Photo © Brett Walton/Circle of Blue

Colorado’s San Luis Valley is pinched by two mountain ranges, the San Juan peaks to the west and the Sangre de Cristo, seen here, to the east. The valley is the highest agricultural region in the United States.

By Brett Walton
Circle of Blue

SAN LUIS VALLEY, Colorado — At an average altitude of 2,350 meters (7,700 feet), Colorado’s San Luis Valley is the nation’s highest agricultural region and one of its top potato producers. Almost by definition, water dictates the patterns of life and land.

With it, valley farmers have turned this sunny, high-desert rift between the Sangre de Cristo and San Juan mountain ranges into one of the most densely irrigated expanses of farmland on the planet. Soon, though, a confrontation between rising global commodity prices, which are pushing production to meet demand, and shrinking water supplies, largely linked to climate change, could cause a number of growers here to do without.

Like heavily irrigated areas in California’s Central Valley, in India’s northern regions, and in the North China Plain, the San Luis Valley has a groundwater supply problem. Since government-subsidized electricity arrived in the 1950s, farmers here have readily pumped from the two aquifer systems that soak up snowmelt like a sponge. Now, those decades of withdrawals have combined with recently lower-than-average river flows to affect water-rights holders along the Rio Grande River, which cuts through the valley before eventually becoming the Texas-Mexico border.

Simply put, the San Luis Valley no longer has enough water to support the abundant farm production that is becoming increasingly supercharged by rising prices for the crops grown here.

There may be a way out. Water officials in the region’s six counties are working with the federal government on a voluntary plan that would pay farmers to take land out of production. If things turn out as planned, up to 16,000 hectares (40,000 acres) of the valley’s roughly 240,000 irrigated hectares (600,000 acres) will not be farmed.

Though it is still being negotiated, the plan has a significant obstacle: the explosive rise in food prices, which are making the sums offered by the water-conservation program less enticing. Prices for the valley’s mainstay — potatoes — have increased 25 percent in the last five years. Wheat, alfalfa, and barley prices have done even better, more or less doubling over the same period.

Photo © Brett Walton/Circle of Blue

“Industrialized agriculture is destroying this place,” says George Whitten, president of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District. Standing in the pastures on his 1,600-hectare (4,000-acre) ranch in Saguache County, Whitten explains the district’s land-fallowing plan, in which up to 16,000 hectares (40,000 acres) will be taken out of production to protect one of the valley’s aquifers.

“The commodity markets are going to drive this,” said Steve Vandiver, the general manager of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District, in an interview with Circle of Blue. “If prices stay high, it’s going to be harder to get farmers to sign up.”

If the voluntary program does not work, Vandiver went on to say, the result would be worst for farmers. The state, he said, would then step in — like it did in not long ago in the nearby South Platte Basin — and force well owners to shut down, without compensation.

“We’re trying to keep that from happening here,” he said. “We’re trying to provide a soft landing.”

Living On A Borrowed Resource
Viewed from above, the San Luis Valley is a punch card of tightly packed center-pivot sprinklers that can pump four cubic meters (1,000 gallons) of water per minute. Settlers started farming the valley in the 1850s, and, by 1903, all of the available surface water had been claimed. Because the valley receives so little rain — just 75 millimeters (three inches) more in a year than what Las Vegas receives — everything is irrigated.

Years ago, farmers relied on groundwater only to finish off the last weeks of the irrigation season, when surface flows were dwindling. But for the last two decades, surface flows in the Rio Grande have declined in comparison with the historical average, said Mike Gibson, the manager of the San Luis Valley Water Conservancy District. To make up for the shortage, farmers have pumped groundwater to take up the slack.

Climate change plays a role in the new river patterns, Gibson told Circle of Blue. Wind storms from the deserts in Arizona and New Mexico are more frequent, and they drop dust on the mountain snowpack, which is the primary water source for the valley’s rivers. The warming effect of the dust, combined with higher temperatures, means that the spring melt has moved several weeks earlier in the year. With a longer dry period in the summer, more groundwater is required to balance the changes in the river.

New reservoirs to store the altered flows are prohibited under a compact between Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas, Gibson told Circle of Blue, but existing reservoirs are being renovated to maximize their storage capacity.

Vandiver told Circle of Blue that the valley is millions of cubic meters shy of sustainable water levels in the aquifer systems. Each year roughly 615 million cubic meters (500,000 acre-feet) are pumped to produce the bounty of alfalfa, barley, potatoes, and leafy greens that contributes nearly 40 percent of the valley’s economy.

The water district banned new wells in the deep aquifer in 1972 and in the shallow aquifer in 1981 — but the over-pumping persists. The district is still developing groundwater models to determine how much of the annual deficit needs to be paid back.

“We have a huge economy here, based on a resource that doesn’t exist,” says George Whitten, president of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District. Whitten’s family has owned Blue Range Ranch since 1897, and he believes that, at the current rate, the agriculture-based economy and the water won’t last for much longer.

Project Fallow: Earning Money To Not Grow
The valley’s water agencies are working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Services Agency to approve an incentive program that would pay farmers to leave their land fallow. The incentive is authorized by the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP), which was enacted by Congress in 1997 to improve water conservation, wildlife habitat, and soils.

Photo © Brett Walton/Circle of Blue

The southwest windows in the Whitten kitchen face the San Juan Mountains. On the counter are Siberian tomatoes, a variety well adapted to the valley’s short growing season.

The Farm Services Agency runs water conservation CREPs in Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska, and Oregon. The agency spent $US 164 million on CREP payments nationwide during the 2010 fiscal year.

The Republican River Basin is the only CREP program currently in Colorado, and it began in 2006 with a goal of fallowing 14,000 hectares (35,000 acres). But high crop prices have proven to be an impediment in Colorado and in other states — as of October, the program had enrolled less than 60 percent of that target acreage.

Under the San Luis Valley plan, farmers would sign a 15-year contract to take land out of production. They would receive an annual payment per acre, based on local land rates. Valley water officials are asking the federal government for an annual average of $US 370 per hectare ($US 150 per acre).

In addition, the local government must provide at least 20 percent of the program cost. The Rio Grande Water Conservation District is meeting this requirement by levying a “pumping fee” between $US 35 and $US 60 per 1,000 cubic meters ($US 45 and $US 75 per acre-foot) on farmers who pump groundwater in excess of their surface water right. The fees are charged to irrigators in Subdistrict No. 1, a patch of land north of the Rio Grande, where the aquifer is most depleted and where the fallowing would occur. A smaller administrative fee is also charged to all irrigated land.

“If CREP doesn’t occur,” Vandiver said, “we will have to do the best we can with the money that the subdistrict collects.”

Photo © Brett Walton/Circle of Blue

Officials in the San Luis Valley’s six counties are working with energy companies to develop solar power on exhausted farmland. SunPower’s 17-megawatt photovoltaic array in Alamosa County, shown here, was the largest in Colorado when it began generating power in December 2010.

Valley officials hope the plan will be approved in time for this year’s irrigation season, but they cannot foresee how its effects will ripple through the community.

“We don’t know what the economic and social impacts will be from taking tens of thousands of acres out of agricultural production,” Gibson said.

And if the goals of the management plan are not met, the state is waiting in the wings to enforce the limits with mandatory restrictions. The state engineer, who oversees water rights, will present draft rules to the state supreme court this year.

Photo © Brett Walton/Circle of Blue

George Whitten’s family has owned Blue Range Ranch since 1897. If we’re going to continue agriculture in the Mountain West, he says, ranchers and farmers will have to consider the proper animals and plants for a drier future.

So, in essence, those farming in the depleted section of the aquifer have to ask themselves this question: If we pass up the land-fallowing deal and continue reaping jackpot harvests, can we find the surface water offsets that the state could require?

Karla Shriver, who for 26 years has grown potatoes on 400 hectares (1,000 acres) south of the Rio Grande, is someone who believes more people will take the payments rather than leave it to chance. She told Circle of Blue that, looking long term, the CREP money may be the best offer that farmers could get.

“We can’t maintain high prices forever,” Shriver said. “It’s all cyclical.”

