Albuquerque’s “Barr Irrigation District”, circa July 2022

Barr Irrigation District

The home of the ill-fated “Barr Irrigation District” is not one of Albuquerque’s scenic destinations.

Perched on low sand hills between Albuquerque’s soft industrial underbelly and the city’s “Sunport” (our marketing appellation for what a lesser metropolis might call an “airport”), the old irrigation district land is today home to an interstate, a power plant, a couple petroleum tank farms, junkyards, and “Fresh and Clean Portable Restrooms”.

But in 1912, when the Barr Irrigation District first glimmered in the eyes of Albuquerque boosters, it was going to “transform the central Rio Grande valley into a veritable garden spot.” A thousand acres of crops, “marketed here for home consumption and shipment” would be “the best thing for Albuquerque’s growth and prosperity” – “a rich agricultural district with this city as the center and distributing point”. (Albuquerque Journal, Jan. 13, 1912)

All that was needed was water, and H.J. Buell, an “irrigation expert” down from Denver, had the answer – “a pumping system operated by electric power”!

“Water in abundance is found at comparatively shallow depth,” the Albuquerque Journal explained in January 1912. The Journal suggested a great “free water” racket to support the enterprise: farmers could sell their rights to surface water flowing through ditches “for a substantial sum” and use the money to build more pumps and irrigate more land. (Research note: This is one of the earliest references I’ve found to sale of water rights in the valley as an economic scheme.)

As near as we can tell, a few farmers did, in fact, sign up with Buell and pump water up to the sandhills. But as the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District made farming in the valley below more attractive by draining swampland and re-jiggering the irrigation works, the project faltered. In the ensuing years, the low sandhill area was institionally reconfigured as the ~800-ish acre “Barr Irrigation District”, the the scheme shifted from pumping groundwater to making the area an extension of the Conservancy District’s existing valley floor irrigation system, pumping ditch water instead.

Like much about the valley’s irrigation schemes, success hinged on find a source of “other people’s money” to pay for it, and when efforts at procuring federal cash failed in the 1930s, the Barr Irrigation District faded from view.

Themes from the book

Two holiday weekend diversions took me into this part of the valley south of Albuquerque – me on a Canada Day weekend bike ride with Scot, and Bob in the archives after I returned from the ride and peppered him with questions. (Having a Regents Professor with mad skills as my “research assistant” for the new book is a pretty sweet perk of the current project. Plus #GeographyByBike – Scot’s importance as a research assistant in this part of the project is crucial.)

Down the hill from the never-realized Barr Irrigation District is the Barr Canal. It’s one of those Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District ditches that has a distinctly “modern” feel – the sharp straight lines of 1920s engineering superimposed over the meanders that went before.

When I say this part of our valley might not qualify as one of Albuquerque’s scenic destinations, I say so with tongue slightly askew. It’s actually an aesthetically fascinating area, a strange mix of Charles Sheeler-esque industrial majesty, movie-set post-apocalyptic junk, and farm. My crazy GPS bike riding map games suggested this was an under-explored piece of Albuquerque, a shortcoming that, with Scot’s help, I’m working to correct.

This part of the junkyard included piles of junked dumpsters. It looked like the graffiti was applied before the container’s arrival.

Scot and I this weekend rode up the Barr from the south, where it cuts through the Albuquerque Metal Recycling yards. ‘Round the back, the Barr splits the main recycling yard from its more post-apocalyptic back acres, the place where the junk yard seems to junk its junk.

It includes trashed trucks from UPS and Federal Express, and (my favorite part) an area devoted to junked dumpsters.

Mostly it was just a bike ride, but when we’re riding the valley floor, there really is no such thing as “just a bike ride”. I’m puzzling out the geography of the valley floor – why some places are homes and twisty streets, some areas were left as big farm fields, and some places got stuck with the city’s junkyards.

In his fascinating new book Tributary Voices, Paul Formisano takes on the stories we’ve been telling ourselves about the colonial watering of the west:

Striving to return to the garden once lost through the Fall, nineteenth-century beliefs about the arid West dictated man’s divine right to drastically alter the region for the onward march of progress and civilization.

Standing alongside Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier myth, the garden myth spilled awkwardly into 20th century Albuquerque in places like the Barr Irrigation District.

I don’t know that the Barr and this stretch of Albuquerque’s southeast valley will make it into the new book Bob and I are writing (Ribbons of Green: The Rio Grande and the Making of a Modern American City, available several years from now, once we finish writing it, at a fine bookseller near you). We have too many stories already. But it illustrates a bunch of our central themes.

