Yes, you could put a brick in your toilet and maybe cut your water use by a few hundred gallons a year. You could let your car go unwashed for a few extra weeks. You could xeriscape your front yard.
This will not solve the water problems in the American West.
According to a 2017 article in The Colorado Independent by reporter Marianne Goodland, ordinary citizens living in Colorado’s cities and towns account for maybe 7 percent of the state’s water consumption. Industry accounts for another 4 percent.
Farms and ranches, meanwhile, account for 89 percent of Colorado’s water use. That’s about 9 out of every 10 gallons consumed. A similar proportion of agricultural use can be found in the other six Colorado River Basin states — California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Wyoming. In a drought situation, the key to keeping water in the Colorado River — for environmental and recreational purposes — truly hinges on agricultural practices.
There are two main schools of thought about reducing agricultural water consumption. The unproductive one, and the productive one.
The 2019 Drought Contingency Plan, presented to the US Congress last month, seems to be focused on the unproductive solution, which is to pay farmers and ranchers to not grow their crops, through ‘buy and dry’ schemes or ‘alternative transfer methods’ (ATMs). Both schemes use taxpayer revenues to reward farmers for doing nothing.
Ms. Goodland’s Colorado Independent article mentioned above does a good job of describing the most popular ways of wasting taxpayer money while also reducing the nation’s agricultural production.
To understand a smarter approach, we can begin with a visit to Israel. From the 2015 article, “How Israel Is Solving the Global Water Crisis,” written by David Hazony in The Tower Magazine:
For most of human history, agriculture was about overcoming the irregularity of rainfall through what’s called “flood irrigation.” This uses as much water as it sounds. Essentially, tons of it are poured into fields or trenches. Think of ancient farmers schlepping buckets from a river to nearby fields. Modern sprinkler systems use less than that, but are still wasteful. A huge amount is lost to evaporation, blocked by leaves, or simply misses its mark.
About 85 years ago, a young water engineer in Israel named Simcha Blass noticed a row of trees planted at the edge of a farm, in the heart of that arid country. The trees looked exactly the same, except for one tree at the end of the row, which was about twice as tall and bushy. He walked over to the base of the tall tree and found that a metal water pipe had sprung a tiny leak, and was dripping into the soil near the tree’s roots.
“The drop of water that grew the gigantic tree refused to leave me. It stayed trapped and sleeping in my heart.”
Blass went on to other projects, ultimately playing an important role in Israel’s national water programs, but it was not until he retired that Blass turned his attention back to that drop of water and that tall, bushy tree. He came to realize something that would utterly change Israeli agriculture: that a tiny amount of water in the right place could make a plant grow larger and faster than a large amount thrown at it by rain or flood irrigation or sprinklers.
The question became: How do you deliver drops of water to each and every plant in a way that is cost-effective? Anyone who’s traveled around Israel has seen the solution. Long, tough, black or brown plastic tubes, an inch in diameter… in public landscaping, or among the crops on a kibbutz.
From the Tower Magazine article:
…Blass’ invention was little more than tubes hooked up to a timer and carefully calibrated. It took a long time to be taken seriously, and it wasn’t until the late 1960s that some folks at Kibbutz Hatzerim, in the desert near Beersheba, started a company called Netafim that began manufacturing these systems and, in the 1970s, exporting them around the world.
How much water does drip irrigation save? Estimates suggest that farmers can save at least 40 percent of their irrigation water on a per-acre basis. But it gets better, because crop yields from drip-irrigated fields can easily be double, or more — meaning that, per pound of food, the water savings can be in excess of 70 percent.
Almost two decades ago, the Dutch made a national commitment to sustainable agriculture under the rallying cry “Twice as much food using half as many resources.” Since 2000, many farmers in the Netherlands have reduced dependence on water for key crops by as much as 90 percent.
And there’s another huge advantage to getting away from flood irrigation which is especially important in the United States: Saving our existing water sources from contamination. Across America, farmers fertilize their crops with chemicals — and then flood their fields. The fertilizer chemicals make their way into fresh-water sources: lakes, streams, aquifers — stimulating algae growth, killing fish and plants, and making the water undrinkable. America’s biggest pollution problem isn’t chemicals in the air; it’s runoff from flood-irrigated farms contaminating the water supply.
Says one Dutch scientist, quoted in a 2017 National Geographic article:
“Water isn’t the fundamental problem. It’s poor soil… The absence of nutrients can be offset by cultivating plants that act in symbiosis with certain bacteria to produce their own fertilizer…”
But America is faced with demographic problem that may be even more serious than its future water challenges. In a country where farmers and ranchers have an average age of 59 years and many are getting ready to retire, we have a century-old tradition of subsidizing questionable planting decisions, price fluctuations, and water shortages with taxpayer revenues.
The 2015 Colorado Water Plan carries on with that same old tradition.
In her 2017 article — “PARCHED: Farms could help solve Colorado’s water shortage. So why aren’t they?” — reporter Marianne Goodland quotes Logan County farmer Gene Manuello:
“I’m in agriculture to produce, not to sell or lease water… I believe in agriculture and ag production, so any process to take irrigated acres out of production doesn’t work for me.”
For Manuello, who has been growing corn and hay and raising cattle since the 1970s, water leasing undermines the very reason he works in farming and ranching. The state’s inclusion of ‘alternative transfer methods’ (ATMs) in its water plans sends a strong message to farmers — that population growth should come at the expense of agriculture.
The way I see it, we’re not likely to solve the water challenges of the American West until younger families, open to new ideas, become involved in the nation’s agricultural industry. What we need are not more water reservoirs and pipelines; we need a youthful, innovative agricultural industry.
Why isn’t that necessity a central part of our fancy water plans?