Rivers of muddy water from heavy rainfall raced through city streets as thousands of people evacuated homes downhill from California’s wildfire burn scars amid atmospheric river storms drenching the state in early January 2023.
The evacuations at one point included all of Montecito, home to around 8,000 people – and the site of the state’s deadliest mudslide on record exactly five years earlier.
Wildfire burn scars are particularly risky because wildfires strip away vegetation and make the soil hydrophobic – meaning it is less able to absorb water. A downpour on these vulnerable landscapes can quickly erode the ground, and fast-moving water can carry the debris, rocks and mud with it.
I study cascading hazards like this, in which consecutive events lead to human disasters. Studies show climate change is raising the risk of multiple compound disasters, including new research showing increasing risks to energy infrastructure.
When storms hit burn scars
Five years ago, on Jan. 9, 2018, a deadly cascading disaster struck Montecito, a community in the coastal hills near Santa Barbara.
The cascade of events had started many months earlier with a drought, followed by a wet winter that fueled dense growth of vegetation and shrubs. An unusually warm and dry spring and summer followed, and it dried out the vegetation, turning it into fuel ready to burn. That fall, extreme Santa Ana and Diablo winds created the perfect conditions for wildfires.
The Thomas Fire began near Santa Barbara in December 2017 and burned over 280,000 acres. Then, on Jan. 9, 2018, extreme rainfall hit the region – including the burn scar left by the fire. Water raced through the burned landscape above Montecito, eroding the ground and creating the deadliest mudslide-debris flow event in California’s history. More than 400 homes were destroyed in about two hours, and 23 people died.
Video from the 2018 disaster in Montecito shows how quickly a mudslide can overtake a town.
These kinds of cascading events aren’t unique to California. Australia’s Millennium Drought (1997-2009) also ended with devastating floods that inundated urban areas and breached levees. A study linked some of the levee and dike failures to earlier drought conditions, such as cracks forming because of exposure to heat and dryness.
Individually, they might not have been disasters
When multiple hazards such as droughts, heat waves, wildfires and extreme rainfall interact, human disasters often result.
The individual hazards might not be very extreme on their own, but combined they can become lethal. These types of events are broadly referred to as compound events. For example, a drought and heat wave might hit at the same time. A cascading event involves compound events in succession, like wildfires followed by downpours and mudslides.
With compound and cascading events likely to become more common in a warming world, the ability to prepare for and manage multiple hazards will be increasingly essential.
At the same time, extreme rainfall events are expected to intensifyin a warming climate. A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, leading to wetter storms. This means more burned acres could be exposed to potentially extreme rainfall events in a warmer world.
Cascading hazards are not limited to rain over burned areas. For example, soot and ash deposits on snowpack can increase snowmelt, change the timing of runoff and cause snow-driven flooding.
It’s also important to recognize that human activities and local infrastructure can affect extreme events. Urbanization and deforestation, for example, can intensify flooding and worsen mud or debris flow events and their impacts. That was evident in the videos of muddy water pouring through streets in Santa Barbara County on Jan. 9, 2023.
In a recent study, colleagues and I also looked at the risks to energy infrastructure from cascading disasters involving intense rain over burn areas, focusing on natural gas pipelines and other infrastructure. Our results showed that not only will natural gas infrastructure be increasingly exposed to individual hazards, creating the potential for fires, the chances of cascading hazards are expected to increase substantially in a warming climate.
Managing multiple disasters and climate change
About a year after the devastating Montecito mudslide in 2018, I visited a location where damage to a natural gas pipeline hit by the mudslide led to a fire that burned multiple homes. Looking upstream, I could see many hills next to one another with similar burned scars, slopes and vegetation cover. Each one can be the ground zero for the next human disaster.
An aerial view of the location of the Dixie Fire near Greenville shows the bare soil left behind. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Despite the high risk when extreme rainfall and droughts interact, most research in this area focuses on only rainfall or drought, but not both. Different government agencies oversee flood and drought monitoring, warning and management, even though both are extremes of the same hydrological cycle.
Emergency response has improved since the 2018 Montecito disaster, but it’s clear that communities and government agencies still aren’t fully prepared for the scale and potential impacts of future events.
This article was updated Jan. 10 with the Montecito evacuation lifted. The article is an update to a version published Oct. 24, 2021.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
A new turf replacement program, set to roll out in Colorado in 2023, will pay to convert some of the grass in urban areas and residential yards into more water-efficient landscaping. This is the first time the State of Colorado has dedicated funds expressly to turf replacement. It’s an important step to increase water conservation and get it closer to where it needs to be, said state officials and conservation leaders at a confab earlier this month. But this version of cash for grass will be just one of many tools — and maybe not the most influential one — that will transform landscaping in the state in response to climate change and reduced water availability.
As climate change, drought, and crisis on the Colorado River intensify, outdoor water use and nonessential turf become increasingly important targets for water conservation. Today, 40% of Colorado’s municipal and industrial water use goes toward outdoor irrigation.
“Water conservation is critical. We’re talking about how we can build the landscapes of tomorrow, today,” said Russ Sands section chief of water supply planning for the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) in kicking off the Colorado Landscape Summit on November 9. More than 150 people attended, either online or in person, this first-ever landscape summit hosted by the CWCB at Metro State University in Denver. “Outdoor turf removal is a really critical part of this discussion.”
The outdoor water-saving conversation has been gaining momentum in Colorado. The state legislature passed House Bill 1151 in June 2022, requiring the CWCB to develop a turf replacement program that will provide incentives for replacing nonessential irrigated turf with more water-wise landscaping. According to the bill, examples of nonessential turf include medians, land adjacent to open spaces, stormwater detention basins, commercial or industrial properties, portions of residential lawns, and more. The new law also came with an allocation of $2 million to finance the program.
Now the agency is working to set up that grant program, with details expected this spring and applications set to open sometime after July 2023. Local governments, special districts, nonprofits, and tribal nations will be eligible to apply, and individuals interested in receiving funds may be able to work with those entities to access the money.
But the program’s $2 million in initial funds won’t stretch far or transform the state’s turf on its own, said Peter Mayer with Water Demand Management, or WaterDM, an engineering consulting firm.
“The amount of money being spent in Colorado is ultimately nothing compared with what’s being spent in a single year in southern Nevada or southern California,” Mayer said.
After subtracting staffing and administration costs, some $1.5 million will remain for incentives to transform landscapes. That money is expected to be distributed in two cycles of $750,000 over two years, with the majority funneled into existing local turf replacement programs. For the program to continue beyond 2025, Colorado will have to find additional funding. However, though not specifically set aside for turf replacement, the CWCB’s Water Plan Grants and Water Supply Reserve Fund Grants may also be used to fund turf replacement work.
In August 2022, some public water providers and cities who rely on water supplies from the Colorado River Basin, including Aurora Water, Denver Water and Pueblo Water, signed a Memorandum of Understanding committing to reduce per capita water use. On November 15, additional water providers and agencies signed on, bringing the total to more than 30 entities across the West. The MOU says each of the water providers will introduce a program to reduce the amount of “non-functional turf grass by 30% through replacement with drought- and climate-resilient landscaping, while maintaining vital urban landscapes and tree canopies that benefit our communities, wildlife and the environment.” Details about how this will be accomplished have not yet been released.
Colorado is hoping to maintain those same qualities with its turf replacement program, said Sands.
But there’s still a lot to learn about how much savings Colorado can expect from turf replacement, what level of incentives are necessary to encourage participation, and what other potential costs and benefits there may be.
The state is trying to learn from neighbors with large-scale programs. The Southern Nevada Water Authority, which provides water to Las Vegas and surrounding cities, has been collecting data on its turf replacement program for almost 25 years, providing a helpful resource for Colorado officials.
Since the late 1990s, the authority has converted about 4,600 acres of turf, saving 467,000 acre-feet of water, at a cost of around $285 million. The average landscape conversion through the authority’s program resulted in a 19% to 21% reduction in water use, with the program’s overall impact resulting in a 75% reduction in landscape water use. Among other findings, participation in the authority’s program correlates with the scale of the incentives – when cash incentives increase, participation increases.
Colorado should expect about one-third of the water savings that Nevada has seen, said Doug Jeavons, managing director with BBC Research, a firm that served as the CWCB’s water economy specialist in working on the 2019 Technical Update to the Colorado Water Plan. That is because of cooler temperatures and the fact that we don’t water turf year-round here, which means a lower starting point for outdoor water use and therefore less potential savings from turf replacement.
“Lower [water] savings basically means less favorable economics for a property that wants to participate in this program,” Jeavons said. In other words, it will take a property in Colorado more time to see the cost savings that result from reduced water bills due to their landscape conversion than it does in Nevada.
Economics aren’t the only reason to convert a property’s turf to water-wise landscaping. A 2018 Alliance for Water Efficiency study on landscape transformation found that most customers aren’t happy with their landscaping and 69% of all respondents have already considered taking out their lawns, said Mayer, who led the study.
“There’s just not enough [state] money to buy [out] all the landscapes [to transform them from grass to water-wise vegetation] so we have to do the work ourselves toward changing the market and shifting the culture,” Mayer said. “We have to create a new Colorado landscape ethos of less water use, minimizing outdoor water use.”
According to Mayer, incentives aren’t the only way to encourage that change. Codes, ordinances, regulations, land use planning and zoning, water bills, and ultimately education and culture change all play a role, he said. But while making those changes, it’s important to minimize any unintended negative impacts, maintain the tree canopy, minimize the heat island effect, and transform landscapes in an equitable way.
To date, 22 turf replacement programs exist across Colorado, and many other utilities have water conservation programs that target outdoor irrigation.
