Due to a logjam in interstate negotiations for massive cuts in Colorado River water deliveries, farmers and urban users have no idea how much water use they’ll be ordered to cut, possibly starting next year.
TUCSON, Ariz. — Robbie Woodhouse’s grandfather began nearly a century of family farming along the Gila River near Yuma in the middle 1920s when he dug up a bunch of mesquite stumps on his land to make way for his barley, wheat, Bermuda seed, cotton and melon fields.
All the Yuma area irrigation districts depend entirely on Colorado River water to nourish their crops. While groundwater does lie beneath many of the farm fields, its quality is uncertain or poor in many places. The uncertainty was triggered first in June, when Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton testified at a U.S. Senate Committee hearing that to stabilize the river’s declining reservoirs Lakes Mead and Powell, the basin states need to cut their water use by roughly up to 30% starting in 2023, and come up with a plan to do that by mid-August. If a plan doesn’t appear by then, she warned the federal government would impose its own, to “protect the system.
“What we want to have happen is for each individual farmer to operate their farms in the matter that they want to operate and plant the crops that they feel they can maintain the fertility of their soils,” he said. “I’m sure it’s going to greatly change crop rotations and also change management practices of individual farmers, to exist on less water. It’s real important that those decisions be left to each individual farm.
“Reclamation has got to show some leadership and say this has got to be done and give us a guide map as to how the system is protected as the commissioner promised what it would be,” Noble said. Until now, it’s left almost 600,000 other acre-feet of its CAP supply in Mead since 2016. In 2022 alone, CAP users and other Arizona Colorado River users left nearly 800,000 acre-feet in Mead, led by 512,000 acre-feet it legally had to leave there under the terms of the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan due to the lake’s falling levels.
“There will be a larger portion of groundwater” used in the future, said Baumgardner, adding that city officials won’t know how much until they learn how drastic the cuts in CAP deliveries will be.
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In Arizona, worry about access to Colorado River waterTUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — Robbie Woodhouse’s grandfather began nearly a century of family farming along the Gila River near Yuma in the middle 1920s when he dug up a bunch of mesquite stumps on his land to make way for his barley, wheat, Bermuda seed, cotton and melon fields.
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