There is a growing sense emerging among Western farmers that some fallowing, leaving fields unplanted, will have to be part of the solution to the increasingly desperate drought. Now the U.S. government is looking to pay farmers in California and Arizon...
WASHINGTON -- Tom Brundy, an alfalfa grower in California's Imperial Valley, thinks farmers reliant on the shrinking Colorado River can do more to save water and use it more efficiently. That's why he's installed water sensors and monitors to prevent waste on nearly two-thirds of his 3,000 acres.
Federal officials and major irrigators have been negotiating for months. Neither side has disclosed details of the negotiations or said how much money is being sought or offered. Water officials from cities and other states with less demand from farms say agriculture's large take from the river allows wasteful farming practices to continue even as water grows scarcer. They note that Western water law, which gives preference to more senior users, allows farmers with those rights to grow thirsty crops in converted desert even as key reservoirs fed by the Colorado dip to all-time lows.
Larry Cox, who has grown produce and grasses in the Imperial Valley for decades, said he idled a few hundred of his 4,000 acres back then. He used the payments to buy sprinkler pipes and other equipment to make his irrigation systems more efficient. But he also let go between 5% and 10% of his workforce of irrigators, farm hands and tractor drivers.
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