Climate change is accelerating and the western United States is entering its 22nd year of drought, long enough to be categorized as a mega-drought. This year, leaders in California have declared a state of emergency for most of the state and much of the West is in “exceptional drought,” a dangerous level of dryness linked to water emergencies, failed crops, and barren pastures, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. And as the Colorado River slows and dry periods between rainstorms have become longer and less predictable, the situation is likely to get worse. Ranchers, who often depend on dry, steep, and marginal land that can’t support crop production, could be hit especially hard.
Civil Eats, 17 May 2021
As Water Sources Dry Up, Arizona Farmers Feel the Heat of Climate Change
Farms in central Arizona will soon lose access to Colorado River water, impacting farmers, cities, and Native communities.
Fall is a busy time for Knorr Farms, a family operation that grows peppers, corn, cotton, and other crops on 3,000 acres in Pinal County, one of Arizona’s top growing regions.
Owner Rob Knorr is preparing for a big October pepper harvest and mapping out plans for the next planting season—what to grow, where, and how. Water, as always, is the linchpin. Like other farmers in this parched county, which stretches for more than 5,300 square miles across the Sonoran Desert, Knorr depends entirely on irrigation water from the Colorado River. He receives it from the Central Arizona Project (CAP), a 336-mile canal system that Knorr calls the “lifeline to Arizona agriculture.”
Knorr Farms owner Rob Knorr holding irrigation piping. (Photo © Meg Wilcox)
But this year, Knorr’s lifeline is slipping away. A landmark agreement reached this spring between three of the states that share the lower basin of the Colorado River (Arizona, California, and Nevada) calls for deep cuts in river water allotments through 2026. The Drought Contingency Plan (DCP) aims to prevent the already dangerously low water levels in Lake Mead—the beating heart of the Colorado River delivery system—from dropping further. Arizona, with the most-junior water rights, is absorbing the bulk of the cuts, and Pinal County farmers like Knorr will be among the first to feel the pain of shortages.
The DCP “not only impacts the crops that we grow, it impacts the number of acres,” said Steve Todd, an advisor to Knorr Farms. “There will be acres left fallow,” in the years ahead.
That may be an understatement. Water experts estimate that up to 40 percent of non-Native land in Pinal County will eventually be fallowed as Arizona embraces the drier future that climate change will bring. And that future is coming soon: As of 2022, farmers in Pinal County—ranked in the top 2 percent of all U.S. counties for agricultural sales with $908 million in annual, on-farm direct sales—will lose their guaranteed access to CAP water, and will have to turn to more limited groundwater supplies.
As climate change forces the Southwest to face new rainfall and temperature baselines, agriculture is in the crosshairs. Farming uses, on average, 80 percent of ground and surface water supplies in the U.S., and rapid population growth, over-allocation of a finite resource, and a rapidly changing climate are leaning heavily on those supplies.
Nowhere is this more evident than the Colorado River system, which supplies water to 40 million people in seven U.S. states and two states in Mexico. While it’s still too early to see the DCP’s impact on Arizona farmers, the state’s approach to helping farmers adapt, stepping up water conservation, and spreading the pain—all while honoring Native communities’ senior water rights—could offer a useful example for other arid regions.
A map of the upper and lower Colorado River Basin.
“The past 20 years of drought have taught us that there is risk in the system,” said Chuck Cullom, Colorado River Programs Manager at CAP. “We have to pivot to a mindset where we all have to make contributions. We need to manage our destiny together.”
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High Plains Farmers Race to Save the Ogallala Aquifer
By restoring soils and grasslands, farmers in the Texas Panhandle are conserving the last water beneath their feet.
About a decade ago, Chris Grotegut realized that he had to start pumping much less groundwater out of his wells. It dawned on the cattle rancher and grain farmer that if he didn’t act soon, there may not be enough water to sustain his 11,000-acre farm in Hereford, Texas—much less to support the next generation on his land.
It’s well-documented that the Ogallala Aquifer, which supplies water to Grotegut’s land, is rapidly depleting. Nearby farms in the High Plains of the Texas Panhandle have experienced worse—many of their wells are going dry. As the aquifer draws lower, the future of agriculture in the region becomes an open question—and the answer depends, in part, on whether enough farmers can shift their practices to sustain on less groundwater.
“We must live within our ecological means in order to give those same ecological opportunities to the next generation,” said Grotegut, who is as much a self-taught ecologist as he is a farmer. “The ethical problem is, what are we leaving our kids?”
