Farmers in Southern California’s Imperial Valley, the largest water users in the entire Colorado River basin, have agreed to significantly reduce their consumption in a new agreement with the California federal government.

The cuts will be made by 2026 and will total more than twice the amount the entire state of Nevada consumes each year.

“IID (Imperial Irrigation District) has overcome enormous hurdles to make this deal possible – there is no excuse for inaction anywhere along the river,” JB Hambythe Vice Chairman of the District and the Commissioner representing California in current negotiations across the river, said in a Press release.

Brian Richter, who researches water use on the Colorado River, said such an agreement is necessary because the climate crisis is pushing the river to unprecedented limits.

“We could wipe all the cities off the map that get water from the Colorado River, and we would just about balance the water balance of the Colorado River system,” Richter said. “So a huge portion of the savings actually has to come from irrigated agriculture.”

This is how the cuts are made

To make the massive savings, the Imperial Irrigation District will receive more than $500 million from the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act. This money comes in addition to a sizable pot of federal and state funds already helping farmers switch to water-saving technologies.

Farmers are also paid to temporarily stop growing thirsty crops like alfalfa – a practice known as deficit irrigation.

Trevor Tagg, like most farmers in the Imperial Valley, grows alfalfa and other forage crops. He plans to participate in the deficit irrigation program, which means he won’t grow alfalfa during the hottest seasons. For him, it’s an option he’s considering as a last resort.

“This is a lifeline that we now have to keep farmers in agriculture,” said Tagg. “In the long term, I don’t agree with this. Personally, I don’t think the water should drain away from here.”

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

While the Colorado River has long been overused, human-caused climate change is causing the snowpack that feeds the river to disappear and increasing the amount of water evaporating from the river and its main reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell. The seven states that rely on the river are locked in tense negotiations to figure out how to make long-term and unprecedented savings after 2026, when existing, century-old legal agreements expire.

But many Imperial Valley farmers like Tagg say they are already overwhelmed by existing water restrictions. Since 2003, the district’s water sales to cities like San Diego, as well as increasingly efficient farming techniques, have reduced the region’s water use by more than 7 million acre-feet of water. By comparison, the entire city of LA uses about 500,000 acre-feet of water each year.

And, Tagg said, as the valley’s farmers continue to use less water, the Salton Sea will continue to dry up, acting as a drain for wastewater from Imperial and Coachella Valley farms. The Salton Sea was originally formed when water from the Colorado River breached an irrigation canal built in the Imperial Valley in 1905.

Over the years, the drying up of the lake has led to dangerous levels of air pollution in the surrounding communities, which are predominantly populated by low-income agricultural workers, and has reduced the habitat of the migratory birds that now depend on the lake.

This is an issue that farmers and environmentalists agree on, and a major reason why there is opposition to this new agreement. Some environmentalists say The deal was agreed without proper environmental assessment.

Find a balance?

There are only a few ways to save water in agriculture: by using more efficient technologies, by growing less water-intensive crops such as vegetables instead of alfalfa, or by not growing any crops at all, which is called fallow farming.

This is what the farmers in Blythe, near the Arizona border, have been demanded since 2004 in exchange for cash payments by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD), which supplies cities like LA with water from the Colorado River.

“They’re paying us not to manage the land,” said Bart Fisher, a Blythe farmer who grows vegetables, melons and alfalfa and is the former chairman of California’s Colorado River Basin Advocacy Group, who was instrumental in developing the research and the partnership with MWD.

“Looking back, it (the ongoing program) has had some unintended consequences in our small community here in Blythe,” he said.

Fisher said the fact that no farmland could be cultivated in Blythe for long periods of time, despite the cash payouts from the MWD, has damaged jobs and businesses.

He said the deficit irrigation program implemented in the Imperial Valley is a better approach because farmers only stop farming for a few months a year, so the impact on the local economy is smaller while still achieving significant water savings. This program is based on the 20 years of research that came out of the program in Blythe.

But if the world does not sufficiently reduce humanity’s planet-warming pollution, scientists say thirsty crops like alfalfa may eventually no longer be able to be grown in the Imperial Valley at all.