Colorado Springs Utilities offers a turf replacement rebate and works to incentivize customers to update their landscaping, shifting to plants that can thrive on 12 inches of irrigation per year or less, said Julia Gallucci, the water conservation supervisor for the utility. The city is also focusing on retrofitting parks and public areas where people can see examples of different types of water-wise landscaping.
Colorado’s West Slope communities are also looking to reduce outdoor water use, but face different challenges.
Some residents in the Roaring Fork Valley, for instance, use untreated water for outdoor irrigation that is not metered through the utility, complicating conservation efforts. “We have raw water supplies so it’s difficult to put in outdoor water restrictions because a neighbor might be pulling water from a ditch, so there’s confusion,” said April Long manager of the Ruedi Water and Power Authority. “I think we still need to do some work on changing expectations.”
Meanwhile, the City of Aurora, which offers a grass replacement incentive, upped the ante. In August 2022, the city passed an ordinance that restricts turf in new developments. The city no longer allows “non-functional,” cool weather turf to be installed at new development projects, redevelopment, or at new golf courses. The installation of turf is also banned from medians, curbsides and residential front yards.
“The key is to not put turf in in the first place,” said Tim York, water conservation supervisor for the City of Aurora. In developing its ordinance, Aurora engaged developers and community members. “You want them to get involved because it’s the right thing to do, not because we told them to do it.”
Correction: An earlier version of this article failed to note the overall impact of the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s turf removal program, which has been a 75% reduction in landscape water use.
Caitlin Coleman is a contributor to Fresh Water News and is editor of Water Education Colorado’s Headwaters Magazine. She can be reached at caitlin@wateredco.org.
Fresh Water News is an independent, nonpartisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado. WEco is funded by multiple donors. Our editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
Many people are familiar with flash floods – torrents that develop quickly after heavy rainfall. But there’s also such a thing as a flash drought, and these sudden, extreme dry spells are becoming a big concern for farmers and water utilities.
Flash droughts start and intensify quickly, over periods of weeks to months, compared to years or decades for conventional droughts. Still, they can cause substantial economic damage, since communities have less time to prepare for the impacts of a rapidly evolving drought. In 2017, a flash drought in Montana and the Dakotas damaged crops and grasses that served as forage for cattle, causing US$2.6 billion in agricultural losses.
These satellite images show the development of a flash drought in the U.S. Southeast in early September 2019. The event began when a stubborn ridge of high-pressure air hung over the region for several weeks, bringing record-breaking temperatures, dry air and very little rain. Evaporative stress is a measure of how ‘thirsty’ the atmosphere is. Move the slider to see the change in moisture. NASA Earth Observatory
Less rain, warmer air
Flash droughts typically result from a combination of lower-then-normal precipitation and higher temperatures. Together, these factors reduce overall land surface moisture.
Water constantly cycles between land and the atmosphere. Under normal conditions, moisture from rainfall or snowfall accumulates in the soil during wet seasons. Plants draw water up through their roots and release water vapor into the air through their leaves, a process called transpiration. Some moisture also evaporates directly from the soil into the air.
Water constantly circulates between soil and the atmosphere – sometimes directly, sometimes via plants. USGS
Scientists refer to the amount of water that could be transferred from the land to the atmosphere as evaporative demand – a measure of how “thirsty” the atmosphere is. Higher temperatures increase evaporative demand, which makes water evaporate faster. When soil contains enough moisture, it can meet this demand.
But if soil moisture is depleted – for example, if precipitation drops below normal levels for months – then evaporation from the land surface can’t provide all the moisture that a thirsty atmosphere demands. Reduced moisture at the surface increases surface air temperatures, drying out the soil further. These processes amplify each other, making the area increasingly hot and dry.
Moist regions can have flash droughts
Flash droughts started receiving more attention in the U.S. after notable events in 2012, 2016 and 2017 that reduced crop yields and increased wildfire risks. In 2012, areas in the Midwest that had had near-normal precipitation conditions through May fell into severe drought conditions in June and July, causing more than $30 billion in damages.
Conventional droughts, like the Dust Bowl of the 1930s or the current 22-year drought across the southwestern U.S., develop over periods of years. Scientists rely on monitoring and prediction tools, such as measurements of temperature and rainfall, as well as models, to forecast their evolution.
Predicting flash drought events that occur on monthly to weekly time scales is much harder with current data and tools, largely due to the chaotic nature of weather and limitations in weather models. That’s why weather forecasters don’t typically make projections beyond 10 days – there is a lot of variation in what can happen over longer time spans.
And climate patterns can shift from year to year, adding to the challenge. For example, Boston had a very wet summer in 2021 before its very dry summer in 2022.
Scientists expect climate change to make precipitation even more variable, especially in wetter regions like the U.S. Northeast. This will make it more difficult to forecast and prepare for flash droughts well in advance.
But new monitoring tools that measure evaporative demand can provide early warnings for regions experiencing abnormal conditions. Information from these systems can give farmers and utilities sufficient lead time to adjust their operations and minimize their risks.
Sunset in Commerce City, a fast-growing industrialized suburb just north of Denver where residents have coped for years with high levels of water and air pollution. Credit: Jerd Smith, Fresh Water News
By Jerd Smith
To better protect low-income, non-English speaking communities from environmental harm caused by industrial contamination and air and water pollution, the state should create an entity to coordinate environmental justice work among state agencies, according to recommendations from a special task force.
It should also use new community outreach tools, such as interpreters, bus tickets and childcare, to bring affected residents in to the work to advise on policy and rulemaking on environmental issues.
In 2021, Colorado lawmakers approved The Environmental Justice Act, which includes a permanent 22-member Environmental Justice Advisory Board. The board is charged with helping ensure that poor communities, as well as communities of color, are included in setting policy and that they benefit from efforts to clean up air and water in their neighborhoods and from fines levied on polluters.
In a day-long meeting Tuesday the board discussed several recommendations made by the task force that are intended to help the state fine tune and strengthen its environmental justice work.
The task force, also created by the act, finished its work late last year. Its recommendations ultimately would have to be approved by the legislature before any of them are implemented, according to Lubna Ahmed, an environmental justice policy advisor to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, which houses the advisory board. When that might occur isn’t clear yet.
Newly elected State Rep. Elizabeth Vasquez, a democrat from the West Slope’s House District 57, which includes Glenwood Springs, said she is looking forward to reviewing any recommendations that may come to the legislature this year.
She said ensuring state agency-wide coordination of environmental justice work is critical. “The equity piece has been missing in Colorado,” Vasquez said, “especially as we think of everyone having access to clean air and clean water, which is not a reality in many places in this state.”
Vasquez also said using new models of community engagement will be key in bringing justice to these communities.
“I come from grassroots organizing. That model is needed at every level of government,” she said.
Key to the state’s efforts is how to define which communities are likely to be “disproportionately impacted,” by pollution. This designation is important because it allows communities to qualify for grants and imposes rules on state agencies for community outreach and data analysis, among other things.
In the act, lawmakers defined these communities as those in census block groups that are either more than 40% low income, more than 40% people of color, or more than 40% burdened by housing costs. Communities with a history of environmental contamination and where economics have contributed to poor public health are also included in the definition.
Other key work of the advisory board is reviewing and approving grant applications for community based environmental justice programs.
The board is accepting the first round of applications through Feb. 3. Information on the application process can be found here. It plans to award $1 million this year. More money will be provided in subsequent years, eventually reaching $2.5 million, which will be derived from penalty revenues, according to a CDPHE spokeswoman.
But the ongoing environmental justice work will likely require more funding from state lawmakers, according to the task force.
Rep. Vasquez said she would support any effort to secure additional funding.
“We need to invest in things that are a priority for us,” she said. “Sometimes changes are costly. I know that we have to be smart and find that money.”
Jerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.
Fresh Water News is an independent, nonpartisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado. WEco is funded by multiple donors. Our editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
Before and after images acquired by NASA’s Aqua satellite reveal the impact of the storms that drenched California between Dec. 27 and Jan. 16. Snowpack is much more extensive on Jan. 17, 2023 (right) than on Jan. 23, 2022 (left). After all the precipitation this year, green swirls of sediment can also be seen billowing into the Pacific Ocean. (Please see below for an animation of these two images. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory)
By Tom Yulsman
The La Niña threepeat wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. The third La Niña winter in a row was expected to drive rain and snow away from much of California, significantly worsening an already brutal drought.
Instead, nine atmospheric river storms battered the state from Dec. 27 to Jan. 16, triggering flooding, mudslides, sinkholes — and, tragically, at least 20 deaths. Some areas received close to their annual precipitation in just those three weeks. Averaged over the entire state, the precipitation totaled 11.47 inches, according to the Weather Prediction Center of the National Weather Service. That’s nearly 50 percent of the precipitation the state receives in an entire water year.
The atmospheric rivers also pumped copious moisture into the Colorado River Basin, with many locations seeing their wettest or near-wettest conditions on record for January, according to the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center. In a tweet, the center noted that “if conditions hold through winter, we can expect above-average streamflow forecasts throughout the #ColoradoRiver Basin.”
But that’s a big “if.” And even above-average streamflow wouldn’t be enough to reverse the fortunes of a vast region of the West starved for water over the course of years. “To begin to alleviate long-term hydrologic drought and contribute to spring and summer runoff, snow needs to continue to accumulate during the winter,” notes a special drought status update published Jan. 24 by NOAA. Moreover, it will take above-average precipitation over the next three to five years, plus better management of water consumption, “to completely alleviate long-term hydrologic drought,” the update states.