• The myths of agriculture: Albuquerque and the surrounding Rio Grande Valley may never have had the dreamy agricultural past to which the boosters claimed they wanted to return, and to which the modern water policy boosters still often mythologize. But true or not, the vision shaped the city we became.
• The role of institutions: In addition to the Barr Irrigation District, this part of the valley was home to the brief life of something called the “South Albuquerque Drainage District”. Formed in 1920, the District never seems to have gotten off the ground, and was subsumed into the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District when it was formed in the years that followed. In developing our water management institutions, scale mattered.
• The greening (junkyarding?) of the valley floor: The once-swampy lowlands of the valley floor were changed forever when the Conservancy District’s draglines sliced through in the 1930s, digging the low-lying ditches we call “drains” that were the district’s most important accomplishment.

The greening of the valley floor

Junkyards and farms along the Barr Canal, Albuquerque, 2022

This stretch of the Barr is my new favorite Albuquerque ditchbank ride (sorry, Los Griegos!).

Up from Rossmoor Road, passage through the junkyard and into the old Schwartzman farm is weird. Smashed cars being ground up for scrap to right of us, scrapped UPS trucks to the left of us, the Barr in between running full and happy right now, and up ahead, one of the last big commercial alfalfa fields in the county being cut.

On lands that seem not to have been farmed or even settled during Albuquerque’s colonial period, the farm and the junkyard sit on land that was an old stockyard and meat processing plant run until the early 1980s by the Schwartzman family. While the sandy soil and lack of drainage may have made this part of the valley relatively less attractive than Astrisco and surrounding villages across the river, the railyards, and then drainage, made the area ideal for Albuquerque’s industrial underbelly.

The Schwartzman land has been slowly but surely carved up in recent decades, but when Scot and I left the awkward confines of the junkyards onto an open ditchbank flanked by fields, a farmer was still on the land, spending their Canada Day holiday weekend methodically cutting hay.

Rio Grande at Albuquerque, June 20, 2022

Where peaceful Rivers soft and slow
Amid the verdant Landskip flow.

– Addison

My friend Mary Harner, who loves and thinks about rivers more/better than anyone I know, is in town.

We found time this morning for a walk along our shared passion, the Rio Grande. After 78 days without rain, the monsoon bloomed on Friday, and it’s been raining since.

I sat on a downed snag poking over a muddy river as we talked. I picked idly at the moist, crumbling top layer of wood.

Moist.

Smelled good.

The Chamisal Lateral, a shady oasis in Los Ranchos de Albuquerque.

In a sad but important way, the disastrous 2022 water year has been a gift to the writer, and I’m spending as much time as I can in reporter mode, sussing out the stories of this remarkable year.

In the new book we’re writing, Bob Berrens and I are trying to make sense of the decisions Albuquerque has made over the last century to live on the Rio Grande Valley floor – we shape river, and  the river shapes us.

2022 is a test. There is less water, a lot less. What will we do? What will this place look like as climate change makes years like this less exception and more norm?

This morning’s bike ride took me through the middle of my hypothesis, a transect across the hydrogeography of Albuquerque – up the river valley through the community of Los Ranchos de Albuquerque, then out onto the riverside trails.

Los Ranchos was leafy and green. The riverside woods were parched, and the river itself, the part flowing between the levees, is at the lowest it’s been at this point in the year since 1989.

For those alarmed by the dropping river, and perhaps struck by the contrast with the buccolic, tree-lined Chamisal Lateral in the picture above, it’s worth considering why things are this way. Because it occurred to me as I enjoyed the shady lanes of Los Ranchos and then looked on at the dull agony of a drying river that this system is, in fact, working as designed.

We have a set of rules, encoded in state legislation and state and county implementation policy and therefore (I guess?) reflective of our collective values as a community that are designed to keep Los Ranchos green while allowing the river to go dry.

Rules as Water Management Design Principles Case 1: Domestic Wells

In 1953, the New Mexico legislature passed its first domestic well statute:

By reason of the varying amounts and time such water is used and the relatively small amounts of water consumed in the watering of livestock, in irrigation of not to exceed one [1] acre of noncommercial trees, lawn or garden; in household or other domestic use, …  the state engineer shall issue a permit to the applicant to so use the waters applied for.