The Sun and the Water
Because the area gets an average 340 days of sunshine per year, the San Luis Valley is at the center of solar power development in the Western U.S. The Bureau of Land Management has put four parcels of land it manages on the “fast-track” for regulatory approval, and several investor-owned companies are already operating in the valley.

If hectares of silicon panels were to replace irrigated crops on worn-out land, this solar industrialization could also help the water problem. But solar jobs are not farm jobs, and valley residents have pushed back against large solar projects. Besides, farming has been not just a way of life, but life itself here for the last 150 years.

“Agriculture is our economy in the valley,” said Vandiver, of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District. “If it goes away, we have nothing left.”

Part of the reporting for this story was done while the author, Brett Walton, participated in a fellowship that was paid for by the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources.

Photo courtesy Doc Searls via Flickr

San Luis Valley from the air.

While landowners took to Australia’s streets in mid-August to demand greater protection against the potentially lucrative coal seam gas industry, opposition groups in South Africa were mustering strength against shale gas exploration that, they say, could threaten the nationally significant Karoo region.

Australia and South Africa are among an increasing number of countries around the world that are reckoning with the prospects of developing unconventional fuels to bring revenue, to diversify energy sources, and to reduce carbon emissions.

But the rapid expansion of the unconventional fuels industry, along with the large volumes of water needed to unlock gas from underground coal beds and shale rock formations, have raised concerns over the potential damage to underground water aquifers, human health, food production, and the environment. These industries are also creating competition over land and water rights, which could spill over into political and social disputes.

Dewatering Australia: Coal Seam Gas v. Agriculture
In recent weeks, Australian farmers have locked gates on properties and organized protests against coal seam gas and coal mining companies trying to tap underground resources in prime agricultural lands.

The protesters, many of them farmers, worry that coal seam gas — also known as coalbed methane (CBM) extraction, which withdraws pre-existing water from the coal seam, thus reducing the pressure and allowing the methane gas to separate from the solid coal and to flow to the surface — might pollute the water resources for drinking and farming. They are demanding a moratorium on CSG drilling, until the health and environmental impacts of the process can be assessed further. The CSG “dewatering” process typically takes two years.

Around 2,000 yellow signs bearing “Lock the Gate” slogans were hung on farm gates throughout Queensland and New South Wales in mid-August, encouraging land owners to stand up to the energy companies, Sky News reported.

Protesters also gathered at a recent mining conference in Sydney on August 18, according to ABC News.

The recent events follow months of wrangling between farmers and miners over energy production, traditionally a very influential sector in Australia. The tensions also sparked political controversy earlier this month, when the Greens Party called for new laws to give stronger rights to farmers, enabling them to keep coal seam exploration rigs off their land, Reuters reported.

According to Australian legislation, the rights to below-ground deposits belong to the government, instead of to individual landowners, meaning that citizens have a hard time keeping energy companies off their property.

Meanwhile, Australia’s CSG industry — a major source for the country’s growing liquefied natural gas (LNG) sector – plans to build roughly $US 70 billion worth of LNG projects in Queensland state over the next seven years; a scenario that is also estimated to create thousands of new jobs each year. Exploration is also advancing in neighboring New South Wales, according to Reuters.

Fracking South Africa’s Karoo Region: Shale Gas Exploration in the Desert
Similarly, South Africa has been gauging the extensive risks associated with the potentially big economic benefits of proposed shale gas drilling in its Karoo region, a semi-desert area known for its stark beauty and indigenous plants; a region that is also believed to hold substantial deposits of shale gas.

Earlier in August, Yale Environment 360 reported that opposition to natural gas drilling is growing among farmers, landowners, and environmentalists in the country, amid concerns that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking – the process of injecting water, chemicals, and sand at high pressure into rock formations to free up the oil and natural gas trapped inside – will deplete and pollute the Karoo’s scarce water supplies.

The worry is that the poverty-stricken region will become the arid twin of the Niger Delta’s swampy mangroves, where foreign oil companies and long years of conflict have contaminated the Nigerian land and water.

In July, protesters chanted outside the Shale Gas South Africa Conference in Johannesburg, where Shell South Africa – just one in a score of companies eyeing shale gas in Karoo — was to discuss its fracking plans for the region.

Earlier this year, in February, South African farmers and environmentalists voiced a public concern over plans to look for shale gas. Then, in May, the South African government said it would conduct a comprehensive feasibility study of hydraulic fracturing before it decides on the shale gas applications in its Karoo region, and the government imposed a moratorium on the use of the fracking technique until that time. This announcement came on the heels of a number of policy decisions in China, Europe, and the United States that have set diverse agendas for shale gas drilling around the world.

Source: Australia Broadcasting Corporation News, Sky News, Toowoomba Chronicle, Yale Environment 360, Reuters

By Adam Moser
Circle of Blue

Photo courtesy s_mestdagh via Creative Commons.

Montana has argued that Wyoming is obligated to provide a set quantity of water for ranching and other industries in the Yellowstone River Basin. Montana took the case to the Supreme Court but lost the first round.

On April 1, the Obama administration leased 3,000 hectares (7,400 acres) of federal mineral rights in the Powder River Basin, an expanse of dryland and prairie that spans northern Wyoming and southern Montana that also produces more than 40 percent of the nation’s coal each year and 10 percent of its natural gas. The Powder, the Little Powder, and the Tongue rivers all flow north from Wyoming to Montana, watering a landscape where farmers and ranchers compete for resources with the largest energy companies in the nation.

The U.S. Department of Interior — which owns the mineral rights beneath 1.7 million of the 2.6 million hectares (4.3 million of the 6.5 million acres) in the energy-rich and water-scarce basin — has plans for 12 more, similarly big mineral lease sales over the next three years.

One month later, on May 2, the U.S. Supreme Court issued the first in a series of potentially momentous decisions on the Powder River Basin’s diminishing water supply that could reshape the limits of energy production and agriculture in the arid West. In what was likely just the first round of Montana v. Wyoming, the Supreme Court, in a seven-to-one majority decision, ruled in favor of upstream water users. In effect, although upstream water users reduce downstream water levels, this does not obligate them to use less water or to supply downstream water users with more water.

The granting of new leases to mine coal in the Powder River Basin and the expectation of more decisions to come from Montana v. Wyoming illustrates a surprising weakness in the federal government’s strategy for managing water resources in the dry American West. By issuing federal mineral leases before the Supreme Court has completed all of the rulings in the complex four-year-old case, the Interior Department is aggravating an already tense situation by creating new demands on the region’s stressed water supplies.

The government’s new leases and the Court’s decision complicate questions about how much water is really available to generate energy and to produce food in one of the nation’s driest regions, as well as who has access to that water.

Lawsuit Basics: Montana Worried About Wyoming’s Upstream Water Use
The Supreme Court ruling stems from a lawsuit, filed in 2007 by Montana, which contended that Wyoming was violating terms of the Yellowstone River Compact. The lawsuit alleges that Wyoming was taking more than its share of water from two tributaries, the Tongue and Powder rivers, which have their source in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming and flow into the Yellowstone River in Montana — but not before running through the heart of coal and gas country; two industries that use large volumes of water.

The Yellowstone River Compact was negotiated among Montana, Wyoming and North Dakota in 1950 and later ratified by Congress in 1951. Its basic objective was to manage the Yellowstone Basin’s water resources, preserve existing water rights, and to define the division of unallocated water.

The compact specified a three-tier system:

• First Tier: Irrigators, on both sides of the border, with water rights dating before 1950. They have first call on water from the two tributaries.
• Second Tier: Includes post-1950 water rights granted to first-tier users.
• Third Tier: New users, who supposedly get their water after first- and second-tier demands have been met.

In dry years, however, not enough water crosses the state line from Wyoming to meet the obligations of first-tier users in Montana, the state claims. Montana alleges that, while its first-tier users go without, Wyoming has allowed its users in the second and third tiers to receive water.

Montana charges in its complaint, according to an analysis by the Billings Gazette, that Wyoming has built new storage reservoirs which impermissibly hold water that should drain into the rivers; that new acreage has been put into production in Wyoming since 1950; that groundwater pumping for irrigation and coalbed methane production have reduced flows in the rivers; and that new, more efficient irrigation methods have reduced the amount of water that flows back into the rivers.

