Imperial farmers under pressure to save water

Issue Date: April 25, 2007

By Kate Campbell
Assistant Editor

Irrigation canals crisscross the Imperial Valley, delivering Colorado River water that turns the desert into productive farmland.

The idea of saving water from farming operations and selling it to urban neighbors seems straightforward enough. But, farmers in the Imperial Valley say the realities of the massive effort they're working on now are anything but easy.

They say the complexities of building and operating a major water conservation program that will ultimately yield 303,000 acre-feet a year of farm water for urban uses is daunting and costly. Hanging in the balance is the future of one of the nation's most fertile farming regions, with production valued at about $1.3 billion a year.

Progress is being made to sort it all out, but Imperial County Farm Bureau President Vince Brooke said, "It's an effort that sometimes leaves members of our farming community bitter about the whole thing. We're not too happy about the way the water transfer was forced on the community.

"There has got to be a better way for coastal areas with unchecked growth to get water," Brooke said. "We need to see desalination as a choice that looks better and better all the time. This is too wrenching and complicated. And the associated costs are horrendous."

The Imperial Valley is one of the nation's most fertile farming regions, with production valued at about $1.3 billion a year.

The farmwater conservation effort by Imperial Irrigation District (IID), the nation's largest irrigation district, however, is not optional. It's required under the Quantification Settlement Agreement (QSA), a hard-fought, multistate water pact that includes scaling back California's use of Colorado River water.

For the Imperial Valley, that means saving enough water from farming operations to eventually send it to the San Diego County Water Authority, the Coachella Valley Water District and the Metropolitan Water District. IID has the largest water right on the Colorado River, with an entitlement of more than 3 million acre feet a year.

Signed in October 2003, the QSA also includes related agreements and exchange projects among the various agencies, the State of California and the U.S. Department of Interior. One of those projects, the lining of the 70-year-old, earthen-banked All-American Canal, which IID uses to convey water, had been put on hold by the courts.

Environmentalists and a few businesses on both sides of the border had objected to the $230 million concrete lining project because seepage from the huge canal has been replenishing the aquifer in the Mexicali Valley for decades. The injunction on the lining project was lifted by a federal appeals court in San Francisco on April 6 and the project is expected to move forward as soon as June 1, with completion expected by 2010.

The project's price tag is now nearly $297 million because of the court delay, according to the San Diego County Water Authority. The state of California is paying just more than half the total, or $153 million, but the San Diego County Water Authority has to make up the difference.

"We are proceeding," Maureen Stapleton, the authority's general manager, told the media when the injunction was lifted. "This has been an extremely expensive delay on a very significant project for California and the Colorado River basin states."

The 75-year water transfer agreement between IID and San Diego calls for ramping up the amount of water to be transferred along with the amount of payments over time. In the Imperial Valley, conservation measures are expected to cost up to $60 million a year, and revenue from the water transfers is expected to cover those costs.

During recent workshops on IID's "definite plan," which will be presented to IID's directors for acceptance in coming weeks, Imperial Valley farmers learned details of the strategy aimed at producing the necessary "wet" water, not just water on paper.

Brooke stressed that efforts to implement the requirements of the QSA have been a complicated "nightmare," especially because there currently are about 10 lawsuits pending related to the agreement, with about 20 already having been dismissed. He said he's optimistic, however, that over time efficient systems will be put in place to make the farm-to-city water transfer go as smoothly as possible.

"In coming years, IID will need to find a way to come up with 303,000 acre feet of water per year to send to San Diego, the Los Angeles area and the Coachella Valley," Brooke said. "By the end of 2008, farmers need to provide enough water from on-farm conservation measures alone to send 4,000 acre feet to the Coachella Valley. We need a plan to do that now--and in much larger amounts in the future."

In all, Brooke said in 2008 a total of about 50,000 acre feet will need to leave the Imperial Valley and be sent to Southern California water agencies from combined fallowing and conserved water.

Imperial County farmers have been actively involved in the planning process for the transfer for some time, he said. But, because of the size and complexity of the agreement, getting a workable plan in place, one that doesn't rely on future fallowing of any of the valley's nearly half million acres of farmland--and remains voluntary--is no easy task.