The statute has changed over the years a bit, but its basic principle still applies. If you want to drill a domestic well at your house, you get to.

The New Mexico Office of the State Engineer does have the authority to declare something called a Domestic Well Management Area “when hydrologic conditions require added protections to prevent impairment to valid, existing surface water rights”, but that has not been done here. (Source, p. 33)

The result is a valley floor pockmarked with domestic well permits, allowing people to use water from the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority for indoor use, and water their lovely yards from a shallow  domestic well. But remember, those shallow aquifers are in direct connection with the river. This is basically water coming straight out of the river.

If our rules are a codification of our values and intentions, it seems here that our intention is to keep the valley floor green in times of drought. If it isn’t, we need to change the rules.

Rules as Water Management Design Principles Case 2: The Agricultural Tax Break

Our crazy smart UNM Water Resources Program student Annalise Porter recently finished a relevant piece of work on the agricultural property tax break irrigators get on the valley floor here in the greater Albuquerque  metro area. Annalise defended in the spring, and is writing an expanded version of the project for a paper for publication. Soon! I think it’s really important stuff.

I rode down street after street today of affluent Los Ranchos homes colored pink on my version of Annalise’s maps – horse pastures, hayfields, one in sunflowers, all getting the tax break. This is not commercial agriculture, or “subsistence farming”, as one court ruling suggested was the intention of the 1967 state statute. These are hobby farms.

We have a set of rules – a state statute, implemented by our local county government, that is providing a financial incentive for this use of water, which Annalise estimates at ~10,000 acre feet per year in Bernalillo County.

Ribbons of Green

The title of the proto-book is Ribbons of Green, after a line in John Van Dyke’s oddly dishonest masterpiece The Desert. In our work, Bob and I are playing with a theme – that we make progress by thinking of “the river” as more than the narrow strip that flows between the levees. Our notion of the river includes the water we move out across the valley floor – the ditches, the shallow aquifers from which we pump to water valley yards, a culturally and biologically rich and complex system lain across a valley floor where an unencumbered river once spread spring floodwaters on its own.

It is interesting to think about what the ribbons will look like five years from now, or ten. Between the levees, in the river’s main channel, the die seems cast – we’ve apparently decided as a community that we’re fine with letting it dry. Maybe Texas will have a say in what comes next – sooner or later our Rio Grande Compact obligation to get water downstream to Texas will require us to put more water into the river channel, perhaps reducing the Los Ranchos blanket of green in the process. Or reducing the green somewhere. Riverside bosque? Farms?

Perhaps the struggle to help the dwindling Rio Grande silvery minnow, our Endangered Species icon, will lead to more water in the river and less in Los Ranchos (or less somewhere).

On my book research bike rides (such a racket!), I have come to stop random ditch walkers and yard waterers and engage them in idle conversation. In general, they love the green, have little idea where the water is coming from, and are delighted with the current situation.

The Compact or the Endangered Species Act as drivers may ultimately change things, but they are something different from our community values. As seen in the Water Management Design Principles above, we seem fine with spreading the green outside across the valley floor while letting the part of the river between the levees, its main channel, go dry.

If it were otherwise, we’d have different rules.

Ditch lobster in a drying Griegos Lateral, Albuquerque, June 9, 2022

Sorry I didn’t have the presence of mind to give you something for scale. This little critter was a a bit smaller than my hand, crawling along the bottom of the drying Griegos Lateral, one of the 1700s-era irrigation ditches on the Albuquerque Rio Grande Valley floor.

Drying kind early this year, because climate change.

The PhD’s at the Inkstain Science Laboratory can’t agree on the spelling – “crayfish” or “crawfish”. I’m going with “ditch lobster”.

2022’s gonna be a tough year for the ditch lobsters.

For a brief moment, this was Albuquerque’s “Tobacco Farms”. Before that, a swamp.

Albuquerque’s nod to its agricultural past, like much of the style we have adopted for ourselves, is in significant measure artifice. This is not to say that it is not in some vague sense rooted in a truth, an actual past. But we engage in the 21st century in significant embellishment, a story we spin out on the land.

One of the last large farms in the urban part of this stretch of the Rio Grande, “greater Albuquerque”, is in what we call the “South Valley”. It’s ~350 acres of alfalfa, broken in two, separated by a Walmart and an uncrossably, dangerously busy highway. (This is your bike riding author’s humble assessment, having tried on more than one occasion to cross from one part of the farm to the other without aid of automobile. Do not try this without the aid of a skilled South Valley guide.)