Wyoming disputes the claims, arguing that Montana has never quantified water rights on the Tongue and Powder rivers. Additionally, Wyoming asserts that the compact does not cover groundwater and tributaries of the two rivers. The groundwater issue is critical because of Wyoming’s coalbed methane industry. Wyoming also maintains that irrigators are entitled to use their entire water allotment with new, more efficient systems that don’t produce as much return water to streams as systems in use in 1950.

This whole argument gets to the point of “appropriation rights”—what are they and who has them? A fundamental tenet of Western water rights, the doctrine of appropriation holds that a first-in-time appropriator of water for beneficial use is also first in the right to enjoy that water; in other words, whoever gets to the water first owns the rights. Although the senior water rights holder generally holds rights that are superior to later appropriators, the no-injury rule places limitations on a senior appropriator’s right to change the use and amount of withdrawals if that change would injure the established rights of others. This means that the person who has had water rights for longest is allowed to increase the amount of water he or she is using, as long as it doesn’t impede on the rights of others.

The Compact states that pre-1950 appropriation rights “shall continue to be enjoyed in accordance with the laws governing the acquisition and use of water under the doctrine of appropriation.”

The first round of Montana v. Wyoming involved water use in agriculture. Montana claimed that, by switching from the flood irrigation techniques that were widely used before 1950 to a more-efficient sprinkler irrigation system, Wyoming farmers had reduced flows in the Tongue and Powder rivers by up to 25 percent and had injured Montana’s water users.

However, seven federal justices joined the majority opinion and ruled that irrigation changes which had resulted in reduced water flow to Montana did not violate Article V(A) of the Compact, so long as the water use and the area irrigated was not enlarged beyond what it was before 1950.

Water for Natural Gas Production
It is the next decision that the Supreme Court makes in the case, though, that could reshape the energy and farm sectors in the upper Great Plains region, which is experiencing hotter temperatures and more erratic precipitation in recent years due to climate change, according to government and university scientists.

The focus will be, in part, on groundwater supplies, which have become essential to natural gas production in a region that has drilled nearly 23,000 wells over the past two decades. Next to agriculture, coal mining and natural gas drilling are the largest industrial users of water, but the Yellowstone River Compact does not explicitly address groundwater.

In order to produce methane from the Powder River Basin’s coal seams, drillers typically need to pump anywhere from four to 75 cubic meters (1,000 to 20,000 gallons) of groundwater to the surface every day, depending on the age and location of the well. One recent study by the Energy Department put the average for coalbed methane wells in the Powder River Basin at 13 cubic meters (3,500 gallons) a day, after an initial period of greater water withdrawal.

In its suit, Montana asserts that Wyoming’s natural gas industry is withdrawing billions of gallons of groundwater a year to develop the Powder River Basin’s coalbed methane reserves. These water withdrawals, Montana contends, are reducing the surface flows of the Powder and Tongue rivers from Wyoming into Montana, which is a violation of the Compact.

The Court’s decision — which could come by the end of the year — is crucial to coalbed methane developers.

A Set Quantity for Montana
In his first interim report, Barton Thompson, the special master appointed by the Supreme Court to manage the Montana v. Wyoming case and to make initial rulings, ruled that the Compact limits withdrawals from groundwater that is hydrologically connected to surface flows in the region. The Supreme Court affirmed this ruling, but the exact extent to which groundwater withdrawals are responsible for reduced flow in the Tongue and Powder rivers has yet to be determined.

The question before the Court now is whether Wyoming has an obligation to deliver to Montana a set quantity of water that is sufficient under the stream conditions to satisfy Montana’s pre-1950 rights. Wyoming argues that its only duty is to do “no injury” to Montana. If Montana cannot prove specific injury — such as damage to crops or loss of livestock due to lack of water — then Wyoming has not violated its obligations under the Yellowstone River Compact.

The Court’s decision on May 2 discussed this issue and found that Article V(A) does not guarantee Montana a set quantity of water from Wyoming. However, it seems inevitable, especially during a dry period, that, eventually, a set quantity of water will be required to satisfy the rights of Montana’s water users — which is the point when coalbed methane producers would have cause to begin worrying.

If Montana is successful in arguing that Wyoming is obligated to provide a set quantity of water, and if the state can also prove that the groundwater is hydrologically connected to the Yellowstone River and its tributaries, then the water rights of Wyoming’s coalbed methane developers may be vulnerable.

According to the Court’s May opinion, Wyoming’s irrigators are permitted to deplete the flows of the Tongue and Powder Rivers beyond the levels that existed before 1950 for post-1950 users in Montana. However, the water allocated to Montana’s pre-1950 users is still protected. The consequence of the ruling is that, in dry spells, coalbed methane developers — all of which arrived after 1950 — may have to shut down their pumps in order to limit withdrawals that affect river flows to Montana. The result of that would almost certainly be much less new drilling and lower natural gas production in the Powder River Basin.

Adam Moser, a lawyer and writer, is the China Environment Fellow at Vermont Law School. Keith Schneider, senior editor for Circle of Blue, and Kevin Patrick, attorney advisor to the Water Law project, contributed to this report. Reach Schneider at keith@circleofblue.org.

Photo courtesy Kimon Berlin via Creative Commons.

The granting of new coal-mining leases in the Powder River Basin and the expectation of more decisions to come from Montana v. Wyoming illustrates a surprising weakness in the federal government’s strategy for managing water resources in the dry American West.

Click through the interactive infographic below to learn more about the growth cycle of wild rice, as well as how it plays an important role in the food web.

Infographic © Kelly Shea, Mark Townsend / Circle of Blue

Click image to open interactive infographic or click here for the HTML version of Wild Rice: A Keystone Species.

Infographic by Kelly Shea and Mark Townsend, Traverse City-based designers for Circle of Blue and recent graduates of Ball State University’s journalism graphics program. They can be reached at kelly@circleofblue.org and mark@circleofblue.org.

This graphic was made to accompany Circle of Blue reporter Codi Yeager’s report, Where Food Grows on Water: Environmental and Human-made Threats to Wisconsin’s Wild Rice.

June 6, 2011 — Photo © Codi Yeager / Circle of Blue

Wild rice on the Bad River Reservation in northern Wisconsin is in the ‘floating leaf’ stage, with a single shoot lying on the water’s surface. This is considered one of the most critical and dangerous stages in the rice’s life cycle, as the stalks are very susceptible to heavy rains and flooding events that can either uproot the plants or drown them.

By Codi Yeager
Circle of Blue

SANBORN, Wisconsin — In early June, green tendrils of wild rice rise from the Bad River’s soft bottom to take their first breaths of cool Wisconsin air. It is morning, just hours after a storm bent the big pines off the Lake Superior coast and beat the extensive beds of infant wild rice that grow here.

Lisa and Peter David, plant biologists who have dedicated a significant portion of their careers to understanding and protecting wild rice, stand in the wind with arms crossed, surveying this year’s new plants.

The Bad River’s rice beds, which later this summer will look like green prairies, perform much as they have for centuries. They provide a stable, supplemental food source for the Anishinaabe people, who hold wild rice as sacred. The rice is also a source of food for wildlife, as well as a habitat for many fish, making it a keystone species for this region’s water-rich landscape.

How much longer that will be the case is not clear, say the Davids. In recent years, climate change has produced stronger storms and more erratic weather. For a plant that grows best in water that is 30 to 90 centimeters (one to three feet) deep, the big changes in water depth caused by heavy rains and floods can drown young rice plants, or pull them out by their roots.

“If lake levels change — getting either higher or lower from where they are — we will probably see some rice beds that will cease to exist,” Peter David says.

The wild rice faces many challenges, both environmental and human-made. First there is the fungal brown spot disease, along with various invasive species such as Eurasian water milfoil and curly-leaf pondweed, which have damaged rice beds in lakes and estuaries throughout Wisconsin; but these can all be controlled.

Infographic © Kelly Shea, Mark Townsend / Circle of Blue

Click image to open interactive infographic or click here for the HTML version of Wild Rice: A Keystone Species.