An animation of two images captured by NASA’s Aqua satellite shows a huge difference in snow cover stretching from California’s Sierra Nevada range east into the Great Basin. The “before” image was acquired on Jan. 23, 2022, and the other on Jan. 17, 2023. As of Jan. 22 this year, the snow water equivalent for the California region was 215 percent of average for the date. But dry and warm conditions in coming months could erase these gains. (Credit: Images from NASA. Animation by Tom Yulsman)
All in all, the drenching we saw in late December through mid-January seemed much more like an El Niño, La Niña’s opposite. What happened?
A simple answer is that when it comes to weather, stuff just happens — La Niña be damned.
“Sometimes other processes can intervene and overwhelm the signal from La Niña,” says Marty Ralph, Director of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “That’s how the atmosphere works.”
But what about the details? Just how did La Niña’s signal get overwhelmed? To understand that, it helps to consider these five things: different dimensions of time, a game of chance, a roiling cauldron, a butterfly, and us — specifically, the impact we’re having on the climate.
First off, just what is La Niña and how does it influence our weather?
In a nutshell, La Niña and El Niño comprise one of our planet’s most consequential climate phenomena: the see-sawing El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. La Niña itself is characterized by cooler than normal sea surface temperatures along the equator in the Pacific Ocean. This is accompanied by changes to wind and storm patterns, including atmospheric rivers — long columns of moisture that can carry the equivalent of 15 times the average flow of water at the mouth of the Mississippi River.
“Atmospheric rivers impacting the North American West Coast typically occur in the wintertime,” says Marybeth Arcodia, an expert in climate variability at Colorado State University. So the fact that they occurred this winter is not unusual.
But one impact of La Niña is a tendency for a strong ridge of high atmospheric pressure to form over the northeast Pacific Ocean. This, in turns, shifts storm tracks northward, favoring wet winters in the Northwest and dry winters from roughly the southern half of California into the Southwest, across to Texas, and beyond. (For the northern half of California, there are typically equal chances for a dry or wet winter during a La Niña.)
La Niña tends to result in strong ridge of high atmospheric pressure in the Northeast Pacific. Like a boulder in a river, it changes the flow of storms as they approach North America, favoring wet winters in the Northwest and dry winters across the southern United States. But in late December through mid-January, this typical La Niña pattern wasn’t in place. (Credit: NOAA)
Yet as 2022 transitioned to 2023, all of California got drenched. And that brings us to different dimensions of time.
La Niña occurs on a timescale that stretches over the course of entire seasons — and with this La Niña, three years. Meanwhile, “the flooding from these atmospheric rivers has happened in just a matter of weeks,” Arcodia observes.
Her point is that a climate phenomenon like La Niña works over a much longer period than individual storms, which happen day-to-day and week-to-week. In fact, for the first two years of this La Niña threepeat, much of California and the southwestern United States were starved of winter precipitation. But on the shorter timescale of a few weeks in December and January, individual weather events managed to punch through La Niña’s longer-term influence.
“If you have a La Niña ridge of high pressure off the West Coast, sometimes an atmospheric river can cut under it for a day or two and pummel Southern California,” Ralph says.
But in this case, of course, there was a parade of those rivers for three straight weeks. To delve more deeply into how this happened, let’s consider a simple game of roulette.
When played in a casino, you have a greater than 97 percent chance of losing a bet in roulette. But that doesn’t mean you can never win. If you had enough money to keep trying, sooner or later you’d probably cash in.
Similarly, just because the odds tilt against the southern half of California winning a lot of moisture during a La Niña winter doesn’t mean it will never experience a moisture win. The climate phenomenon comes with no guarantees, only odds. That point is driven home by the La Niña winter of 2016-2017, when all of the Golden State won the precipitation jackpot and went on to experience its third wettest year on record.
So, at a simple level, California’s experience during late December through mid-January is just one of those things that happens from time to time, due to an unlikely but entirely possible throw of the atmospheric dice. (Once again, stuff happens…)
But to answer the more complex question of just how short-term weather patterns ganged up to overcome the odds imposed by La Niña, let’s take a step back to consider the big picture — and how it resembles a pot of bubbling liquid.
Seen from space, rushing atmospheric rivers, whirling bomb cyclones, and blossoming supercell thunderstorms can leave the impression that the atmosphere we live in is indeed akin to a cauldron of roiling stew. And that’s not so far off the mark. From the point of view of physics, the atmosphere acts as a liquid, with the sun providing the flame to get things going. But even as we’re drenched, whipped, and often scared out of our wits by severe weather, we may well be unaware of features in the atmospheric cauldron that drive storms toward us.
These drivers include the constant bubbling up and down of atmospheric pressure. When a high pressure area is born, it typically grows into an elongated shape — a ridge in the atmosphere — with winds circulating around it in a clockwise direction. After California’s onslaught of storms ended in January, a La Niña-like ridge of high pressure became ensconced along the U.S. West Coast, bringing fair weather and shunting rainfall far to the north. (Will it stay there? Keep reading…)
By contrast, an area of low pressure typically takes the form of trough — which is why meteorologists call it just that. In the Northern Hemisphere, winds around a low within a trough flow counterclockwise, often bringing stormy weather.
Ridges and troughs are outlined by the flow of the jet stream, a relatively narrow band of strong wind in the upper levels of the atmosphere. (There are actually multiple jet streams; I’m talking about what’s known as the “polar” jet stream.)
The pattern is akin to ocean waves. And like ocean waves, the ridges and troughs normally aren’t stationary. Although sometimes they can become stuck, most of the time, they move, just like ocean waves, progressing slowly from west to east, dissipating and reforming, all the way around the globe. (The flow of air in the jet stream itself is much faster than the stately procession of the ridges and troughs themselves.)
These large-scale features don’t just look like waves. They are waves — in the atmospheric cauldron. Scientists call them Rossby waves, after meteorologist Carl-Gustaf Arvid Rossby, who first identified them.
When a Rossby wave perturbs the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitude jet stream, warmer, high-pressure air is transported poleward into the wave crests, which are called ridges. Cooler, lower-pressure air is transported equatorward into the troughs. (Credit: NOAA Climate.gov)
“Rossby waves and the jet stream are two separate, but intimately connected, entities,” says Breanna Zavadoff, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Miami. As the waves form, grow, shrink, move, and reform, they interact with the jet stream, affecting where it is positioned and how wavy it is, thereby shaping the weather we experience.
During winter in La Niña years, these interactions tend to produce a wavier pattern than in neutral years. And in the Pacific, that wavy pattern often results in the persistent ridge of high pressure over the northeastern part of the ocean. Combined with other factors, this can help funnel very moist winds from the subtropics near Hawaii into atmospheric rivers aimed at the Pacific Northwest.
As you might imagine, a bubbling up or down of pressure can occur here, there, or anywhere, either by chance, or possibly even due to us. (More about that in just a bit.) And with just that small change in initial conditions, a chain of events can be touched off in the atmosphere that eventually has big effects thousands of miles away.
Something like that happened a few weeks before California’s battering by atmospheric rivers: a bubbling up of strong thunderstorm activity in the Indian Ocean. It was part of a phenomenon called the Madden-Julian Oscillation, or MJO, and Ralph believes it played a major role in what happened.
Whereas La Niña, and its opposite, El Niño, are stationary, and occur on a timescale of entire seasons, MJO moves, and its impacts occur more on a weekly timescale. It consists of a disturbance of clouds, rainfall, winds, and pressure changes that moves eastward in the tropics, circling the entire globe in about 30 to 60 days, on average.
The storminess Ralph observed in the Indian Ocean was part of this pattern. As it moved east into the tropical Pacific, thunderstorm activity caused water vapor to rise high into the atmosphere. As the water vapor cooled at altitude and condensed to form billowing clouds, large amounts of latent heat were released.
“This is a massive forcing of the atmosphere in a manner that sends Rossby waves to the northeast in the Pacific Basin,” Ralph says. And as we’ve seen, these waves — troughs and ridges — play a leading role in the weather we experience. That includes where atmospheric rivers, or ARs, make landfall.
But the MJO phenomenon doesn’t always result in the southern part of California getting drenched. Other factors play a role too, and the interplay is complex. Ralph and his colleagues at Scripps have developed a tool designed to tease apart the details of that interplay and thereby enable forecasters to better predict what might happen when an MJO is in place.
“We’re just kicking the tires on it right now,” he says. The goal is to use the tool “to determine whether the odds are tilting toward ARs two to three weeks ahead.”
In early January, after the MJO storminess moved from the Indian Ocean into the tropical Pacific, a now infamous bomb cyclone erupted and moved toward California. “Its minimum air pressure plummeted by about 3 percent in 24 hours, signifying a vacuum-like ingestion of air… resulting in strong inward winds,” wrote Washington Post meteorologist Matthew Cappucci and science journalist Diana Leonard at the time.
An infrared view of water vapor in the atmosphere acquired by the GOES-18 satellite, overlaid with NEXRAD weather radar data. This combination shows the impact of the bomb cyclone and atmospheric river storm that battered California and other parts of the West Coast on Jan. 4 and 5. (Credit: SSEC RealEarth)
This vacuuming in of air by the storm happened in a trough bounded by a very big downward dip of the jet stream that wound up ideally positioned to direct rivers of moisture from the subtropics into California. In subsequent weeks, new storms formed and helped direct yet more atmospheric rivers over the state.
The eastward-moving disturbance of the MJO cited by Marty Ralph may not have been the only factor at play. As California was getting hammered, Jennifer Francis, Senior Scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, was taking note of another phenomenon far from California: a sprawling area of abnormally warm surface water called a “marine heatwave” in the northern Pacific, south of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. She also noted that the typical wavy pattern of the jet stream during a La Niña was not in place.