The Texas Panhandle is not the only region staring down the aquifer’s decline: the massive, 174,000-square-mile underground reservoir spans eight landlocked states in the Great Plains, from South Dakota to Texas. Along with being a critical source of drinking water, the aquifer supports one-fifth of all wheat, corn, cotton, and cattle in the United States. Irrigation technology, such as center pivot irrigation, patented in 1952, once helped transform the Great Plains into an agricultural oasis; flat land stretched over a seemingly endless reserve of groundwater at farmers’ disposal.
About half a century ago, that story of abundance began to take a turn as research began to show that the aquifer was in sharp decline. In 1986, Congress ordered the U.S. Geological Survey to monitor wells that draw from the Ogallala and report back annually. Since then, the reports have provided detailed evidence of the aquifer’s drawdown–in some places as much as 234 feet, according to the most recent data—due to rainwater taking much longer to flow back into the aquifer than it does to be removed.
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As the West Faces a Drought Emergency, Some Ranchers are Restoring Grasslands to Build Water Reserves
Western ranchers are restoring diverse, grassland ecosystem practices that can improve the land’s capacity to hold water—and help them hold onto more cattle.
t’s calving season and all across the West ranchers are watching the sizes of their herds grow. It’s also the beginning of a new season on most ranches, but in the midst of a historic, persistent drought, a growing herd brings difficult questions.
As average temperatures climb and the water that flows through many of the major rivers and creeks across the west is slowing, the availability of forage—grass, legumes, and other edible pasture plants—has become less predictable. As a result, many ranchers face complex calculations: Do they sell off some of their cattle and cut a profit, but risk flooding the market and getting a low price? Or do they hold onto their herd and buy extra hay and forage, rent additional pasture, or risk overgrazing—and further drying out—the land?
There aren’t easy answers to this question, especially as climate change accelerates and the western United States enters its 22nd year of drought, long enough to be categorized as a mega-drought. This year, leaders in California have declared a state of emergency for most of the state and much of the West is in “exceptional drought,” a dangerous level of dryness linked to water emergencies, failed crops, and barren pastures, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. And as the Colorado River slows and dry periods between rainstorms have become longer and less predictable, the situation is likely to get worse. Ranchers, who often depend on dry, steep, and marginal land that can’t support crop production, could be hit especially hard.
“To be honest, we don’t have any miracle answers at all,” Julie Sullivan, who runs a grass-fed beef ranch in the San Luis Valley of Colorado, said in an email. Yet Sullivan and ranchers like her have found ways to lower the stakes by adopting management practices that can improve the land’s capacity to hold water–and, therefore, hold onto more cattle.
The best bet? Improving or restoring the diverse, grassland ecosystem native to the land, and grazing it just enough to grow year after year. This doesn’t guarantee a rancher will avoid selling off cattle, or needing disaster assistance through the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Yet, it does help create something like a buffer within the landscape so droughts and other natural disasters like wildfires are less threatening.
Managing to Avoid Bare Soil
“Every drop of moisture is even more precious than it used to be,” said Sullivan. “You want to do everything you can to make sure your ground is capable of absorbing water.” When the soil is healthy, full of organic matter and microbes, it will sop up water. The relationship between water and grasslands is cyclical: When more water is retained in the soil, it leads to healthier grasslands and healthier grasslands are able to build deeper, longer-lasting reserves of water.
Most of the water-conservation practices that Sullivan and her husband and business partner George Whitten employ on the San Juan Ranch are geared toward keeping the ground covered year-round. In the driest region of Colorado, their meadows—a complex mixture of native grasses, forbs, and legumes—always have something growing and alive.
“You’re always managing to avoid bare soil,” said Sullivan. This involves moving the cattle every day, with an electric fence, so that they do not overgraze the land, exposing it to the drying sun. Their cattle feed off the grasslands their entire lives, never entering an industrial feedlot to be fattened with grains, which makes healthy pastures all the more essential.
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Regenerating the Soil Transformed this Indiana Farm
On his 7,000-acre property, Rick Clark uses non-GMO seeds, no-till farming, crop rotation, and cover crop diversity to regenerate soils and turn a profit.
When yogurt maker Dannon (part of Danone North America) announced in 2016 that it would transition some of its products to non-GMO verification, the company had to find farmers to provide non-GMO feed for the dairy cows that produce milk for its yogurt. This was no easy task, because the vast majority of feed in the U.S. is produced from genetically modified corn and soybeans.