To the south, where there is more industry, water management practices can cause erratic water levels for energy production, logging, and recreation. These competing human uses, however, have the potential to become the foundation for negotiating solutions to water level problems, which could inadvertently help the rice. But tribal members here worry about pollution, as industry moves northward with a proposal to build a taconite, or low-grade iron ore, mine near the headwaters of the Bad River. And the effects of climate change are like a bad infection, making all of this worse.

Climate Compounds Coastal Rice Problems
The preponderance of scientific evidence — much of it amassed in the land grant research universities of the Great Lakes states — indicate the warming planet could lead to even lower water levels in the Great Lakes. Though, to what extent the levels could change is hard to pinpoint, explained Brent Lofgren, a physical scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

“Our expectations are in a state of flux,” Lofgren said. “One thing that has been observed is a drop in lake levels that was pretty sudden in 1998, and, though there have been fluctuations since then, they have stayed low compared to mean levels. The tricky thing is attributing the changes to greenhouse gases.”

Even a small change in water levels for a plant that prefers water 30 to 90 centimeters (12 to 36 inches) deep can disrupt plant growth and reduce the rice population on a river or in a lake. That is what the Davids, and the Ojibwe nations, who employ them, are working to prevent.

The husband and wife scientific team serve as biologists at the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC), a natural resource management agency of 11 Ojibwe nations in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan that is based in Odanah, Wisconsin.

“It is pretty hard to overstate the significance that this plant has,” Peter David says. “Climate change has us really concerned about what that might mean for the rice. Increased heavy rainfall events, flooding that could lead to the plants being uprooted or drowning; it is all a big concern.”

Drowning Due to Storms and Dams
The rice is most vulnerable in June, when it is in the aptly named “floating leaf stage,” a critical time in the growth cycle. The rice grows out from its roots in the very soft bottom sediments, but, during this stage, the rice becomes very buoyant, floating along the surface. Since the root systems aren’t fully developed at this point, if there are high winds or high waves, it is possible that the plants could be uprooted and pulled out of the sediment.

Additionally, during this stage, the rice undergoes a physiological change. Previously, when the rice was wholly submerged under the water, it was exchanging gases with the water column, but, now, it begins to exchange gases with the air. If the rice is then resubmerged — like in a flooding event, for example — the plant could actually drown.

June 7, 2011 — Photo © Codi Yeager / Circle of Blue

A calm Lake Superior morning in Munising, Michigan. In 2007, lake levels were about two-thirds of a meter (two feet) lower than the normal average, negatively impacting wild rice, which typically grows in knee-deep water.

A similar outcome occurs when water levels are intentionally manipulated, and there is no shortage of dams that do just that in Wisconsin.

“The rice beds have definitely declined from historic levels,” Peter David says. “Out of all the rice beds that we’ve lost, most have been due to changes in hydrology. If you look at the Wisconsin River system, it is just dam after dam after dam. In some places dams are operated, there can be a five- or six-foot [two-meter] change in water level over the growing season, and that is more than the rice can tolerate.”

The Davids acknowledge that dams are not inherently incompatible with wild rice, which actually likes some variation in water levels. Properly managed dams can mimic this natural fluctuation and can prove to be good growing regions. Most dams, however, are used to manage water levels so they are suitable for power generation or recreation, instead of for rice habitat.

“People generally like their lake levels high, so they can boat, they can swim, they can get to the open water,” Lisa David explains. “But that water level is too deep for rice.”

This was the situation that the Chippewa people of Lac Vieux Desert, a lake which straddles the Michigan-Wisconsin border, faced when the lake was dammed — first for a logging operation and later for power generation.

“When the dam was built at the outflow of Lac Vieux Desert, which is the headwaters of the Wisconsin River, it raised water levels and destroyed the rice beds that were there,” Roger LaBine, a Lac Vieux Desert tribal member, said in an interview with Circle of Blue.

In 2002, in cooperation with the U.S. Forest Service and other partners, the people of Lac Vieux Desert secured a court federal order that required the water levels to be lowered for a test period of 10 years. The order allowed one of the largest wild rice restoration projects in Michigan to begin, and there will be an evaluation of the rice bed in 2012, when the issue, once again, goes before a federal court.

“We got 10 years to grow 70 acres [28 hectares] on the lake, to prove that controlled water levels would allow the rice beds to be restored,” LaBine said. “Last year, we were at 87 acres [35 hectares], and we haven’t reseeded in three years. For the wild rice beds to remain present in the coming years, there has to be a continual water level that needs to be respected.”

Heavy Rains and Fungus: Signs of Climate Change?
Now, rice beds here and elsewhere in northern Wisconsin are subject to the new forces of a warming climate, with consequences potentially more ruinous than human-made dams.

Last year, unexpectedly heavy rains at the beginning and end of the ricing season wreaked havoc on the beds — tearing up young plants during the spring growth period and beating rice out of seed heads during the fall harvest. Along for the ride was fungal brown spot disease, whisking through thick rice stands on the warm, humid air.

June 6, 2011 — Photo © Codi Yeager / Circle of Blue

Close to where the Bad River runs into Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin, wild rice is in the ‘floating leaf’ stage, when a single thin shoot rests on the water’s surface. By harvest time in late August, the plants are a meter (three feet) tall, and harvesters must bend the stalks over their canoes to gently knock the rice from the seed heads.

It was one of the worst ricing seasons in the last 20 years. In a good year, more than 45 metric tons (100,000 pounds) of rice can be harvested from off-reservation waters in Wisconsin. Last year saw a meager 7 metric tons (15,000 pounds) of harvest.

“Brown spot disease has been around for a long time, but most years it doesn’t have that big of an impact,” Peter David says. “Last year, you could see the whole color of the beds change because of the infestation, and it really reduced seed production. These are the kinds of things that, yeah they’ve been happening for centuries, but it seems like they’ve been happening more often than they used to. Rice is not a plant that is designed to disperse across the landscape, so when you lose a bed someplace, it might take centuries for rice to recolonize that site. Some plants may be able to move their range more readily to adapt to climate change, but rice probably isn’t one of those.”

So, what if the rice is lost? The Davids tout its ecological importance — a feeding ground for ducks, geese, and swans, as well as a hatchery for fish and a home for mink and muskrat.

To the Anishinaabe people, it is that and more.

Historical Significance for Native American Tribes
“Manoomin: it is a conjunction of two words,” Joe Rose Sr. explains. Rose grew up on Bad River Reservation and is now the director and an associate professor of Native American Studies at nearby Northland College, an environmental liberal arts institution in Wisconsin, just a few miles from the Michigan border. Under his baseball cap, he has white hair and kind eyes. His hands move as he talks. “Mino means something good, and miin is a seed, or berry. We call it Manoomin: the wild rice.”

Sitting at an old conference table in the brick building shared by the tribal headquarters and GLIFWC, the rhythm of Rose’s words is like a quiet melody as he tells the story of his people — how they journeyed first East to the Atlantic Ocean and then followed the signs of the Great Spirit back West, until they found the place where food grows on water.

“[The rice] was declared sacred, because it was a part of the prophecy and played a very important role in the returning home of the Anishinaabe people,” he says.

Rose began harvesting wild rice when he was nine years old; his brother was seven. Wisconsin’s rice harvesting law is based on those traditional harvests, which protected the beds. Harvesters must use a boat no wider than 96 centimeters (38 inches) and no longer than five meters (17 feet). Motors are illegal, and boats are instead pushed through the beds using a wooden pole. Harvesters gather the tops of the plants and dislodge the kernels by whacking them with light wooden sticks.

“We went down to the Kakagon Sloughs all by ourselves,” Rose remembers of harvests with his younger brother. “My grandfather and my parents, they helped us get our equipment together and went to see us off. We’d go down, and there would be native elders down there, so we felt safe. By the time we were teenagers, by the time I was about 18 years old, we were making 300 pounds [135 kilograms] of clean rice a season…[now] the ricing isn’t nearly as good as it was back then.”

Rose has missed only one or two seasons since that first one, and he has seen changes come to the rice beds. He says water levels have a lot to do with it. In 2007, for instance, Lake Superior was about two-thirds of a meter (two feet) lower than the normal average, and that affected the Kakagon Sloughs, where Rose has continued to harvest, with rice growing up out of mudflats instead of knee-deep water.