The jet stream was flowing straight east from Japan at the time. “But when it hits the heatwave area, it buckles,” Francis said in an email message. “A ridge forms over the heatwave, and then a trough forms downstream,” to the east. This pattern persisted, with the trough “creating the parade of storms striking the U.S. west coast.”
Roughly approximated here are the locations of a marine heatwave in the northern Pacific, a ridge of high atmospheric pressure, and a low-pressure trough, along with the path of the jet stream, on Jan. 9, 2023. This pattern helped direct a river of atmospheric moisture at California. (Credit: earth.nullschool.net with annotations by Tom Yulsman)
Climate change may well have something to do with this. Scientists recently discovered a pool of warming water in the northern Pacific sprawling across more than 1.1 million square miles — an area equivalent to about a third of the contiguous United States. Using observations and computer modeling, the researchers investigated what was behind this “warming pool.” They concluded that increasing greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere have been a key cause. Another human influence — this one laudable — played a role too: decreases in aerosol pollution from industry and vehicles.
The warming pool has had significant impacts on the region. For example, over the last two decades, summers have averaged 1.5 °C warmer and 37 days longer, according to the researchers. They also found that the warming pool has been encouraging the formation of marine heatwaves — along with weather-altering ridges of high atmospheric pressure above them — like the one noted by Jennifer Francis.
With greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere continuing to rise, we can well imagine what’s to come. “This warming pool will continue to increase the water temperature in the future, increasing both the frequency and intensity of local marine heatwaves,” says lead author Armineh Barkhordarian of the University of Hamburg, quoted in a release.
Francis agrees: “I think ocean heatwaves will only increase in frequency, intensity, and spatial extent as we continue to augment concentrations of greenhouse gases.”
Given what we’ve seen this year and in the past from marine heat waves, it’s plausible that weather impacts could grow even more intense as they worsen. What might that mean for California? It’s difficult to say, according to Francis. So many different factors are at play that it will take further research to tease out what the impacts might be, and where and when they might occur.
Regardless, what happened in December and January does provide some solace: The intensity of California’s drought has eased somewhat, depleted reservoirs have gotten desperately needed inflows, and a healthy snowpack has built up in the Sierra Nevada Range, and to the east. Even so, California’s water woes continue. As of Jan. 17, more than 90 percent of the state was still in drought.
It’s possible that the current dry pattern along the West Coast will continue, and conditions will look a whole lot more like La Niña in the remaining months of winter and heading into spring. That would undercut gains that California and parts of the Colorado River Basin have made so far. There’s ample precedent for this. In December 2021, parts of the Sierra experienced record snowfall, despite La Niña. But then conditions took a radical turn, with the driest January, February, and March in more than 100 years.
At the same time, there is a glimmer of hope for a different outcome. “There are some very preliminary hints of a shift,” with increased activity of atmospheric rivers coming in February, Ralph says. The caveat is that when looking ahead more than about a week, uncertainties mount, so the shift may not pan out. “But the odds are in favor of getting back into a wet mode.”
Let’s hope it happens more gently this time.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
Autumn view of the wetlands and cottonwood groves in the Yampa River basin at Carpenter Ranch, located west of Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Photo courtesy of The Nature Conservancy
By Caitlin Coleman
A race is on to determine which wetlands and other waters will be protected under the Clean Water Act, the law that regulates the discharge of pollutants into the nation’s water. At issue is not only the protection of water bodies but also clarity for farmers, ranchers, developers, and others who question whether the actions they take on their lands require a federal permit.
On October 3, the U.S. Supreme Court heard Sackett v. EPA, a case that asks whether certain wetlands are protected under the Clean Water Act and how that should be determined. The Supreme Court offers no specific timeline as to when it will release an opinion, aside from by the end of this term in June 2023, or sooner, but likely not before January 2023.
“The magnitude of this Supreme Court case can’t be overstated,” said Ashley House, director of public policy national affairs for the Colorado Farm Bureau. “It’s a matter of food security.” But it’s also a matter of protecting the state and nation’s water resources.
In Colorado there is no state program to protect certain wetlands and waterways from dredging, filling and other damage if they’re not covered by the Clean Water Act. The state has always relied on the federal government’s program for dredge and fill permits, though it could develop its own protections if needed.
Over the past seven years, the test for which water bodies are protected under the Clean Water Act has changed three times – with each new presidential administration – as certain categories of wetlands and ephemeral streams have been revised in and out of the definition for “waters of the United States,” also known as WOTUS, a federal status that extends them protections under the Clean Water Act.
Now, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers are developing another new rule that would also clarify which waters are protected from pollutants under the act. The agencies’ final rule was submitted in September 2022 and, according to EPA, the agencies plan to issue the rule by the end of the year.
Recent changes to the definition of WOTUS occurred in 2015, 2020 and 2021, with another likely coming in 2022. Those recent definitions for what qualifies have bounced between broader and narrower.
“A narrow definition of waters of the U.S. leaves an incredibly important water resource value unprotected by federal law — which is basically uniform across the nation — and then it’s up to the states to decide what to do, and some states won’t decide to protect those areas at all,” said Joro Walker, general counsel with Western Resource Advocates.
The 2020 definition, for example, excluded all ephemeral waterways and some wetlands. Ephemeral streams represent more than 25% of Colorado’s stream miles, according to Colorado Trout Unlimited.
But farmers and ranchers, developers, and other business owners worry the broader definition would mean federal involvement in day-to-day decisions around their properties, or the need to consult a lawyer on something like driving across an ephemeral stream or running water through an irrigation ditch every few years. The 2015 rule included a broad definition and has been referred to as a federal “overreach.” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said in 2019 that the rule would have put “backyard ponds, puddles, and prairie potholes under Washington’s control.”
Now though, the Colorado Farm Bureau and others who are regulated are calling for clarity and security, something they hope the Supreme Court will provide.
“It’s hard to know what is covered,” said Travis Vincent, general counsel and director of public policy state affairs for the Colorado Farm Bureau. “We want a more bright-lined test so our members have a better understanding of when their property or something on their property would be regulated under WOTUS.”
The organization is also looking for more stability.
“On the existential level it creates a lot of anxiety when you have changes to the definition with every changing administration. There’s a sense of anxiety with all producers,” said House. “Producers need accountability and also regulatory consistency.”
Currently, EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers are relying on the definition that was in place through 2015, which they call a “familiar approach” that will “support a stable implementation of ‘waters of the United States’” while EPA and the Army Corps continue their rulemaking.
According to a statement issued by EPA, the new rule will include “amendments to reflect the agencies’ determination of the statutory limits on the scope of the ‘waters of the United States’ informed by Supreme Court precedent, the best available science, and the agencies’ experience and technical expertise.”
But the Supreme Court’s decision could change that. If the Supreme Court issues a decision before EPA finalizes its rule, the agency would likely need to adjust its rule before issuing it. If EPA’s call comes first, it could render the court’s decision moot, or mean that the agencies need to go back to the drawing board after the court’s decision is released. Both the court’s opinion and the rulemaking could affect EPA’s regulatory process and the level of protection that water bodies receive.
“We are in a very dynamic situation with the rule and have been for a number of years,” says Trisha Oeth, director of environmental health and protection at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. “I think all interests would benefit from certainty and stability in this area, so we continue to watch it very closely and have been having conversations with stakeholders here in Colorado to figure out, long term, what is the right path for us.”
In Colorado, not all changes to the rule have been implemented. A month after the 2020 revision took effect, which rolled back protections, Colorado filed a legal challenge. According to Colorado’s Water Quality Control Division, some 25% to 50% of Colorado streams, lakes and wetlands could have been impacted by the 2020 rule. Colorado’s attorneys initially secured a stay on enacting the new rule and absorbing more enforcement responsibilities, but that ruling was vacated by the Tenth Circuit Court in March 2021.
In 2021, the nation reverted back to the pre-2015 rule but just after that, in January 2022 the Supreme Court agreed to review Sackett v. EPA, which questions whether certain wetlands are waters of the United States. The Sacketts own land in Idaho which lies across from wetlands and drains into a tributary that feeds Priest Lake. They had long been trying to build there but EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers found that the dredging and filling of construction would affect the tributary and lake.
When the case went to the U.S. Court of Appeals, the court upheld EPA’s conclusion, based on a test established through a 2006 Supreme Court case, Rapanos v. United States, in which Justice Kennedy argued that the Army Corps of Engineers should determine whether the water at issue possesses a “significant nexus” to waters that are navigable when determining whether a water body meets the definition of WOTUS.
But in the Rapanos case, justices failed to achieve a majority opinion on the WOTUS test. This has left, as the Sacketts have said, a landscape of “fruitless confusion, conflict, and litigation.”
The Sacketts appealed the Court of Appeals’ decision to the Supreme Court. The Sacketts aren’t alone in standing up to EPA on its decision. In April 2022, the Colorado Farm Bureau joined 19 other state Farm Bureaus in filing a brief with the court in support of the Sacketts.
More than 40 additional briefs in support of either EPA or the Sacketts have been filed by many other parties, including the State of Colorado, which filed a brief in June arguing for broad protection of waters and for the use of the “significant nexus” test in determining which waters to protect.
Although the court has heard oral arguments, it remains unclear where the justices will side and whether they will come together to provide a new, definitive test for WOTUS jurisdiction.
“It’s hard to speculate on what the [U.S. Supreme Court decision] is going to look like,” said Oeth. “If the outcome were to change the definition of WOTUS or add a new test for what WOTUS includes, that could have an impact here in Colorado.” If a new definition were to apply to fewer water bodies than it does now, that would mean that Colorado waters would have less protection than they do today, she said.
Elizabeth Miller contributed to this report.