The district operates more than 3,000 miles of canals and drains that gives it the capacity to deliver more than 3.1 million acre-feet of IID's Colorado River water entitlement a year. Of that water, district officials said it delivers about 97 percent of it to farmers.

The water comes with an added problem--every acre-foot brings more than one ton of salt along with it. Valley farmers have developed an ingenious system of underground tiles and drains to help leach the fields and carry the salty tailwater water to the Salton Sea. But that creates another problem, higher salt levels in the sea make it less hospitable for fish, wildlife habitat and recreation.

Because of these complexities, Brooke said water conservation recommendations will come in four parts, including necessary IID system improvements, such as more accurate metering at the farm gate; establishing a baseline for measuring conservation levels; seepage recovery from canal lining, starting with the East Highline Canal; and the engineering of on-farm irrigation systems and adoption of improved management practices.

The short-term solution, however, is implementation of an emergency fallowing plan that immediately frees up water for transfer, a interim measure farmers had been assured would not be used.

"There was no way to implement the QSA right off the bat with conserved water," Brooke explained. "The QSA contract didn't provide any up-front money for us to do that. And you can't revamp a 100-year-old irrigation system that serves 500,000 acres of irrigated cropland in an instant."

He said that's why another contract, called the "Revised Fourth Amendment" was adopted. It institutes a 15-year emergency fallowing program to create the first water for contract requirements.

"This too seems simple enough," Brooke said. "The Revised Fourth Amendment, however, also requires there be mitigation funds to remedy third-party impacts because of the fallowing.

"After three years of intense public debate and negotiation, mitigation funds for the first two years of the fallowing contracts are just starting to reach the community," he said. "Mitigation funds for the remaining years are presently in arbitration with San Diego County Water Authority."

For this water year, IID officials said nearly 300 fields were submitted for consideration in the district's emergency fallowing program, totaling more than 27,500 acres of farmland with a water conservation yield well in excess of IID's fallowed water requirement for the 2007-2008 fallowing program.

Due to this oversubcription, the district is offering contracts to eligible fields using a random selection system. District officials said that as contracts are declined, IID will offer additional fallowing contracts to fields based on their order from the random selection process until the program is fully contracted.

The first sets of fallowing contracts were sent to potential participants on March 12. In a prepared statement, the district said it anticipates completing the contracting process for the full number of fields by the end of April.

"Because the fallowing program is an emergency measure it's not a permanent solution. The longer-term hurdles are installing on-farm conservation measures and defining what can be done for IID system improvements," Brooke said. "Even with these considerable challenges, we're pretty much on schedule to get the plans and systems in place to manage the water transfer. But, don't get me wrong, we've still got some huge decisions ahead of us.

"We operate on a 24-hour system and constantly move the water around. As we set baselines for usage, we will have to decide if it's going to be based on actual crop requirements, historic use or by simple division of acres into acre feet. There's also a problem of fairness for farmers that have paid to improve their water conservation systems before the agreement was signed versus those who haven't installed the equipment yet," he said.

Yet another wrinkle that still needs to be ironed out is the future of the Salton Sea. Irrigation water drains into the sea and has since the man-made lake was formed by accident in 1905. Currently, the salinity of the sea is about 135 percent the salinity of the Pacific Ocean.

Water researchers say more than 17 percent of the delivered irrigation water in the Imperial Valley becomes tailwater runoff, the only supply of fresh water that goes to the sea, except water that comes from rain or system malfunctions. With improved conservation measures, that percentage would decline. For now Salton Sea mitigation water generated from fallowing will cover the shortfall, but other solutions are being sought.

Imperial County water and agriculture leaders have been working with state officials to develop a plan and funding to protect the Salton Sea, but Brooke said there's a long way to go to find a workable solution with broad-based support.

The impact of the water transfer, increased on-farm conservation, reduced runoff from farms into the Salton Sea, along with regulations related to TMDLs, major construction projects, lingering lawsuits, are just some of the issues sparked by the QSA and the required water transfer.

Brooke said that although progress is being made in sorting it all out, it's an effort that often leaves members of Imperial's vibrant farming community uneasy.

"We're business people trying to make future decisions without knowing all the details," he said.

(Kate Campbell is a reporter for Ag Alert. She may be contacted at kcampbell@cfbf.com.)

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