“For the first time in history, the Bad River Tribal Council closed the ricing season,” Rose says. “And nobody went out.”

Codi Yeager is a journalism student at West Virginia University and a Traverse City-based reporter for Circle of Blue. Reach her at codi@circleofblue.org. Infographic by Kelly Shea and Mark Townsend, Traverse City-based designers for Circle of Blue and recent graduates of Ball State University’s journalism graphics program. They can be reached at kelly@circleofblue.org and mark@circleofblue.org.

June 6, 2011 — Photo © Codi Yeager / Circle of Blue

Joe Rose Sr. grew up on the Bad River Reservation in northern Wisconsin. Now the director and an associate professor of Native American Studies at nearby Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin, Rose has been harvesting wild rice since he was nine years old.

The United Nations is struggling to keep up with the surge of hungry Somali refugees fleeing to Ethiopia and Kenya as a result of relentless drought and conflict in eastern Africa, the U.N. High Commissioner of Refugees (UNHCR) said.

Last week, several aid agencies increased warnings over a worsening humanitarian crisis in Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Djibouti amid an unprecedented dry spell, chronic instability, and high food prices in the Horn of Africa.

On Sunday, the first of several UNHCR-charted cargo jets with emergency aid arrived in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, as part of the agency’s refugee efforts in Kenya and Ethiopia. UNHCR is among a number of aid organizations that have reported shortfalls in funding for their emergency programs in the Horn of Africa.

There are more than 430,000 Somali refugees in Kenya and Ethiopia alone, including 164,000 who have arrived since the beginning of the year, according to the U.N. Some 3,000 refugees from Somalia – now on the verge of famine — continue to arrive in Kenya daily.

Officials report that some of the refugees show signs of severe malnutrition, exhaustion, and dehydration, with some even dying during or shortly after the journey.

And the problem is exacerbated by the continuing civil strife in most of Somalia, as well as cross-border violence between pastoral communities in Ethiopia and Kenya, which is decreasing supplies, causing civilian casualties, and triggering massive displacement.

The U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) called the dry spell — resulting from two consecutive poor rainy seasons — the worst drought the region has experienced in 50 years. The United Nations’ humanitarian news agency, IRIN, recently said that the devastating drought is likely the result of strong seasonal weather phenomenon in the region and is not tied to climate change.

Eastern Africa is also feeling the pressure of high food and fuel prices.

Last week, people in Nairobi protested against Kenya’s soaring inflation — at 14.5 percent in June – largely due to regional grain shortages, rising consumer demand, and weakening of the local currency.

Throughout the Horn of Africa, food prices are rising as a result of bad harvests and poor prospects for the upcoming crops. Grain export bans by Tanzania and Ethiopia to control domestic prices have placed additional pressure on prices in neighboring countries, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), which monitors trends in staple food prices in countries that are vulnerable to food insecurity.

The price of maize on the wholesale market in Kenya has increased 160 percent since July 2010, following the failure of this year’s maize crops, and the retail price of red sorghum has risen 169 percent, the Financial Times reported. In southern Somalia, sorghum prices have jumped by 240 percent over last year’s prices.

Source: FEWS NET, IRIN, The New York Times, Reuters, UPI, United Nations, UN High Commissioner of Refugees

Photo via creative commons by Keelerchristy

Wheat fields, Brittany France.

By Codi Yeager
Circle of Blue

Yield projections are dropping as droughts continue to hit wheat crops in Europe and parts of the United States, while other regions are plagued with heavy rains that are delaying corn planting and threatening wheat with mold.

The European droughts started as early as February in Germany and France and are expected to continue until June, Reuters reported last week.

Germany and France are two of the top producers in the EU, which, as an entity, is the world’s largest wheat supplier, Bryan Purcell, a crop assessment analyst for Europe and North Africa with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service, told Circle of Blue.

“The dry months have reduced initial wheat estimates, but currently May forecasts are above last year’s when we had weather issues” he said, referencing the 2010 droughts in Central Europe and Russia. “[The droughts] are definitely weighing down the crop, but the situation is not as dire.”

When compared to 2010 droughts, this year’s weather is having less severe effects. In fact, global wheat supplies in 2011 are expected to rise 19.4 million metric tons (21.4 million tons) over last year’s harvest, representing a 1 percent increase, according to the USDA’s latest World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates report. This outpaces the increase in global demand of 7.6 million metric tons (8.4 million tons), though ending stocks for 2011 are projected to be at lower levels than last year, the report added.

Demand for grains has increased in recent years, primarily because of biofuel production, Purcell said. “We are also seeing more demand because of rising incomes in places like India and China.”

Extreme weather events as a result of global climate change could become more common in the future, taking a heavier toll on agriculture, the Houston Chronicle has reported. While this year’s droughts may not be catastrophic to global supply, the lack of rain could adversely affect the quality of the wheat harvested.

“France typically produces very high quality wheat, but, if the drought continues, it may be lower quality wheat than is needed for milling,” Purcell said. “Other countries might have to provide milling wheat because France couldn’t meet the standards.”

Still, the estimated quantity of wheat produced could continue to change, depending on weather conditions in the remaining run-up to the June and July harvests.

Farmers in the U.S. are also watching the weather closely, as some battle droughts and others fight unseasonal rain. Bloomberg reported that 44 percent of winter wheat fields in the country were rated either poor or very poor as of May 15.

Due to a lack of rain in Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado—states that produce a large portion of the country’s hard red winter wheat—total winter wheat production in the U.S. is expected to decrease by 4 percent, according to the USDA’s WASDE report.

In the Ohio Valley, too much rain is causing farmers to worry about the winter wheat harvest, as well as the planting of corn crops.

“Farmers are watching their crops very closely,” said Natalie Lehner, communications director of the Ohio Corn and Wheat Growers Association. “Some fields are very wet, while others are fine.”

As a preventative measure, many farmers are applying fungicide to their wheat. Some do so using airplanes because the fields are too muddy to access from the ground.

“Right now it is just preventative because the weather we are seeing is cool and wet instead of hot and wet,” Lehner said. “If it gets hot and wet, we could see mold, which is the biggest concern.”

The amount of rain is not normal, Lehner said, and farmers can expect a small hit in yields even if the weather changes. “We just have to wait and see,” she said.

Codi Yeager is a journalism student at West Virginia University and a Traverse City-based reporter for Circle of Blue. Reach her at codi@circleofblue.org.

In 2010, the national coal sector used 138 billion cubic meters (36.5 trillion gallons), or 23 percent of the nation’s freshwater reserves. By 2020, according to government estimates, the coal sector will use 188 billion cubic meters (49.7 trillion gallons), making up 28 percent of the nation’s total water use. Meanwhile, agricultural water use—371 billion cubic meters in 2010, or 62 percent of total use—is expected to drop to 360 billion cubic meters (95.1 trillion gallons), or 54 percent of the 670 billion cubic meters (177 trillion gallons) that China is expected to use in 2020.

This slideshow was made to accompany China’s Other Looming Choke Point: Food Production by Keith Schneidera Traverse City-based senior editor for Circle of Blue. Reach him at keith@circleofblue.org. Photos by J. Carl Ganter, a Traverse City-based photojournalist and director of Circle of Blue.

Photo © J. Carl Ganter / Circle of Blue

A field in the Anlong Organic Farm —one of China’s first organic farms located in Sichuan Province near Chengdu — is no larger than the average American front lawn. Workers patiently hold heavy green woshen in one hand and use a knife to remove thick leaves from the stalk in the other.

By Keith Schneider
Circle of Blue

YINCHUAN, China—Even along the middle reaches of the Yellow River, which irrigates 402,000 hectares (993,000 acres) of farmland north of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region’s provincial capital, there is still no mistaking the smell of dry earth and diesel fuel, the abiding scents of a desert province that is also among China’s most efficient grain producers.

Ningxia farmers have relied on the Yellow River since 221 BCE, when Qin Dynasty engineers clawed narrow trenches from the sand, introducing some of the first instances of irrigated agriculture on earth. Despite persistent droughts, in each of the last five years irrigation has made it possible for annual harvests to increase by an average of 100,000 metric tons.

