With the Colorado River on the brink of disaster, farmers who depend on water for life are preparing to drastically cut operations.

Near the U.S.-Mexico border, fourth-generation farmer Amanda Brooks grows 6,000 acres of broccoli, lettuce, dates, citrus and alfalfa. Her family’s farm in Yuma, Arizona, looms over the banks of a raging river.

The river is “everything we do,” Brooks said. “We couldn’t grow crops without it.”

Last year, government officials warned Congress that the river was getting dangerously low. Speaking before a Senate committee, Reclamation Service Director Camille Touton said seven areas in his Colorado River Basin need to drastically reduce water use to maintain reservoir stability. rice field.

“The challenges we face today are unlike anything we’ve seen in our history,” Touton said.

The river crisis is due to climate change and population growth in the West, with too many people using too much water. About 75% of rivers flow to agriculture. And farmer Amanda Brooks knows she could bear the brunt of the looming logging.

“Not everyone gets along,” she said. “Not everyone agrees on what that solution is. It’s scary.”

Brooks mentions rising tensions between the seven basin states.

6 last month sent a proposal to the federal government It made plans to wipe out the system-wide curtailment. But the states that use the largest share of the river did not sign. California came up with a plan of its own.

Without an agreed solution, the reservoir will continue to dwindle, and hydrologists say the river could stop flowing past the Lake Mead dam within two years. That scenario is called Deadpool.

Considering the stakes, Brooks says Yuma farmers are saving as much as they can.

All of her fields are laser leveled to reduce runoff to zero. She also works with a coalition of local irrigation districts who have offered to dry some fields.

Their plan, called Save the River, called for the government to pay farmers $1,500 for each acre-foot of unused water.

“I think there was generally a perception that we were greedy,” Brooks said, explaining the unacceptable plan. We know that it just didn’t make us complete.”

‘Extreme shock’ to farms

If farmers don’t know what’s going to happen, neither do economists. About ten years ago, George Frisvold of the University of Arizona ran a model to try to understand what would happen to farmers when rivers experienced unimaginable water shortages.

Many vegetable farmers in Yuma and neighboring Imperial County, California, thrived when he and his colleagues cut the area’s water allocation by 2.5 million acre feet.

“Vegetable production will be the last to be affected as it is the most profitable,” says Frizvold.

Not true for other crops. Frizvold’s model showed that losing that much water would wipe out low-value crops like alfalfa, cotton, and wheat. However, this study had a blind spot. We were not modeling scenarios over 2.5 million acre feet. At the time, Frizvold said losing so much water would have been considered “extreme shock.”

What was unimaginable ten years ago is now essentially inevitable. The Department of Reclamation says the state must conserve 2 million to 4 million acre-feet of water to prevent rivers from bursting.

This is the equivalent of about 3 million soccer fields covered by 1 foot of water.

“We are in uncharted territory,” says Frizvold.

“If you don’t have water, you have no rights.”

Yuma farmer Kirk Dunn recognizes the threat. He grows low-value crops that Frizvold warns about. On his recent sunny February day, he was planting a different variety of wheat in the cab of his tractor that needed less water.

It’s an experiment.

He wants to reduce irrigation by 20% without affecting yields. “We are doing our best to prove it. need to do it,” he said.

Meanwhile, Dan is frustrated with his neighbors. California farmers just a few miles from here have advanced water rights. That means Arizona will be the first to suffer when rivers run out of water or drought. Cities like Phoenix and Tucson, and many of the state’s farms, will run out of river water before California runs out of water.

In the 1960s, Arizona agreed to a deal to secure funding for the Central Arizona Project, a vast system of canals that would carry water from the Colorado River to the central part of the state. This is part of a legal framework that people often refer to as “the law of the river”.

“California and other states want to rely on the laws of the river and historic treaties and water rights, but all these will soon disappear because without water you have nothing. said Dan.

Arizona versus California

This tension between nations has set the stage for battle. Across the river from Arizona, the town of Holtville, California, calls itself the carrot capital of the world.

Every February, the town holds a parade in honor of the prized vegetable.

“Being a farmer is no easy task,” said parade participant Mike Webb, who grew up in the area and works on local farms. You think you’re safe, but there’s not much to go around. ”

Farms in Holtville and nearby towns get their water from the approximately 500,000-acre Imperial Irrigation District in California’s Imperial Valley.

IID is the river’s largest single water user and Ten times as much water as the entire state of Nevada.

According to IID manager Tina Shields, the district supported California’s decision not to participate in the plans of the other six basin states for future cuts. She said their proposal ignores the priority system set out in the Rivers Act. It will be.

“A deal is a deal,” she said. She said, “We don’t just stop respecting existing conventions, laws and laws just because times were a little tougher and people didn’t realize they were going to be affected.”

Shields and other Imperial Valley farmers say they are willing to make some sacrifices. As part of a deal with the federal government to solve an environmental disaster in the nearby Salton Sea, IID voluntarily agreed to conserve her 250,000 acre-feet of water this year. But Shields said school districts aren’t willing to do more unless other states act first.

For farmers like Jack Vessey, whose family has grown vegetables around Holtville for generations, there is no backup plan. He said that if the river stopped flowing past Lake Mead, “the area would dry up and become a desert again. It would become a ghost town.”

But both Arizona and California farmers see their livelihoods at risk, which is why finding solutions is becoming increasingly difficult. At this point, many water experts expect the federal government to step in and order states to cut back before the reservoir reaches Deadpool.

Plans that deviate from the status quo can be taken to court. The process will take years to resolve before the reservoir is further reduced, said Wade Nobel, a Yuma attorney representing the local irrigation district.

“The situation is very tight,” he added. “In water wars, things are going to get ugly. They were ugly for a while, and they’re going to get worse.”