Caitlin Coleman is a contributor to Fresh Water News and is editor of Water Education Colorado’s Headwaters Magazine. She can be reached at caitlin@wateredco.org.
Fresh Water News is an independent, nonpartisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado. WEco is funded by multiple donors. Our editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
Taylor Draw Dam on the White River in northwest Colorado forms Kenney Reservoir. The dam has a hydropower facility tied to a 1966 water right for 620 cfs. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
By Heather Sackett
A water conservancy district has put a call on the White River, an action that has the potential to alter the system for other water users.
On Dec. 1, the Rangely-based Rio Blanco Water Conservancy District placed a call for its water right of 620 cubic feet per second at the Taylor Draw Dam hydroelectric plant, which the district owns and operates. It is only the second-ever call on the White River. A call occurs when a water rights holder isn’t getting the full amount of water to which they are entitled and upstream water users are shut off or “curtailed” so that the downstream user can get their full amount.
“I think maybe it’s a little strong to say it’s going to be life-changing, but it’s going to be significant, especially if we start seeing a call year-round,” said Colorado Division of Water Resources Division 6 Engineer Erin Light. “I think it could really change the regime that everyone in that basin is accustomed to. I think there’s not much question that the basin would become overappropriated.”
DWR designated the nearby Yampa River basin as overappropriated earlier this year, which means that there’s more water on paper than real water in the system at certain times of year and new well users will have to get a water-replacement plan, known as an augmentation plan.
Under Colorado water law, older water rights get first use of the river. In this case, water users junior to the district’s 1966 water right are being shut off. This time of year, that mostly means some industrial users and those who pull water from the river to water their livestock but who don’t have a water right for that specific use, Light said.
Under Colorado water law, watering livestock from ditches during irrigation season is included under an irrigation water right. But in the winter, when fields are not being irrigated, ranchers need a separate decree specifically for livestock watering if they want to continue using their ditches to water the animals.
The Rangely-based Rio Blanco Water Conservancy District has placed a call on the White River for its 620-cfs water right at the hydropower plant. Division of Water Resources staff have shut off water to some upstream users who water their livestock with ditches in the winter.CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Reduced hydropower revenues
According to a news release from the district, the ongoing drought has significantly reduced seasonal inflows into Kenney Reservoir, which has reduced power production at the dam. According to the district, electricity production has been reduced by 35%, which has reduced the district’s revenues.
District General Manager Alden Vanden Brink said in an email that the district’s full water right was not being met several months out of the year and that the call will remain on until the full water right or capacity of the turbine is met. The district also has a 1982 water right for 125 cfs.
The news release said the district is sensitive to the hardships that the call may have on other water users and is working to create a White River augmentation plan, with a backup water supply for junior users.
Light said her office has curtailed about 10 ditches and two industrial water users since the call came Dec. 1, but assuming the call will be on whenever the river flows at less than 620 cfs, there will be more water rights and water usage curtailed in the summer and fall. During the irrigation season, there will be about 500 ditches and pumps that water commissioners will have to visit to see how much water they are using and whether they are using it legally, she said.
The U.S. Geological Survey stream gauge on the White River above Rangely is currently ice-affected and not giving a reading, but Light said she is certain that the 620-cfs water right at the dam is still not being met, even with curtailing upstream junior users. The river is probably running at about 300 cfs going into Kenney Reservoir, she said. Stream gauge data over the last half dozen years show that outside of seasonal peak flows, the White River near Rangely normally runs below 620 cfs.
Kenney Reservoir, five miles east of Rangely, in October 2020. The Rio Blanco Water Conservancy District owns and operates the reservoir.CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Wake-up call
The White River flows from the Flat Tops west through Meeker and Rangely to its confluence with the Green River in Utah. This sparsely populated basin has seen little regulatory oversight from the state, and water users could generally take as much water as they needed. But that is changing. For the past few years, Division 6 staffers have been pushing water users to install measuring devices on their ditches and canals.
“In Division 6, our basin that has the most number of structures by far without measuring devices is the White River,” Light said. “Unfortunately, probably at the onset of this call in the summer, we will be shutting people off without measuring devices.”
Will Myers is an engineer and rancher on the Williams Fork, a tributary of the Yampa River, and he also serves as the agriculture representative on the Yampa/White/Green Basin Roundtable. Getting a water court decree for stock watering is the best way for agricultural producers to protect their practices, he said, especially in an area not used to strict administration by state officials because there has historically been enough water to go around.
“Any time you have something like this happen, it’s kind of a wake-up call for those in the ag community,” Myers said. “Just because you’ve always done something doesn’t mean you’re not susceptible to an actual legit administrative call.”
Ongoing drought and the impacts of a warming climate are at least partially fueling a trend in never-before-seen calls in parts of western Colorado. In 2018, the Yampa River saw its first-ever call, and the Crystal River saw its first-ever senior irrigation call.
“If that’s indeed true — that we are going to continue to see a drying climate — we are going to continue to see senior water rights not being met,” Light said. “I think that’s become clearly evident in the last four years.”
Aspen Journalism covers water and rivers in collaboration with The Aspen Times. This story ran in the Dec. 12 edition of Steamboat Pilot & Today and the Craig Press.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
River guide John Saunders paddles a boat down the Yampa River in May 2021. Colorado’s recreation community is asking the state for more inclusion in the updated Water Plan, a final draft of which is scheduled to be released in early January.
By Heather Sackett
Colorado’s river recreation community is asking for more recognition in the update to the state’s Water Plan.
In a Sept. 30 comment letter addressed to the Colorado Water Conservation Board Director Rebecca Mitchell and Gov. Jared Polis, a group of recreation, environmental conservation organizations and local businesses ask for river recreation to play a more prominent role in the roadmap for Colorado’s water future.
“Adequate flows to sustain recreation and environmental water needs must be a top priority for CWCB,” the letter reads. “As the update notes, climate change and aridification will contribute to significant temperature-driven river flow declines, disproportionately impacting recreation and river health.”
State officials in July released the second iteration of the Colorado Water Plan, a 239-page document that lays out four interconnected areas for action: vibrant communities, robust agriculture, thriving watersheds and resilient planning. The update to the original 2015 plan is a roadmap for how to manage Colorado’s water under future climate change and drought scenarios. CWCB staff said they are currently reviewing the 1,376 comments with about 2,000 observations and suggested revisions they received during the 90-day public comment period, which ended Sept. 30.
In the Colorado water world, recreation usually is lumped together with the environment as a “non-consumptive” use since both seek to keep water in the stream. But signatories to the letter say that grouping overlooks the importance of recreation to the economy.
“We are always talking about environment and recreation together because they are so interconnected, but in doing so we miss out on the larger picture of the importance of recreation and really the economic development aspect of it,” said Hattie Johnson, southern Rockies stewardship director of American Whitewater. “There is special care and special consideration that require a different way of looking at recreation that we feel is still lacking in the update.”
The letter gives six recommendations to better integrate recreation into the Water Plan: reaffirm that water-based recreation is not in conflict with other water uses; include the Colorado Outdoor Recreation Industry Office (OREC) as a collaborating agency; add a CWCB recreation liaison; address recreation flows and temperatures; include recreation in watershed planning; and approach storage and water development in a way that won’t negatively impact flows for recreation.
Despite its contribution to Colorado’s outdoor culture, tourism economy and lifestyle, recreation has struggled to find a foothold in the state’s system of water rights, which was established over a century ago and still reflects the values of that time. Colorado water law prioritizes the oldest water rights, which usually belong to agriculture and cities.
As coal mines close, some communities like Craig are turning toward healthy rivers as a way to transition from extractive industries to an outdoor-recreation-based economy.
“It’s important to note that recreation is a pretty important stream use for a lot of communities on the Front Range and West Slope,” said Bart Miller, healthy rivers program director for Western Resource Advocates. “Just having vibrant rivers running through town not just for people to go and float on, but for businesses and boardwalks and the heart of town for a lot of places.”
The update to the Water Plan recognizes that climate change presents a threat to the long-term viability of water-based outdoor recreation. Some communities like Steamboat Springs, where the Yampa River through town has been closed to recreation in recent summers due to high temperatures exacerbated by low flows, are already feeling the effects. Recreation proponents asked CWCB to address this issue.
“We recommend that the final update include specific actions CWCB will take to address recreation flows, including mitigating summer recreation closures caused by high water temperatures and better quantifying the gap for recreational and environmental flow needs,” the letter reads.
The upstream wave at the Roaring Fork Whitewater Park in Basalt is tied to a recreational in-channel diversion water right. As the only way to ensure a water right for recreation, it is an imperfect tool with some drawbacks.CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
RICDs are imperfect tool
Neither of two recent proposals from recreation proponents — one that would have tied water rights to a natural stream feature and one that would have designated stream reaches for recreation, allowing them to lease water to boost flows — gained wide support from water users or legislators.
Currently the only way to keep water in rivers for boaters is for a local government to get a recreational in-channel diversion (RICD) water right for a human-made wave or whitewater park. But recreation proponents say this method is an imperfect tool. The process of securing the rights can be met with opposition and take years in water court. RICD water rights also sometimes end up making concessions to future water development.
Building the wave features is expensive, meaning a RICD water right may be out of reach for less-affluent communities. Pitkin County has spent more than $3 million on constructing and subsequently fixing its two waves with a RICD water right in the Roaring Fork River near Basalt; the project had an initial budget of $770,000.
The letter also suggests adding a staff position at CWCB to focus on solving the flows challenge and guiding the RICD program.
“A big idea we included was this idea of a recreation liaison,” said Alex Funk, director of water resources and senior counsel at the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. “Having someone at CWCB that’s basically your recreation expert, someone that can handle the RICD program, work with the OREC office, someone who is more dedicated to that community and thinking through those things.”