Photo Slideshow: Food and Farmers — Organic Agriculture and New Infrastructure

The 2010 harvest of 3.5 million metric tons was nearly double what it was in 1990. The 3.9 million people who live and work on Ningxia’s 1.2 million farms, most no larger than three-quarters of a hectare (1.6 acres), produce the highest yields of rice and corn in the nine-province Yellow River Basin, according to central government crop statistics.

In sum, the farm productivity of this small northern China region—about the same size as West Virginia and located 1,200 kilometers (745 miles) to the west of the Bohai Sea—reflects the major shifts in geography and cultivation practices over the last generation that have made China both self-sufficient in food production and the largest grain grower in the world.

Yet Chinese farm officials here and academic authorities in Beijing are becoming increasingly concerned that China does not have enough water, good land, and energy to sustain its agricultural prowess. As Circle of Blue and the China Environment Forum have reported in the Choke Point: China series, momentous competing trends—rising energy demand, accelerating modernization, and diminishing freshwater resources—are putting the country’s energy production and security at risk.

The very same trends also threaten China’s farm productivity. Last year, the national farm sector and the coal sector combined used 85 percent of the 599 billion cubic meters (158 trillion gallons) of water used in China.

Food Supply At Risk Along Yangtze and Yellow
This spring, unmistakable evidence of just how vulnerable China’s energy and farm sectors are to moisture shortages has emerged in northern and southern China. Last week, central government and provincial authorities ordered managers at the Three Gorges Dam to release 600 million cubic meters (159 billion gallons) of water to the lower Yangtze River, where authorities began restricting electricity usage by manufacturers. The reason: a severe drought that is dramatically lowering water levels in rivers that generate much of China’s 213 gigawatts of annual hydropower capacity and are used to transport coal to power plants.

Photo © J. Carl Ganter / Circle of Blue

Workers spread manure by hand in a dry field near Yinchuan in Ningxia, where farmers have relied on the Yellow River since 221 BCE, when Qin Dynasty engineers clawed narrow trenches from the sand, introducing some the first instances of irrigated agriculture on earth.

Drought in northern China is also reducing spring wheat harvests and starting to limit coal production, thus accelerating the rising prices for food and energy and putting more inflationary pressure on the entire economy. Grain production on 870,000 hectares (2.15 million acres) of farmland has been affected in Hubei Province—one of China’s largest rice producers—and about 400,000 people have no ready supply of drinking water.

Zheng Shouren, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Engineering, told the Xinhua News Agency that the emergency water releases from Three Gorges have been a lifesaver. “If there was no Three Gorges Dam, the drought would be worse and shipping on the Yangtze would be very hazardous,” Zheng said.

The Yellow River Basin is another pivotal place where energy, water, and growth trends converge in damaging ways. The nine desert provinces, including Ningxia, now produce more than 20 percent of China’s annual grain harvest, which last year amounted to 546 million metric tons. Four of the Yellow River provinces are also the largest suppliers of coal, China’s primary source of energy.

Where Industry Meets Innovation

Photo © J. Carl Ganter / Circle of Blue

Farmers at the Anlong Organic Farm discuss new designs for aquaculture.

To some extent, the technological updates suggested by Kou Guojiang, chairman of the Nan Liang Water User Association, have already begun.

Ningxia’s energy sector, which also uses enormous amounts of Yellow River water, has begun financing irrigation improvements to conserve water. The water that is saved—64 million cubic meters (17 billion gallons) annually—is transferred from agriculture to industry.

The seven-year-old pilot program, one of only two in China, has enabled the development of a vast energy production and manufacturing base east of Yinchuan, which is beneficial since Ningxia’s proven coal reserves, estimated by the provincial government’s Bureau of Coal Geological Exploration at 27.3 billion metric tons, make it an important player in China’s energy economy.

Such water-rights trading programs illustrate the influence of the energy sector and are almost certain to become more common in the Yellow River Basin as China’s coal production and consumption rise from 3.15 billion metric tons in 2010 to more than 4 billion metric tons by the end of the decade.

A 1987 plan to allocate and enforce specific allotments of water to each of the nine provinces in the Yellow River Basin is based on an estimated river volume of 58 billion cubic meters (15 trillion gallons). Of this, Ningxia’s annual allotment for all uses is 4 billion cubic meters (1.1 trillion gallons). The 1987 estimate, however, has proven faulty: last year, the river volume fell to 53 billion cubic meters (14 trillion gallons), and, in 2003, it dropped below 45 billion cubic meters (12 trillion gallons).

Arguably, in fact, in no other region of China is the competition for water between the energy and farm sectors more fierce than along the Yellow River, where available water for agricultural, industrial, and municipal uses—based on the 1987 agreement—amounts to roughly 37 billion cubic meters (9.8 trillion gallons) a year, and where persistent drought caused by climate change is steadily causing water supplies to drop.

The Situation in Ningxia
From 2004 to 2009, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, total water reserves in Ningxia alone fell an average of 30 million cubic meters (7.9 billion gallons) a year; 150 million cubic meters (39.6 billion gallons) over five years, or 15.1 percent. Similar declines have occurred in nearby Inner Mongolia and Shanxi.

Of the province’s total water use, the percentage devoted to agriculture is steadily dropping, according to provincial records. Last year, Ningxia’s farms used 3.72 billion cubic meters (983 billion gallons), 6 percent less than the 3.97 billion cubic meters (1.05 trillion gallons) that farmers used in 1988.

North of this provincial capital of 1.5 million, where the Yellow River heads into Inner Mongolia, the contest for water is plainly evident. Dry fields—most around half a hectare (just over one acre)—await planting in wheat, corn, and other crops. In the distance, white smoke pours into the sky from coal-fired power plants, most of which use 75,000 cubic meters (20 million gallons) of water a day.

The sand-bottom irrigation trenches were empty when Circle of Blue and the China Environment Forum visited in April. Gray metal irrigation pipes and sprayers sat idle. Unlike mainstream American agriculture, in which the largest 46,000 farms produce half of the food and cultivate hundreds of hectares each, Chinese agriculture is made up of 200 million farms, each of which oversees an average of a few mu, a Chinese land measurement, or generally about half a hectare, or roughly one acre.

Almost 200 hectares (494 acres) of ground in Ningxia are farmed by 300 families that belong to the Nan Liang Farm Water User Association, a cooperative that also manages an irrigation district that supplies Yellow River water for cultivation.

Kou Guojiang, the 46-year-old chairman of the Nan Liang Water User Association explains that because of competition from Ningxia’s expanding coal sector and industrial base, along with steadily drying conditions, his association’s annual water allotment is 30 percent less than it was in 2008.

Because of the technical assistance provided by the World Bank and other groups, Nan Liang farmers have learned to produce more food with less water. Harvests are steadily increasing, but there is a point, Kuo says, where water scarcity will affect yields.

Photo © J. Carl Ganter / Circle of Blue

Harvesting organic woshen, a leafy green with a thick stalk, at the Anlong Organic Farm near Chengdu. As incomes and lifestyles improve, Chinese consumers are showing a greater interest in a more varied diet and are cooking with a wider variety of products.

The solution, he says, is to modernize this farm district’s irrigation network, the largest of five in the province, which provides water to 402,000 hectares (993,000 acres) of arable land. The sand-bottom canals waste a lot of water, Kou says. They need to be lined with concrete or plastic. The system also needs to be better managed with up-to-date digital controls and gates so that water is delivered when farmers need it, saving huge amounts of water—not to mention the energy to move it.

North and South
The national coal sector already uses 138 billion cubic meters (36.5 trillion gallons), or 23 percent of the nation’s freshwater reserves. By 2020, according to government estimates, the coal sector will use 188 billion cubic meters (49.7 trillion gallons), making up 28 percent of the nation’s total water use.

Meanwhile, agricultural water use—371 billion cubic meters in 2010, or 62 percent of total use—is expected to drop to 360 billion cubic meters (95.1 trillion gallons), or 54 percent of the 670 billion cubic meters (177 trillion gallons) that China is expected to use in 2020.

At first glance, that may not seem like a big reduction for farmers. And it wouldn’t be if the geography of China’s grain production were the same as it was in the 20th century. It’s not, though.