One of the farmers the company signed up with is Rick Clark, a fifth-generation farmer in Warren County, Indiana, located in the west-central part of the state, between the Wabash River and the Illinois state line. Clark’s family has lived on the farm since the 1880s, and today the farm encompasses 7,000 acres.
While Clark produces non-GMO corn and alfalfa for Dannon, as well as profitable cash crops, including non-GMO soybeans for a Cargill facility in Lafayette, Indiana, he does much more than that: he has also developed a unique system for building soil health. Across his property, Clark uses regenerative practices including diverse crop rotations, no-till methods, and cover cropping, and he is striving toward the tough task of combining no-till practices with organic certification.
Clark is one of a small but growing number of farmers who are adopting regenerative agricultural practices to build soil health. (Others include Gabe Brown in North Dakota and David Brandt in Ohio, who were featured in David Montgomery’s book about regenerative agriculture, Growing a Revolution.) His farm offers a practical, proven example of how regenerative farming methods can transform agriculture.
Rick Clark roller crimps fixation clover, crimson clover, oats, radish, and peas. He will plant corn right after this process.
“Diversification drives the system,” he says. “I care deeply about building soil health and will sacrifice yield to maintain soil health.”
Big brands and organizations are paying attention. In 2017, Clark was honored as Dannon’s Sustainable Farmer of the Year. More recently, Land O’ Lakes honored him with an Outstanding Sustainability Award, and he was also a regional winner of the American Soybean Association’s Conservation Legacy Award.
Greg Downing, an agronomist with Cisco Farm Seed, who has worked with Clark for several years, calls Clark’s commitment to soil health “150 percent.” “I think Rick saw early on that building soil health was simple: that when you have something growing all the time and are doing crop rotations, you are doing good things to the soil,” Downing says. “You are going to regenerate a lot of life, biology, as well as minerals.”
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To Prevent the Next Dust Bowl, Give Soil a Chance
As the United Nations gathers for a Climate Summit, farmer Gabe Brown and ag specialist Ron Nichols urge regenerative agricultural practices to improve the soil and slow climate change.
Hugh Hammond Bennett, the father of the modern conservation movementeffort that became today’s Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS), once wrote, “Take care of the land and the land will take care of you.” Perhaps it would have been more accurate to say, “Take care of the soil and the soil will take care of you.”
It’s not just a matter of semantics, but rather of understanding.
When Bennett became the chief of the Soil Erosion Service in 1933, the nation was in the midst of one of the most devastating environmental disasters in our history: The Dust Bowl. This disaster was caused by two primary factors.
One was climatological: A prolonged (but historically normal) dry period followed an unusual period of above-average precipitation throughout the Great Plains. The wetter stretch prompted many landowners to convert grasslands into farmland because the climate, for a handful of years, seemed perfect for grain production. The resulting bounty was, indeed, plentiful. The combination of precipitation and carbon-rich soils (provided courtesy of thousands of years of perennial vegetation living symbiotically with herds of roaming bison) set the stage for a yield boon.
For a short while, times were good. Really good.
The second major factor was human-caused: The grassland-to-cropland conversion had a long-term negative impact on the soil itself. The plow that broke the plains also broke the ability of the plains’ soil to function as nature intended. Deep plowing and monoculture grain crops destroyed soil structure; it collapsed essential air and water pores in the soil profile and rendered the soil less capable of supporting microbiologic life and storing water. Farmers left their soil bare between crops, rather than keeping roots in the ground to keep it covered.
The process of plowing grasslands into cropland also depleted soil organic matter and reduced microbiological diversity so the once-healthy, living and life-giving soil was left unable to withstand the inevitable dry period that was to come.
When the rainfall patterns returned to normal, the soil was sick and fragile. Thirsty crops withered, wind whipped across the uncovered landscape, and the Dust Bowl ensued. As the crops failed, farm after farm went bankrupt. Dust storms enveloped the nation and its inhabitants as far east as Washington, D.C. What followed, as Timothy Eagan’s book title suggests, was truly the “worst hard time” for those who lived through it.
The deep plowing of native grasslands for cropland conversion, destroyed the soil’s ecosystem and set the stage for the Dust Bowl. Photo courtesy USDA Soil Conservation Service.
