standing with friends on the bank of the Rio Grande, watching the high flows of this week’s environmental pulse flow through central New Mexico.

Guy with canoe, bicycle, trailer, on the high flow of the Rio Grande, May 10, 2014

Guy with canoe, bicycle, trailer, on the high flow of the Rio Grande, May 10, 2014


If you look closely, you can see a bicycle in the front of his canoe. As he rode by, he explained that when he gets to the takeout, he puts the canoe on a trailer behind the bike and tows it back up to where he left his car.

There’s a bike trail along the river the whole way. This seems quite clever.

Rio Grande pulse flow

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I had work to do this morning, but this happened and I couldn’t very well not go watch:

Rio Grande pulse flow water in silvery minnow channel, Albuquerque, May 2014, by John Fleck

Rio Grande pulse flow water in silvery minnow channel, Albuquerque, May 2014, by John Fleck

It’s an environmental pulse flow on the Rio Grande through Albuquerque, creeping down a channel built in 2008 to provide spawning habitat for the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow.

This is the fourth consecutive very dry year on the Rio Grande here, with March-July runoff at Otowi, the gauge that measures flow into the central New Mexico Rio Grande Valley, forecast at just 29 percent of the 1981-2010 average. One of the keys to spawning and therefore survival of the silvery minnow (our key endangered critter) is a spring pulse of runoff, so water managers pulled off some clever accounting tricks to conjure up 18,000 acre feet of water to give the minnows an extra boost.

It’s not a huge amount of water, but it’s nearly a 10 percent boost, so it’s not nothing, either.

The release from Cochiti Dam, the flood control structure at the head of the middle valley, started at 10 a.m. yesterday, and the water hit the Albuquerque reach of the river after midnight. I went out this morning only intending to give the flows a quick look, because I had work to do. But, oh my, a river.

There’s an old farm channel in the woods along the river near our Rio Grande Nature Center that’s been widened and adapted to take on water with moderate spring flows, and when I arrived this morning the water was just beginning to creep down its sandy bed. It was very dry – as near as I can tell from the gauges, it likely hasn’t flowed since mid-September.

I ran into Mickey Porter, a fish biologist with the Army Corps of Engineers, who was setting out temperature sensors. (More on the work blog.) He and his colleagues will be out monitoring over the next few days, and he told me he thinks we could see spawning by tomorrow afternoon or Saturday.

This has a lot of similarities to the Minute 319 Colorado River pulse I’ve written so much about – a small amount of water but a very rich and complex deal to pull it off. Similar to the Colorado deal, we won’t know until later, but I suspect that the institutional piece – representatives of all the agencies involved collectively figure out how to pull this off – that may be the more important result of the effort. Another similarity – how absolutely mesmerizing it is to watch water creep slowly across dry land. One more picture:

Water, creeping down the silvery minnow channel, Albuquerque, May 2014, by John Fleck

Water, creeping down the silvery minnow channel, Albuquerque, May 2014, by John Fleck

Sandra Postel on new Colorado River initiative

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Sandra Postel has some interesting insights regarding the proposed Colorado River System Conservation Program:

$11 million is a drop in the bucket of what is needed to achieve meaningful conservation savings in the Colorado River Basin.  And each of the four cities has substantially more conservation they can do within their own borders.  But what is unique about this program is its “we’re in this together” approach….

By collaboratively creating an incentive for basin-wide conservation, the big four urban water users and the Bureau of Reclamation have an opportunity to bring more resilience and adaptability to the drought-stricken, overtapped Colorado River.