In 1980, almost 60 percent of China’s grain production occurred in 14 provinces south of the Yangtze River. Since then, policy changes, market adjustments, and land availability have prompted an important shift in production patterns. Today, 13 provinces contribute nearly 80 percent of the country’s total grain output, and seven of them are in China’s north.

Last year, provinces south of the Yangtze River produced about 40 percent of China’s grain. Meanwhile, the proportion of the 546 million metric tons of grain produced last year by northern provinces amounted to 325 million metric tons, or nearly 60 percent.

Modernization of the Farming Sector
In an April meeting with Circle of Blue, Dr. Yangwen Jia, a chief engineer of the Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research—a think tank of China’s Ministry of Water Resources—said the nation will need to increase domestic grain production by 50 million metric tons annually by 2020, or 10 percent more grain than was produced in 2010.

“We know,” he said, when asked to confirm the 10 percent figure, “that’s a big increase from today.”

When Cities Replace Farmland

Photo © J. Carl Ganter / Circle of Blue

Dusty streets near farmlands outside Yinchuan, Ningxia.

Water isn’t the only critical resource becoming scarce in China—so is farmland, as sprawling cities are replacing arable land.

Last year, authorities reported that China’s farmers cultivated and grazed a total of 121 million hectares (299 million acres), or 8.5 million hectares (20.8 million acres) less farmland than was used in 1998. In other words, China lost nearly as much farmland as exists in all of Illinois within a span of 12 years.

“For China, which has a population of 1.3 billion, the food bowl for our people must be in our own hands,” Ding Shengjun, a professor at the Academy of State Administration of Grain, told the Beijing Review in March. “Right now, the mainstay of Chinese food security is not at all solid, and, actually, it’s likely to weaken.”

“Our country is facing great pressure in the supply of agricultural products,” added Chen Xiaohua, China’s vice minister for agriculture, during a speech to farm industry representatives in January in Shanghai.

Yangwen said China is prepared to invest $US 60 billion (RMB 400 billion) over the next decade in irrigation and other water production and transport measures. And northern China’s contribution to the national food supply will grow even more significant over the next decade.

According to the 12th Five-Year Plan, China’s master development strategy that was made public in March, much of the new grain production will come from Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning provinces, which are already important farming regions but where new irrigation networks will need to be constructed.

Certainly, China is capable of increasing its food supply to meet demand. The country’s grain production has increased an average of 12.6 million metric tons annually since 2004, when growers produced just under 470 million metric tons. But dwindling water supplies, along with obsolete and leaky irrigation networks—most of which waste billions of cubic meters of water annually—are an impediment, said Yangwen.

It’s not that China doesn’t know how to supply crops with water. About half of China’s arable land is irrigated by 40,000 small- and medium-sized irrigation networks, according to the Ministry of Water Resources. Most, however, were built more than half a century ago, are unlined, and are too old, too small, and too inefficient to perform well in an era of increasing competition for water supplies, according to government studies. The Ministry estimates that less than 40 percent of the irrigation networks are in good condition.

China does not yet have an estimate of how much money it will take to modernize the country’s irrigation system, which also consumes significant amounts of electricity to supply pumping stations. But during their visit to Ningxia in April, Circle of Blue and the China Environment Forum toured one of the province’s three irrigation districts, visited a small pumping station, and gained insight on the magnitude of the challenge facing all of Chinese agriculture.

Ningxia’s irrigation network, divided into five districts, supplies almost 1 billion cubic meters (264 trillion gallons) of water annually to 1.3 million hectares (3.3 million acres) of cropland. Five pumping stations draw water out of the Yellow River and lift it to big supply canals on higher ground that transfer the water to successively smaller canals and channels.

All of this engineering takes a lot of people—2,588 staff members, according to provincial figures—and a lot of energy. The five pumping stations collectively use 730 gigawatt-hours of annually, or roughly the same amount generated in a year by a 100-megawatt coal-burning power plant. In short, irrigation is a large consumer of electricity in Ningxia.

Ningxia’s farmers, as well as managers of the irrigation network, say they are prepared to cultivate their crops using less water, which may help to reduce electricity demand. Last year—as part of a stepped-up modernization project, much of which was financed by the coal and chemicals sector—almost $US 37.5 million (250 million RMB) was spent on engineering and construction to line the province’s main and branch irrigation canals.

Photo © J. Carl Ganter / Circle of Blue

Irrigation improvements have been installed at the Anlong Organic Farm. However, most networks — built more than half a century ago — are unlined and are too old, too small, and too inefficient to perform well in an era of increasing competition for water supplies.

The irrigation districts assert that the construction saved 58 million cubic meters (15 billion gallons) of water last year. By 2015, irrigation districts plan to spend $US 59 million (395 million RMB) annually on modernization and canal lining to save 90 million cubic meters (23.7 billion gallons) annually. The water saved is being transferred from agriculture to Ningxia’s growing industrial base—much of it focused on coal production, power generation, and coal-to-chemical conversion. (See sidebar.)

Kou Guojiang, the chairman of the Nan Liang Water User Association, shrugged when asked about the water transfer occurring in his irrigation district.

“We learn to produce more with less water,” he said. “That’s what we’re doing.”

Photo courtesy of Central Arizona Project

A Central Arizona Project canal delivers Colorado River water to the state’s interior. Arizona is one of seven states in the Colorado River Basin, which supplies water to 30 million people and thousands of farms that produce 15 percent of the nation’s crops.

By Brett Walton
Circle of Blue

The worst drought in the 105-year historical record of the Colorado River has opened a new era of water scarcity that is prompting state and federal water managers to evaluate never before considered options for increasing water supply and reducing demand.

The new ideas for managing the seven-state river basin, which supplies water to 30 million residents and thousands of farms, have attracted increasing attention from agricultural users and other big water interests, particularly in the upper basin states that counted on receiving more water under the region’s near-century-old water use agreement.

In Las Vegas last month, at the annual meeting of the Colorado River Water Users Association—the only organization bringing together stakeholders from each of the seven basin states—opponents and supporters made their views known during a speech by Doug Kenney, the director of the Western Water Policy Program at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

Kenney was invited to Caesar’s Palace to share the first-year findings from his study on water governance in the Colorado River Basin. His message: in a new era of water scarcity along the river—where supply and demand lines have already crossed—traditional water management practices will need to be fundamentally changed.

New options for managing the Colorado include establishing provisions for year-to-year agreements with states and farmers to avoid shortages. They also include improvements in the efficiency of river operations, or by river augmentation, which means adding new supplies from a slew of sources—some viable, some expensive, and some fanciful: desalination, river diversions, and weather modification, respectively.

Kenney’s governance study is just one of several such assessments—carried out by academics and federal agencies, as well as state and regional water management authorities—suggesting the need for new ways to manage water flows. The studies are providing a new legal and scientific foundation for defining existing water rights within states, clarifying laws and regulations about how shortages on the river would be handled, and evaluating options for increasing the basin’s water supply and reducing demand.

Kenney argued that the states of the upper basin—Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming—are the most vulnerable if future flows are as low as predicted because the river’s legal structure gives priority to Mexico and the lower basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada.

“I thought it was time for someone to stand up at that meeting and start talking about the reality,” Kenney told Circle of Blue. “That there’s just not any water left on that river.”

While there were no catcalls or rotten fruit, Kenney admits that some representatives from the upper basin states were not pleased to hear that water promised to them nearly a century ago under the Colorado River Compact would probably not be available in the coming decades.

Within the basin, the Colorado River supplies water to Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Tucson. Additionally, the river’s water is transferred out of the basin to Albuquerque, Denver, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, San Diego, and Santa Fe. The Colorado River irrigates four million acres that produce 15 percent of the nation’s crops. The eight major hydroelectric dams along the river have an installed capacity of 4,200 megawatts, which is enough to power more than three million households.

The Problem
Kenney’s assessment comes at an uncertain moment in the long history of managing the West’s most important source of water. On the one hand, the supply of moisture is temporarily abundant. The series of winter storms that hit the nation over last month’s holiday season brought an unexpected bonus to river watchers in the southwest.