The letter also recommends that recreation be included into watershed planning, specifically by including environmental and recreation flow target recommendations in stream management plans. The 2015 Water Plan had a goal of covering at least 80% of the state’s priority streams with SMPs. And although one of the original goals of these SMPs was to identify flow needs for recreational water uses, only 1% of the plans completed so far did so. In some cases, the SMP process was taken over by agricultural interests, watering down what was supposed to be a tool specifically for the benefit of non-consumptive water uses.
A kayaker runs the 6-foot drop of Slaughterhouse Falls on the Roaring Fork River near Aspen in June 2021. Recreation proponents gave six recommendations to the CWCB to better elevate recreation in the update to Colorado’s Water Plan.CREDIT: BRENT GARDNER-SMITH/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Coalition letter
The comment letter from recreation proponents was an add-on to a more-lengthy submission from the Water for Colorado coalition, which is made up of representatives of environmental advocacy groups including American Rivers, Audubon Rockies, The Nature Conservancy, Trout Unlimited and others.
Recreation was one of three key areas the 40-page letter focused its recommendations on. The letter lays out the criticism that environment and recreation are a secondary focus of the plan and that watershed health is merely “considered” in state water resource planning.
“While we agree that should be a minimum requirement, it doesn’t go nearly far enough,” the letter reads. “Environmental flows and watershed health must also be a coequal goal of state water resource planning itself — not just a secondary consideration.”
The update to the Water Plan lays out projected future “gaps” — the shortage between supply and demand — for agriculture and cities, but not for recreation or the environment.
“There’s not much detail about the volumes of water that are missing or needed,” Miller said. “We’ve got plenty of streams around the state that are short, and we will need to figure out how to improve their health through creative ways of reducing out-of-stream uses.”
CWCB Section Chief for Water Supply Planning Russ Sands said staff appreciates the in-depth feedback from the recreation community.
Sands acknowledged that although there are several locations across Colorado where non-consumptive streamflow needs have been identified, they have not been quantified statewide in the same way as they have been for agricultural or municipal demands. CWCB may revisit addressing those gaps during the next update to the Water Plan, he said.
Sands emphasized the fundamental need for the Water Plan to promote projects that benefit multiple water user groups: agriculture, the environment, recreation and cities.
“Climate change presents a long-term threat to the viability of all sectors of water use,” he said in an emailed statement. “The most promising tool to address this is radical collaboration.”
The final draft of the updated Water Plan is expected by early January.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
Cattle of the Bow & Arrow herd, graze in a frosted corn field on the 7,770 acre Ute Mountain Ute Farm & Ranch Enterprise near Towoac, Colorado. About 700 head of cattle, graze on the farm and ranch lands during the winter. During the summer the herd is moved to mountain pastures. (Dean Krakel photo, special to EWC)
By Allen Best
At Spring Born, a greenhouse in western Colorado near Silt, you see few, if any, dirty fingernails. Why would you? Hands never touch soil in this 113,400-square-foot greenhouse.
You do see automation, long trays filled with peat sliding on conveyors under computer-programmed seeding devices. Once impregnated, the trays roll into the greenhouse.
Thirty days after sprouting, trays of green and red lettuce, kale, arugula, and mustard greens slide from the greenhouse to be shorn, weighed and sealed in plastic clamshell packages. Hands never touch the produce.
Spring Born says it needs 95% less water compared to leafy greens grown using Colorado River water a thousand miles downstream in Arizona and California. That region supplies more than 90% of the nation’s lettuce. At Silt, the water comes from two shallow wells that plumb the riverine aquifer of the Colorado River, delivering about 20 gallons per minute. The water is then treated before it is piped into the greenhouse. This is agriculture like nowhere else.
The all-mechanized operations at Spring Born’s large greenhouse near Silt, Colo., produce leafy greens by maximizing the use of water. Spring Born says it needs 95% less water compared to greens grown using Colorado River water 1,000 miles downstream in Arizona and California.From the Hip Photo courtesy of Spring Born.
Great precautions are taken to avoid contamination and prevent the spread of pathogens. Those entering the greenhouse must don protective equipment.
There’s no opportunity for passing birds or critters to leave droppings. As such, there is no need for chlorine washes, which most operations use to disinfect. Those washes also dry out the greenery, shortening the shelf life and making it less tasty. The Spring Born packages have an advertised shelf life of 23 days.
Spring Born likely constitutes the most capital-intensive agricultural enterprise in Colorado. Total investment in the 250-acre operation, which also includes traditional hay farming and cattle production, has been $30 million. The technology and engineering come from Europe, which has 30 such greenhouses. The United States has a handful.
Agribusiness in Colorado generates $47 billion in economic activity but it ties to one reality: The future is one of less water. So how exactly can agriculture use water more judiciously?
The Thirsty Future
A Desert Research Institute study published in April 2022 concluded that the warming atmosphere is a thirstier one. Modeling in the study suggests that crops in some parts of Colorado already need 8% to 15% more water than 40 years ago. Agricultural adaptations to use less water are happening out of necessity.
Colorado has warmed about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 120 years. Warming has accelerated, with the five hottest summers on record occurring since 2000.
Higher temperatures impact the amount of snowfall and amount of snowpack converted to water runoff. “As the climate warms, crops and forested ecosystems alike use water more rapidly,” says Peter Goble, a research associate at the Colorado Climate Center. “As a result, a higher fraction of our precipitation goes into feeding thirsty soils and a lower fraction into filling our lakes, streams and reservoirs. Essentially, a warmer future is a drier future.”
This year was a good example of the drying trend.
Snowpack was around average in the San Juan Mountains, but spring arrived hot and windy. Snow was all but gone by late May, surpassed in its hurried departure only in 2018 and 2002. Farmers dependent on water from the Dolores River, still reeling from last year’s meager supplies, were required to accept lesser supplies yet again as the growing season began this year.
The Ute Mountain Ute Farm and Ranch Enterprise, the most southwesterly agriculture operation in Colorado, expected less than 30% of its regular water delivery from McPhee Reservoir. This was on top of a marginal year in 2021, too. Simon Martinez, general manager of the operation, said just 15 of the 110 center pivots had crops under cultivation in early June. Employment was cut in half, and the 650-head cow-calf operation had been slimmed to 570.
Pressured by compacts
The warming climate is not alone in spurring adaptations. In many river basins, irrigators must also worry about delivery of water to downstream states specified by interstate compacts.
Water conservation districts formed in the last 20 years are paying farmers to decrease pumping and planting to save the water that remains in the aquifers, comply with compacts, and transition to less water use.
Directors of the Republican River Water Conservation District, in northeastern Colorado were successful in voluntarily retiring 4,000 acres by June 2020. They are confident about retiring 10,000 acres in the area between Wray and Burlington before 2025. They’re less sure of achieving the 25,000 acres that compact compliance will require by 2029.
Rio Grande Water Conservation District directors in south-central Colorado have an even greater lift. They must figure out how to retire 40,000 irrigated acres by 2029. They’re at 13,000.
High commodity prices have discouraged farmer participation. The pot of local, state and federal money hasn’t been sufficient to fund high enough incentives to compete with commodity pricing. A bill, SB22-028, Groundwater Compact Compliance Fund, which passed in the Colorado Legislature in May, will allocate $60 million to both the Republican and Rio Grande basins to help them comply with interstate river compacts by reducing the acreage outlined above. The law says that if voluntary reductions cannot be attained, Colorado may resort to mandatory reductions in groundwater extraction.
From Sprinklers to New Crops
Even as center-pivot sprinklers are removed in the Republican River Basin and San Luis Valley, they are going up in the Grand Valley of western Colorado. There, instead of drafting groundwater, they are distributing Colorado River water, because they are reducing labor costs and reducing water use.
The geography of the valley from Palisade to Fruita and Loma does not immediately favor center pivots. They work best as a pie within a square, a full 40 or 160 acres. Parcels in the Grand Valley tend to be more rectangular. That means a pivot can arc maybe three-quarters of a circle. That slows the payoff on investment.
Why the pivot, so to speak, on pivots? Perry Cabot, a water resource specialist with Colorado State University’s Western Colorado Research Center near Fruita, sees two, sometimes overlapping, motivations. (Cabot also serves on the Water Education Colorado Board of Trustees.)
The greater motivation is the desire to save labor. That itself is good, he says, because the investment reflects an intention to continue farming. “People are obviously doing it for the long haul,” he says.
The other motivation appears to be water related. “The feedback I get is, to paraphrase the farmers, at some point in the future we are going to have less water to farm with and so we must prepare for that,” Cabot says.
Incremental improvements have improved efficiency. Experiments at the CSU research center in Walsh have shown conclusively the advantage of long-drop nozzles that spray the water just a couple feet off the ground, reducing evaporation.
Jason Lorenz with Agro Engineering talks about irrigation, soil moisture and chemistry during a soil workshop for students in Colorado’s San Luis Valley.Courtesy of AgroEngineering.
Technology can help perfect a producer’s irrigation set up. Consider work in the San Luis Valley by Agro Engineering, crop consultants who seek to assist growers in producing maximum value with minimum water application. Potatoes, the valley’s largest cash crop, thrive in warm, but not hot, days and cool nights. They need 16 to 18 inches of water per year, of which 13 to 15 inches comes from irrigation. This includes two inches applied during planting, to moisten soils sufficiently for germination. They do not do well with too much water, explains Jason Lorenz, an agricultural engineer who is a partner in the firm. That, and the need to align use with legal requirements, gives growers compelling reason to closely monitor water.