Some of the land is in private hands, a proto-development with alfalfa parked on the land (the owner gets a good tax break) until the market hits that point of equilibrium where building stuff on it makes sense. The rest is in public ownership, an enthusiastic but perhaps historically misguided civic sense of self, directed toward preservation of an agrarian past that, while real, looked very different than the picture above.

The early 20th century property records bear an odd name: “Consumers Tobacco Co.” The old maps also show something very different than what we see today – swamps, and lakes. “Water surface variable, very high this date. Aug. 29, 1927”, one of the old maps reads.

The tobacco name lingers in “Tobacco Farms LLC”, the legal owner of a good fraction of the land.

The swamps and lakes are long gone, drained away by deep ditches dug nearly a century ago to turn swamp into a tobacco-farming empire.

Like so many of this valley’s attempts at landing on a successful commercial crop – large scale wheat farming, tomatoes, pinto beans, orchards, sugar beets – this did not go well.

Tobacco Farms

Albuquerque Journal, March 11, 1928

The advertisement in the March 11, 1928 Albuquerque Journal seems profoundly out of place.

The signatories, the members of a consortium that in in the 1920s had formed the Consumers Tobacco Company, were an odd assortment for an agricultural enterprise – an insurance agency owner, a lawyer, four developers of subdivisions in the burgeoning area around downtown Albuquerque, a warehousing and shipping firm, the Albuquerque Gas and Electric Co., and the First National Bank.

The ad was one of many run by this group of civic boosters. Why were they – no farmers themselves – so enamored with a crop that seemed so out of place in the arid West? The answer can be found in the advertisement’s words attributed to the First National Bank: “Any crop that can increase the per acre yield of the acreage we have under cultivation will react to the benefit of the farmer and the community alike.”

That “benefit … to the community” was the key. That’s why a bunch of housing developers thought tobacco was the answer to Albuquerque’s future.

These people were pursuing Albuquerque’s destiny as a great city. The citizens of this growing metropolis needed jobs, and a contemporary understanding of the economic structure of the day – remember this was the 1920s – saw those jobs in a “Von Thunen Ring” of farming around the city. Never mind that by the 1920s Albuquerque’s food was arriving by rail, and local agriculture even then could not compete. The economic structure of the nation was shifting beneath their feet, and it was hard for the Kelehers and Clinton P. Andersons of the day to see beyond the confines of their paradigm.

Draining the swamps

Circa 1927, a plan to drain the swamps around “Hubbell Lake”

To build that city, these civic entrepreneurs needed to drain the swamps that made up the bulk of the land on the valley floor.

“It’s pretty hard to develop economically in a marsh,” New Mexico State Engineer Steve Reynolds said years later.

The most successful crop in the Middle Rio Grande – mortgages

This is the heart of the book Bob Berrens and I are writing (credit here to Bob for the work we’ve been doing on the Tobacco Farms story – Bob’s the smart guy, I’m the literary muscle, a bouncer standing at the door of the Ribbons of Green nightclub deciding which stories to let in). To understand Albuquerque’s pivot in the 1920s from swampy valley to booming city, Bob and I have been spending an inordinate amount of time staring at three sets of old maps. (Huge thanks to the staff at the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District for helping us with the complete map sets.)

If you look at the Tobacco Farms maps, you see swamps, and lakes, and a bold straight line drawn through the middle of the page – “Isleta Interior Drain”. It’s deceptively simple – dig a big ditch through the marshland to lower the water table, and voila – swamp becomes farmable land!

But the deception is perhaps in the goal? If you compare the list of names on the newspaper ad above, the founders of Consumers Tobacco Company, you see not farmers but developers. You also see, crucially, a who’s who of the backers of the creation of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District.

And if you head east across the 1927 maps, you see something striking. Before the drains were even built, while they were still dreams in the eyes of the Kelehers and Clinton P. Andersons, a carefully platted tract of homes: “Tobacco Farm Subdivision”. Immediately to the east is another ditch – “Atrisco Riverside Drain”.

We see this up and down the valley – even as the rhetoric (and some of our modern mythology?) suggests an attempt salvage and boost agriculture on the valley floor, a network of drains, and subdivision after subdivision being platted on the resulting newly reclaimed swampland.

In the 1929 census, tobacco peaked at 15 acres in Bernalillo County, never to be seen again.

Tobacco Farm Subdivision remains.