Farmers slaughtered livestock to reduce supply and drive up prices or sold, at a loss, what livestock remained on the farms they were about to abandon. By 1934, farmers had sold 10 percent of all their farms, and by 1937, more than one out of five farmers were on federal emergency relief. Those on and off the farm suffered and died from dust pneumonia, called the “brown plague,” caused by an increasing number of “Black Blizzard” dust storms.
What we know in retrospect is that the Dust Bowl farmers unknowingly mined the life from the soil and, in doing so, they undermined its resilience. Bountiful but short-term harvests came at a cost that no one at the time could have imagined.
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Ranches/Farms
Knorr Farms
A family operation that grows peppers, corn, cotton, and other crops on 3,000 acres in Pinal County, one of Arizona’s top growing regions
San Juan Ranch is a certified organic, grass-fed and grass finished cattle ranch located in the San Luis Valley near Saguache, Colorado operated by George Whitten and Julie Sullivan. We are Audubon Certified, a Holistic Management International Outstanding Demonstration Site, and a mentor site for the Quivira Coalition New Agrarian Program. We are committed to restorative practices that result in soil health, functioning grassland ecosystems, and viable small scale ranching. We direct market our meat through Blue Range Ranch, our direct sale business.
MARKEGARD FAMILY GRASS-FED, San Franciso Bay Area, CA
Markegard Family Grass-Fed provides the community with locally born, raised and processed certified grass-fed and grass-finished beef and lamb, pasture raised chicken and pork. Customers can order regenerative meats online through our shop to be delivered around the Bay Area or at Farmers Markets. Make sure to check out our CSA to join the other committed members who benefit with regular access to limited products, sales and special events! We look forward to serving you and your family with the freshest, healthiest local meats in the Bay Area!
TomKat Ranch, San Franciso Bay Area, CA
TomKat Ranch is an 1,800 acre grassfed cattle ranch in the San Francisco Bay Area. Our team of ranchers, scientists, and advocates look to nature to guide our landscape management in support of our values. Over the next five years, we want to have inspired the transition of one million acres of California rangeland to regenerative management.
Organisations
Dixon Water Foundation, Texas
The Dixon Water Foundation promotes healthy watersheds and sequestration of carbon through regenerative land management, to ensure that present and future generations have the water resources they need.
Through our ranches, grants, education programs, and research partnerships, we hope to ultimately impact how Texans protect the great environmental resources of our state.
The Malpai Borderlands Group, Arizona and New Mexico
The Malpai Borderlands Group is organized and led by ranchers who live and work primarily in Southeast Arizona and Southwest New Mexico. It is a collaborative effort that is built around goals shared by neighbors within our community. Our group originated as a series of informal discussions among ranching neighbors who recognized that a way of life, and a wild landscape, that they all loved was being threatened by spread of development and subdivision from nearby towns.
The Malpai Borderlands Group was formally organized as a non-profit organization in 1994. Since then, we have pursued activities in several program areas directed at protecting and restoring the ecological diversity and productivity of our land:
Land protection: We have protected 78,000 acres of private land through conservation easements, which will protect it as natural wildlife habitat and productive ranch land by preventing subdivision and development.
Innovative cooperative land management: Our group invented the concept of “Grassbanking” by which neighboring ranchers who were experiencing serious drought could rest their ranches from grazing by moving their herds to the Gray Ranch under reciprocal conservation agreements.
Habitat restoration: We have undertaken many restoration projects to restore native grassland and savanna habitat, including an ambitious goal of restoring fire as a natural landscape process. We have cooperated with numerous agency and private partners to conduct prescribed fire over 69,000 acres. Our monitoring has shown that our projects are resulting in improved ecological condition over many thousands of acres.
Community outreach: To enable others to benefit from our work we host several meetings each year that are focused on sharing new scientific and land management information with our neighbors and cooperators.
Trilogy Beef, New Mexico
The Trilogy Beef Community is a local food network that delivers a New Mexico produced and harvested center-of-the-plate beef supply to families in New Mexico.
Trilogy Beef is a process-verified, local supply of USDA-inspected New Mexico beef raised in a comfortable, pasture-based environment, and selectively finished on grass or locally produced grain sources. Our pastures are managed using natural and organic-certified grazing and cropping systems. An entire process free of synthetic feed ingredients, herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers. Furthermore, our beef is free of injectable or feed-grade antibiotics and contains no added growth hormones.