The company uses aerial surveys conducted from airplanes to analyze whether the desired uniformity is being achieved. The latest advancement, multispectral aerial photography, enables the detection of green, red and near-infrared light levels. These images indicate the amount of vegetative biomass, vegetative vigor, and the greenness of the leaves. Variations show where crops are healthier and where there are problems, including insects and diseases, water quality, or soil chemistry problems.
Any discussion of water and agriculture in Colorado must include a focus on corn. In 2021, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, almost 1.4 million acres in the state were devoted to corn, with well more than half of that irrigated.
Corn is also thirsty. So far, efforts to produce corn with less water have come up short, says Colorado State University water resources specialist Joel Schneekloth. But if corn still needs the same amount of water, researchers have succeeded in producing greater yields.
How about alternatives to corn? Sunflowers, used to make cooking oil but also for confections, came on strong, but acreage shrank from 132,000 acres to 59,000 acres statewide between 2010 and 2019. For farmers, corn pays far better.
Quinoa may be possible. It consumes less water. But no evidence has emerged that it’s viable in eastern Colorado. The demand is small. Demand also remains small for black-eyed peas, which a bean processing facility in Sterling accepts along with pinto, navy and other beans.
“We can find low-water crops, but they just don’t have huge markets,” explains Schneekloth who conducts studies for the Republican and South Platte basins at a research station in Akron. There has to be enough production to justify processing facilities, he said. One such processing facility proximate to the Ogallala aquifer in Colorado—it was in Goodland, Kansas—closed because it didn’t have enough business.
Nearly all of the corn in Colorado is grown to feed livestock. What if, instead of eating beef or pork, we ate plant-based substitutes? The shift, says Schneekloth, would save water. It takes seven pounds of forage and grain to produce one pound of meat. For a meat substitute, it’s closer to one for one. But that tradeoff isn’t that simple in most places. Much of the cattle raised in Colorado start on rangeland, feeding off of unirrigated forage, which is not suitable for crop production.
Besides, Schneekloth says he has a hard time imagining a mass migration to meat substitutes in the near future. Plant-based substitutes cost far more and the product, to many people, remains unsatisfactory. “Mass migration will be a hard one to sell,” he says. “Maybe eventually, but it won’t happen for a long time, I don’t think.”
Healthier Soils
Soil health has emerged as a lively new frontier of research and practice and the integration of livestock and crop production is one of its tenets—manure adds nutrients to the soil and builds organic matter, improving soil health.
Soil, unlike dirt, is alive. It’s full of organisms, necessary for growing plants. Wiggling worms demonstrate fecund soil, but most networking occurs on the microscopic level. This organic matter is rich with fungi and bacteria. Iowa’s rich soils have organic content of up to 9%. The native soils of Colorado’s Eastern Plains might have originally had 5%. The farms of southeastern Colorado now have 1% to 3%.
Derek Heckman is on a quest to boost the organic matter of his soil to 5% or even higher. It matters because water matters entirely on the 500 acres he farms in southeastern Colorado, just west of Lamar.
Derek Heckman, who farms near Lamar in eastern Colorado, is implementing various soil health practices to build the organic matter of his soil, improve water retention, and stretch limited water supplies farther. Photo by Allen Best.
“Water is the limiting factor for our farms a majority of the time,” he explains. “We are never able to put on enough water.”
Heckman’s water comes from the Fort Lyon Canal, which takes out from the Arkansas River near La Junta. In a good year, he says, his land can get 25 to 30 runs from the ditch. Last year he got 16 runs. This year? As of early May, Heckman was expecting no more than 10 runs.
“The more organic matter there is, the more the moisture-holding capacity of the soil,” he explains. This is particularly important as water supplies dwindle during the hot days of summer.
“Let’s say we have 105 degrees every day for two weeks,” says Heckman. “Organic content of your soil of 3% might allow you to go four additional days without irrigation and without having potential yield loss or, even worse, crops loss.”
Heckman, 31, practices regenerative agriculture.
In explaining this, Heckman shies away from the word sustainable. It’s too limiting, he says. “I don’t want to just sustain what I’m doing. Regenerative is bringing the soil back to life.”
Growing corn in the traditional way involved plowing fields before planting. The working of the field might involve five passes by a tractor, compacting the soil and reducing its porosity. The plows disrupt microbial life.
For several decades, farmers and scientists have been exploring the benefits of less intrusive tilling of the soil. Beginning about 20 years ago, Heckman’s father was one of them. The scientific literature is becoming robust on the benefits of what is generically called “conservation tillage.”
Irrigated corn fields of eastern Colorado can require 10% less irrigation water depending upon tillage and residue management practices, according to a 2020 paper published by Schneekloth and others.
Heckman experiments continuously, trying to find the best balance of cover crops, minimal tilling, and the right mix of chemicals.
“A lot of guys are comfortable with what grandpa did and what dad did, and that’s what they do,” he says. “I want to see changes in our operation.”
On the Western Slope, soil health restoration is being tested in an experiment on sagebrush-dominated rangelands south of Montrose. Ken Holsinger, an ecologist with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, says the intent is to restore diversity to the lands and improve the water-holding capacity of the soil.
Holsinger says the federal land was likely harmed by improper livestock grazing, particularly prior to adoption of the Taylor Grazing Act in 1934, but may well have continued until the 1970s prior to implementing modern grazing practices.
This experiment consists of a pair of one-acre plots that have lost their topsoil and have become dominated by sagebrush and invasive vegetation. Such lands produce 200 to 300 pounds of forage per acre but should be producing 800 to 1,000 pounds per acre of native grasses. The soil will be amended with nutrients to restart the carbon cycle. Afterward, 50% of the sagebrush will be removed.
“We are looking at restarting the carbon cycle and ultimately holding more water in the soil profile,” says Holsinger.
One way these enhanced, restored soils help is by preventing the monsoonal rains that western Colorado typically gets in summer from washing soil into creeks and rivers, muddying the water. If the experiment proves successful, then the task will be to cost-effectively scale it up, ideally to the watershed level.
Back in Silt, at the site of Spring Born, Charles Barr, the company’s owner, speaks to the need for innovation. “That will be the model going forward for all of these agricultural areas,” he says. “They have to find new sources of revenue, they have to find new ways of doing business, and they have to find new ways to conserve water.”
An earlier version of this article appeared in the Summer 2022 edition of Headwaters magazine.
Allen Best grew up in eastern Colorado, where both sets of grandparents were farmers. Best writes about the energy transition in Colorado and beyond at BigPivots.com.
Fresh Water News is an independent, nonpartisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado. WEco is funded by multiple donors. Our editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
This article is the first in a series supported by The Water Desk, an independent journalism initiative based at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.This story was originally published by the Salt Lake Tribune on Nov. 24, 2022 and is republished with permission.
Mount Carmel • When the water is running through the ditches connecting her fields to Virgin River tributaries, Dusty Reese and her family don’t get a lot of sleep.
Lacking a pressurized irrigation system, the Kane County ranchers roam the alfalfa fields guiding where the water goes to ensure the fields are flood irrigated as efficiently as possible. The process can go well into the night.
“It’s really hard to control your water,” says Reese during a recent tour of one of her stubbled plots in Utah’s Long Valley, not long after bringing in the last harvest of the season. “It is not something you can just turn on and leave like a wheel line or a pivot. You actually have to walk up and down your field to check and make sure that the water is getting where it needs to go and [dig] with a shovel.”
The Utah Farm Bureau’s Kane County president, Reese, and her husband John farm and run cattle in this 13-mile-long valley framing the Virgin River’s east fork as it flows between the Markagunt and Paunsaugunt plateaus, the top two steps of the Grand Staircase.
It’s a place of bucolic beauty where artist Maynard Dixon lived in the 1940s creating his famous landscape paintings at a rustic retreat he built not far from where the Reeses now work the soil. Small farms line the valley bottom, looking much the way it looked during Dixon’s time.
But these days, growers have an increasingly complicated relationship with the liquid asset so vital to their survival. As Utah’s climate changes, less water is available, while municipal and industrial demands keep growing and lakes shrivel into puddles.
“The key question is how do we save the Great Salt Lake and all the darts and arrows point back to agriculture,” one Farm Bureau official said at a recent public meeting.
450,000 gallons to produce a ton
The Reeses are among the state’s 9,300 family hay-growing operations, which consume most of Utah’s water resources. Alfalfa and other types of hay are by far Utah’s most valuable agricultural crop, worth nearly half a billion dollars last year. But that represents just 0.2% of the state’s gross domestic product — on par with revenue generated by amusement parks.
The 2.4 million tons of annual hay the state produces plays a vital role supporting Utah’s agricultural economy, especially ranchers and dairies, but it comes at a price, experts say.
While Utah’s urban dwellers must rein in their notoriously high use of water, the state won’t solve its water woes without serious concessions from the agricultural sector, according to University of Utah economics professor Gabriel Lozada.
Alfalfa and hay account for 68% of the 5.1 million acre-feet of water diverted every year in Utah, Lozada’s research has found. That means it takes 1.38 acre-feet, or about 450,000 gallons, to produce a ton of alfalfa — about as much water as two Utah homes typically use in a year. (An acre-foot is the amount of water it takes to cover one acre of land with one foot of water.)
According to federal data, 29% of Utah’s hay harvest, by value, is exported overseas, with about two-thirds going to China. Up to 1 million acre-feet were used to produce this hay, depending on how many tons this share of the harvest’s value represents, according to Lozada’s calculations.
Could Utah put that water to better use elsewhere without leaving agriculture producers high and dry?
Lozada and others think so, but it would require overhauling Utah’s 19th-century water law so that farmers are rewarded for using less water, and reducing subsidies on the water they are entitled to use.
