Tom Brandy, who grows alfalfa in California’s Imperial Valley, believes farmers who depend on the shrinking Colorado River can do more to conserve water and use it more efficiently. I’m here. So he installed water sensors and monitors on almost two-thirds of his 3,000-acre land to prevent waste.

But one of Brandy’s off-limits practices is fallow. It’s about leaving fields unplanted to save water that would otherwise irrigate the crops. Brandy said that would save a lot of water, but it would also financially threaten both farmers and rural communities.

“It’s not very productive because it just doesn’t farm,” Brandy said.

Despite the growing sense that some fallow land will be needed as part of the solution to the increasingly desperate drought in the West, where the Colorado River serves 40 million people, many Western farmers feel the same way.

“Given the amount of water used by agriculture in the Colorado River system, we cannot stabilize the system without reducing agriculture,” said Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources. “It’s just math.”

The U.S. Reclamation Service is considering paying farmers to rest their fields. Many of them are in California’s vast Imperial Valley and Arizona’s Yuma County, where they grow much of the country’s winter vegetables and rely on rivers. comes from $4 billion set aside for

Federal officials and major irrigators have been in negotiations for months. Neither side has disclosed details of the negotiations, nor how much funding is being sought or provided.

Sen. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat from Colorado, said fallow should be considered. The challenge, he said, is to come up with fair pay for farmers as they work on land of varying quality and plant crops of varying value.

“Water in certain parts of the Colorado River Basin is more valuable than water in others. You have to,” Hickenlooper said in an interview. .

Agriculture uses 70% to 80% of the Colorado River’s water, and ideas for reducing it have long been debated. Farmers and the irrigators who serve them justify their use of water because people across the country eat locally grown produce and locally grown grass-fed beef. said.

Water officials in cities and other states where demand from farms is low say agriculture draws so much water from rivers that wasteful farming practices continue despite water shortages. says there is. They say that even as major reservoirs supplied from Colorado plummet to all-time lows, western water laws that prioritize older users will keep farmers with those rights thirsty in the converted desert. He said he could grow crops.

Tina Shields is a water manager at the Imperial Irrigation District, first saving water with efficient methods such as drip irrigation, selecting crops that use less water, and using water sensors to reduce waste. I advise farmers to do so. But she acknowledged that fallow needs to be part of the equation as states heed the federal call and reduce its use by 15% to 30% she said.

“We don’t like fallow land,” Shields joked, joking that the practice is known as “the F-word here,” and that the district’s additional 250,000 acre-feet It said it would need some amount to conserve water from the Colorado River, which it said would save about 8% of the allocation from the Colorado River. (1 acre foot of water is enough to submerge 1 acre of land in 1 foot of water, roughly the amount used by 2-3 US households per year.)

Resting fields to conserve water is not a new idea in the Imperial Valley.

For 15 years, the Imperial Irrigation District ran a fallow program as part of a historic water transfer agreement signed with San Diego in 2003. This program ended in 2017. About 300,000 acres of farmland fellow, saving 1.8 million acre feet of water at a cost. Farmers were paid $161 million, according to the district.

Things are getting worse on the Colorado River, but the Imperial Valley has memories of the program. And farmers want much more than they were paid at the time.

Larry Cox, who has grown crops and grasses in the Imperial Valley for decades, said hundreds of the 4,000 acres were nomadic at the time. He used the payment to buy sprinklers his pipes and other equipment to make the irrigation system more efficient. But he also let go of his 5% to his 10% of the workforce of irrigators, farm workers and tractor drivers.

Today, he worries about the impact fallow will have on rural communities. In addition to potentially causing economic losses to farmers, businesses that supply farmers with tires, fertilizers, gas and other needs will also be affected.

“It damages our entire community,” he said.

Many farmers fear that once the land is no longer produced, it will never be cultivated again. This is also because the quality of the land may deteriorate, making it difficult to return the land to production later.

Paul Brierley, executive director of the University of Arizona’s Yuma Center of Excellence for Desert Aggregation, said disruptions to farm operations have consequences downstream.

“Farming is like any other business,” says Brierley. “They have capital invested, they have employees, they have markets for their products.

The failure of a proposal from a Yuma County farmer last year showed how difficult it would be for federal officials and the farmers they target to come to an agreement. In that case, the farmer suggested the government pay him about $1,500 for each acre-foot of unused water in his four years, but no deal came to fruition.

An indication of how much reclamation would pay came from another offer offered at $400 per acre-foot to farmers in the Lower Basin of Arizona, California and Nevada.

Buschatzke said Arizona farmers felt that even the $1,500 offer was less than they deserved based on what they made with their produce.

“It’s a business, sure, but they think they’re doing a lot of good for the whole country because they grew up in Yuma,” Buschatzke said.

Imperial Valley farmers have priority over the Colorado River’s water, making it almost impossible to mandate a water cut there without filing a lawsuit.

“You can’t get producers on board,” says Shields. “We have to make business decisions for them.”

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