Snowpack in the Rockies—which provide 90 percent of the river’s flow—is 35 percent above average, as of January 18. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation projects that water flows into Lake Powell will be eight percent above average for 2011, making it likely that an extra 3.1 million acre-feet (MAF) of water will be released to Lake Mead from Lake Powell.

One acre-foot is 325,851 gallons, and an additional 3.1 million acre-feet could raise the level of Lake Mead by roughly 30 feet—enough to delay the threat of a shortage declaration in the lower basin for several years. Just a month ago, Arizona officials were scrambling to sign deals to keep Lake Mead’s elevation above the shortage trigger point of 1,075 feet. By the end of last summer, many authorities had predicted that the powerful water-powered electric turbines in Hoover Dam could soon be shut down.

Today, such shotgun agreements might not be necessary, giving state authorities time to work out a more robust strategy.

But scientists studying trend lines and projecting decades into the future are less optimistic because climate change is steadily reducing rainfall and snowpack. “It’s really a crapshoot to predict how river flow will change,” said Richard Seager, a research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who studies the Colorado River. “All we can really say is that the whole area of the basin is in a region that models predict will get drier.”

Compact Complications
The question of river flow, past and future, is a fundamental problem with the Colorado River Compact, the foundational legal document governing the river. Signed in 1922, the compact split the basin into upper and lower divisions and promised each 7.5 million acre-feet (MAF) per year, with the lower basin’s share deliverable as a ten-year average due to river variability. At the time, flows were assumed to be more than 20 MAF per year, but the 16 years of record-keeping prior to the agreement happened to coincide with a period of unusually high runoff.

In the decades since, a longer record has shown that these original calculations were too high. The average annual flow over the period from 1906 to 2007 was 16.4 MAF.

Furthermore, Connie Woodhouse, a geographer at the University of Arizona who works with tree ring data that can be used to estimate precipitation, says the average flow since the 8^th century has been roughly 14.7 MAF per year.

Including the 1.5 MAF per year guaranteed to Mexico as part of a 1944 treaty, the math in the basin just does not add up, anymore. Measured as a 10-year average, water use exceeded supply beginning in 2003.

If an upper basin state wanted to challenge the legal basis of the allocations, Robert Glennon, a professor at the University of Arizona Law School, told Circle of Blue that the principle of mutual mistake could apply.

“If the parties entered into an agreement with a fundamental misunderstanding of what was going on, the contract may be void,” Glennon explained. “And that surely is the case with the prevailing belief about river flows when the compact was signed.”

Climate Effects
The other wrench in the mix is climate change, though its effect on the laws governing the river is far from clear.

For example, not everyone agrees with Doug Kenney’s assumption that the upper basin is going to be most affected by climate change. It all depends on how the compact is interpreted, argues Dick Wolfe, Colorado’s state engineer, a position responsible for managing the state’s water.

“The question is,” Wolfe told Circle of Blue, “do the upper basin states bear the brunt of climate change alone, or do we share it proportionally [with the lower basin]?”

The key sentence in the compact reads, “The States of the Upper Division will not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75,000,000 acre-feet for any period of ten consecutive years.” The implication is that withdrawals by the upper basin states will not be so large as to take away water entitled to the lower basin. But how will climate change be considered? In this case, the upper basin states would not be the cause of depletion.

“They have a strong argument,” Glennon said. “But no one [in the basin] wants to go there. That’s why the agreement in 2007 was so important.”

Law and Politics
The 2007 agreement established when to declare a shortage in the lower basin and how to distribute the rationing. Though nudged by the Secretary of the Interior, who acts as water master for the lower basin, the agreement was negotiated between the states themselves. And that’s how the states would like to settle all matters.

If there’s one thing that unifies the Colorado River Basin, it is the opposition to decisions imposed by outsiders and the belief in the value of maintaining the compact, if for no other reason than avoiding a legal war. They do not want intervention by the courts or by the federal government.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Senator John McCain, representing the lower basin state of Arizona, told the Pueblo (Colorado) Chieftain newspaper that the states themselves should renegotiate the compact. The backlash against McCain came so furiously from parties in the upper basin that he later retracted the statement.

Because of the desire for internal contractual solutions, every basin state is planning, studying, discussing, or negotiating some aspect of how to deal with a water shortage, should one arise. These processes involve water rights, water transfers, reservoir operations, and groundwater management.

The study everyone is waiting for is the Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study, due to be released in January 2012. This joint program between the Bureau of Reclamation, the seven basin states, and a collection of interested parties will assess different supply and demand scenarios through 2060 and consider options and strategies to close any gaps. Interim reports will be made publicly available throughout the year, starting next month with the assessment of supply and demand.

“I think if we do it right,” said co-chair Bill Rinne, the director of surface water resources for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, “this study should be credible in terms of, for the first time, bringing in what different states have used for planning for supply and demand and getting all that in one spot.”

The Plan
One recommendation expected to be included in the final report is river augmentation, increasing the supply in the basin by bringing in water from new sources. “The expectation of most folks involved in the basin is that the study is going to come out supporting augmentation, and it’s going to be able to demonstrate, with data, that the need exists,” said John Shields, Wyoming’s interstate streams engineer and a member of the Colorado River Water Users Association resolutions committee. The CRWUA membership passed a resolution in 2007 advocating that one million acre-feet of new water be brought into the basin by 2050.

“I think, at this time, there is the political resolve and the hydrological necessity to actually see what we can do about increasing the size of the pie, if you will,” Shields told Circle of Blue.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority, which supplies water to Las Vegas, commissioned its own augmentation study in 2007. The most common suggestion was desalination—either by building plants on the Californian or Mexican coast, or by firing up the on-again, off-again Yuma facility near the Arizona-Mexico border. Those plants would allow coastal cities like Los Angeles and San Diego to use more desalinated water, freeing Colorado River water for inland users.

But Robert Glennon, the Arizona law professor, said that augmentation as a solution is “bogus.”

“People talk that game,” Glennon told Circle of Blue. “That’s the historic Western water game. But from where? You can have some desalination, but it’s expensive, uses gads of energy, and you have to get rid of the brine stream.”

Another proposal is to cut the amount of water flowing to farms. “Conservation and efficiency are important, but it’s important to realize that in the face of climate change and drought, they make almost no contribution to the Colorado River,” said Jim Lochhead, the manager of Denver Water, the city’s public utility. “We need a large reduction in demand—namely agriculture.”

Like many cities in the basin, Denver—which gets half its water from the Colorado River watershed—has junior water rights, meaning that it is first to be cut off when water is short, according to the prior appropriation system used by most western states.

Lochhead told Circle of Blue that the state needs to develop a mechanism to have agricultural transfers without rate shocks to urban customers and employment shocks to rural communities, but that discussion has only just started.

For a model, the state can look downstream. California has a successful land-fallowing program between the Metropolitan Water District and the Palo Verde Irrigation District. In dry years, the MWD, which serves 19 million urban residents in southern California, can purchase water from Palo Verde farmers who agree not to plant crops on a corresponding amount of land.

Most states are talking about land-fallowing and dry-year contracts with farmers. The one exception, however, is Nevada. Because the state’s 300,000-acre-foot allocation goes almost entirely to municipal and industrial use, it does not have an agricultural buffer to draw upon, and the legal strictures of the compact make interstate water trades exceedingly difficult.

That explains why the Southern Nevada Water Authority is pushing for a 300-mile pipeline to tap a groundwater basin in northeast Nevada and has even floated the idea of a pipeline to the Mississippi, if only to get people talking.

The states of the Colorado River Basin are certainly doing that. There are no options on the table yet, because the table is still being built. The Bureau of Reclamation study is a good point to start from, especially since past discussions about water use have been a little “parochial,” according to UC-Boulder’s Doug Kenney, and “piecemeal,” according to Denver Water’s Jim Lochhead.

“We need to think of some way to get by with less,” David Getches, the dean of the University of Colorado Law School, told Circle of Blue. “We’ve got to find either a re-allocation scheme or a way for everybody within their allocations to have a cushion to adapt to the cycles of drought that we know exist, plus the wildcard of climate change.”

Brett Walton is a Seattle-based reporter for Circle of Blue. Reach him at brett@circleofblue.org.