“Lots of people have warm and generous feelings towards farmers and rural life, but the vast majority of Utahns live in cities and suburbs,” Lozada said. “If you look at what generates the economic vitality of the state, it’s not our farming sector. It’s services, tech, health care, education, retail and transportation.”
That’s not to say that agriculture does not make critical and irreplaceable contributions to Utah’s overall quality of life. Irrigated alfalfa provides numerous environmental and social benefits that are tricky to quantify, but the cost of devoting so much water to a single crop is becoming increasingly and painfully clear as Utah’s water supplies get depleted.
Hidden costs
Scientific studies link Great Salt Lake’s record low water levels to upstream diversions, most of which are feeding agriculture in the Weber, Bear and Provo basins. Saving the lake, which supports $1.3 billion in economic output and internationally significant migratory bird habitat, has become a top priority among state leaders.
Driven also by unrelenting drought, dropping lake levels are not only disrupting robust brine shrimp and mineral industries, but they could also tee up an air quality nightmare for Utah’s urban corridor should exposed lakebed sediments become airborne.
“In economics, by definition, you’re trading off one good thing against another good thing. There are lots of good things about large, prosperous agricultural sectors and stable rural communities,” Lozada says. “But the cost of that, frankly, given the aridification of our climate, is probably horrendous degradation of the quality of life on the Wasatch Front.”
Lozada’s point isn’t to pit urban against rural communities, but rather to encourage reforms so that rural prosperity doesn’t come at the expense of the downstream environment and Utah cities, or vice versa.
Good for the soil
Hay grows on nearly three-fourths of Utah’s 1.1 million acres of irrigated croplands, although that share fluctuates year to year as alfalfa goes in and out of rotation with other crops, like triticale, a wheat hybrid, or corn.
Before laying blame for Utah’s water woes on alfalfa, agronomists say, it’s important to note the pivotal role this high-protein plant plays in rural communities, not to mention its broad environmental benefits.
“It’s a universal feed for cows, horses, goats, anything, and it has the protein that a lot of animals can accept and do really well on,” says fourth-generation Sanpete County rancher Stan Jensen. ” I don’t know of another crop around here that would bring in the yield and the income and serve as many purposes as alfalfa.”
He devotes 100 of his farm’s 500 acres to alfalfa. He estimates 5 feet of water are applied to every inch of land that grows the crop, an amount equal to 160 million gallons.
When managed properly, alfalfa cultivation improves soil and reduces carbon emissions, according to Tony Richards, who heads the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food’s (UDAF) soil health program.
As a perennial legume, alfalfa plants fix nitrogen into the soil and they need to be replanted just once every 5 to 10 years. Accordingly, alfalfa requires far less fertilizer and tilling than most other crops, which lessens its environmental footprint and keeps more carbon and nutrients in the ground.
After five or more years of harvesting from the same alfalfa plants over and over, farmers usually switch to corn or some other crop that draws from the nitrogen from the soil for a few years before replanting the alfalfa. And some farmers grow hay grasses and alfalfa together in ways that maximize yields.
“You can run an alfalfa stand for its whole life and never put any nitrogen [fertilizer] on it,” Richards says. “In a soil health context, alfalfa is a great crop.”
And the plants’ taproots extend up to 15 feet into the ground, which benefits the soil in other ways.
“You have this big root line going all the way down. It’s seeking deeper water so it can go through resiliency with drought,” Larsen says, “but at the same time it is creating a channel that water can infiltrate down through the soil better.”
These deep roots, in other words, enable the ground to absorb water more quickly, which also reduces erosion.
“If we do have a 1-inch rainstorm, are you able to infiltrate all of that inch or is it leaving your field, going somewhere else and taking soil with it as usually is the case?” Richards says. “That infiltration is critical because that water that goes down deep, it also recharges the aquifer. It’s what creates our springs.”
Why alfalfa works for Utah growers
Though it requires lots of water, alfalfa is a good fit with the West’s high-elevation landscapes, according to Ryan Larsen, a Utah State University economics professor.
On Utah’s high-elevation arid steppe, alfalfa is often grown where the land can’t support other crops profitably, particularly in Millard and Iron counties.
“There’s not really much else you could do on that land,” Larsen says. “Alfalfa really is our way of extracting the most value from this land.”
This crop is typically harvested two to four times a year, yielding on average around 3.8 tons per acre. How much depends on availability of water, timing of the harvests and the farmers’ goals, according to rancher Clay Hansen.
“If you cut it earlier, it can create a higher value feed, but there’s less tonnage of product. Or you can wait a little longer and get more tonnage at a lower value,” Hansen says, “or sometimes try to shoot that in the middle where we’re trying to do a little bit of both, so it wouldn’t be uncommon to get four cuttings right here.”
Near the Reeses’ Long Valley farm, Hansen helps manage the alfalfa operations connected to the vast Esplin Livestock Co. operation, which runs cattle on 183,000 acres of public and private land. Hansen’s 200-acre farm grows alfalfa in rotation with other grasses and grains, like sorghum, triticale, oats and barley.
“We’re trying to make sure that we have one or two pieces coming out of alfalfa and going into alfalfa all the time,” Hansen says, “We don’t want our whole farm in one stage because that puts us at really high risk, so we try to be very spread out.”
He aims to harvest 6 tons per acre each year, but how much depends on the weather. A rainstorm can boost a crop or turn a harvest “to junk,” depending on when it hits.
“We can get into that rainy monsoon pattern that we need so badly, but it really ruined a lot of hay,” he says. “Because we couldn’t get it cut at the right time, it had to sit in the field to dry out where it got rained on.”
Like the Esplin operation, the Reeses raise alfalfa to support their livestock operation when rangeland forage is poor or to bridge gaps in their seasonal public lands grazing windows.
“Ideally, we don’t ever want to have to feed our cattle hay. We’re hoping to keep them out grazing the whole year,” Reese says. “But as we’ve seen in the past few years [of drought], we often have to supplement and it has the protein and the nutrients that our animals need to grow.”
Larsen estimates that at least half of Utah’s harvest remains in the state, with the higher quality alfalfas going to the dairies and lower quality going to feed livestock on the range.
“In Millard County, rural Box Elder, rural Iron County, alfalfa production is really what fuels all those communities. If you take that away, I don’t think there’s enough there to support them,” Larsen says. “Our Utah producers would have to have to ship that in from somewhere, which would add additional financial burden, which could lead to them going out of business just because their cost of production would be so high.”
A path forward
Growers can reduce water waste by lining canals and ditches, leveling fields, and investing in pressurized systems, like wheel lines or pivots.
UDAF is helping farmers cover these investments through its water optimization grant program, which covers half the cost of qualifying projects. The state has set aside $70 million in American Rescue Plan Act money for these grants, but that sum will barely put a dent in the need.
Program director Jay Olsen estimates it would take $5 to $7 billion to optimize all 18,000 Utah farms’ use of irrigation water, and the costs keep going up every year.
For Reese, there is only so much she can do to cut water use. Without a reservoir to store the Virgin’s flow, pressurized systems are out of the question for many Long Valley growers.
Two canal companies deliver the water from nearby streams to the Reeses’ five fields spanning 80 acres. The volume of water their company’s shares give them varies from year to year, but Reese doesn’t know exactly how much water floods their fields.
When it’s their turn to irrigate, the ditch gates open for a set period of time then they close. No one is measuring.
“This year, we didn’t have very much water,” Reese says. “A lot of our successful crop production was because of monsoonal rains, not because of what came down the ditch.”
Misaligned incentives
Agricultural producers tend to hold the most senior water rights where they operate and have little reason to use less than their allotted share. In fact, using less puts their water rights at risk under Utah water law.
“You have to prove that you have been using your water, even if you own the water rights,” Reese says. “If you’re not pulling out the water, if you’re not using it, the state will come in and take it to someone else, so most agriculturalists will always use all of their water.”
As growers are not rewarded for conserving water, nor are they penalized for overusing it. This is because growers don’t actually pay for the water they use; they pay a price per share in canal companies, which remains the same regardless of how much water is delivered to their fields. Those payments cover the canals’ debt obligations, operations and upkeep, but not for the water itself.
“What farmers are doing is what’s economically rational given their incentives,” Lozada says. “If you are a farmer, what is your most important input? Water, and it is essentially free, except for the small cost of conveyance and transportation. Surely you would use a whole lot of it. You’d be dumb not to and that’s the situation that we put farmers in.”
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Clay Hansen walks through an alfalfa field on his family’s farm in Mt. Carmel on Thursday, Nov. 10, 2022.
Today, legislative reforms are in the works that would enable farmers to temporarily forgo their water or lease it without risking losing their water rights.
“If we put a price on water or we subsidize farmers to not use water, we don’t have to use persuasion anymore. The price system is going to do it,” Lozada says. “If it’s going to profit the farmer more to sell his water to the state than to use it to grow alfalfa, then that’s what he’s going to do.”
But are dry farms what Utahns want? Agriculture’s defenders argue everyone benefits when productive agriculture preserves open space and wildlife habitat near cities. Alfalfa supports farmers in the Heber, Ogden, Weber, Cache and Long valleys who may otherwise sell their land to real estate developers.
More subdivisions would sprawl into Utah’s scenic getaways and the more remote towns would empty out. It’s fair to say rural Utah would look vastly different without alfalfa, and not for the better in Dusty Reese’s view.
“Most of us are hoping that our kids can come back and work on the farm. There’s not a lot of job opportunities in these rural areas, and agriculture is one of them,” Reese says. “When you take away agriculture and you take away the logging, that’s created ghost towns in those areas because there’s no opportunity for people to work in the community and to work with and on the land.”
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
