IRRIGATING THE DESERT
WRITTEN BY DAVID STENTIFORD
PHOTOS BY JEFF ROSS AND PETER GOIN
This spring, as we celebrate Earth Day, we turn our attention to local water. Learn how we turned brown acres green, helping to cultivate crops and cattle and, thus, grow our current local food system. But, looking toward the future, how do we responsibly balance water usage and still support local food?
Dun-colored hills rise into a pale blue sky streaked with white horsetails, long, thin clouds that signal changing weather. Below, spring green pastures lie next to mint-colored fields. There’s a rancher, too, a young calf in his arms. A tall hat sits on his head and he is wearing chaps and a leather vest. His horse stands by his side looking on. The man’s gaze scans a lush valley floor.
This is the pastoral image bolted to many Nevada car and truck bumpers. It’s the background of the charitable license plate that supports Future Farmers of America in Nevada and Nevada Department of Agriculture’s promotional projects. Inscribed on top of the picture is a simple phrase: “People grow things here.”
What this image captures with the green against the brown is the idealism and paradoxes of growing food in the driest state in the Union. The phrase seems to acknowledge that agriculture in the desert is a small miracle or that farming is, well, just what happens around these parts. And, while this picture looks quintessentially Western, this is a relatively recent view of the West, one projected onto the arid landscape for about 150 years. But the plate’s scene misses something essential: signs of irrigation.
“Food grows where water flows,” says Rick Lattin, farmer/owner of Lattin Farms in Fallon, Nev., quoting a sign along a stretch of Interstate 5 in California.
In addition to food production, water also is important to how we make choices in the market. Great Basin Community Food Co-op leaders in Reno, for example, use the idea of a foodshed, defined by a combination of three California-Nevada watersheds, to mark preferred boundaries for sourcing the local items they sell. The region’s foodshed is made up of the Truckee River in the north and the Carson and Walker rivers to the south. Essentially, local food means local water.
Eating Our Water
Running into rivers and lakes, stored behind dams, gliding into canals, pumped through pipes: snowmelt enables our food to grow here. Even our groundwater depends on precipitation.
Moreover, we eat our water. Producing 3,000 calories of food takes about 790 gallons of water, according to Water for Food, Water for Life: A Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture. This is the water soaked up by plants — such as the bok choy in your stir-fry or the alfalfa the dairy cows munch. And this water is largely transpired and evaporated back into the atmosphere. This number does not reflect the additional water used for washing spuds in the warehouse. It’s just what moves from ground to plant to sky. Stated as a rule of thumb, each calorie we consume takes about one quart of water to grow. Comparatively, people require one gallon or so for drinking each day. The upshot is best described by Dr. Gary Paul Nabhan, conservationist and author of Coming Home to Eat, arguably the first manifesto for local food.
“Today,” Nabhan writes, “more than four out of every five gallons of fresh water found on this planet are pumped out of riverbeds and consumed by agricultural crops.”
Where does our water go? Locally, according to Truckee Meadows Water Authority officials, in non-drought years the municipality draws about 6 percent of the Truckee River’s total volume for urban use — for toilets, lawns, laundries, and industry — returning about half of this to the river as treated effluent. TMWA also draws 10 to 15 percent of its total water supply from groundwater. At the same time, the Truckee-Carson Irrigation District draws 12 percent of the Truckee’s flow out of the basin for farming around Fallon. About 78 percent of the river is allocated for flows to Pyramid Lake, the remaining 7 percent going into other irrigation systems. In drought years, TMWA uses about 8 percent of the river’s flow, returning about half, while TCID draws 53 percent out of the basin and 23 percent is allocated to the lake, while the remaining 16 percent goes to other irrigators. The point here is that major tradeoffs for water affect farms, people, and ecosystems.
These tradeoffs are made acute because our foodshed is water scarce. We’re able to live with this scarcity, however, through our economic means. In other words, our foodshed is physically water scarce, but not economically so. In each river basin, there is not enough water to supply all demands and needs, but we stay fed, most of us anyway, by the virtual water we import in the foods we buy from California, Mexico, and everywhere else. Farms also trade this virtual water out of the region, to supply, for example, cows from California to Japan with hay and alfalfa, what most of Nevada’s croplands produce.
No Irrigation Required
We should probably keep in mind that people have subsisted in the Great Basin for more than 11,000 years without irrigation. When we talk about local food and water we also need to talk about food traditions, ones not visible or familiar to most of us today. These foods are important parts of local ecosystems. They’re also important to people’s identity. Gina Wachsmuth, a tribal council member and water quality technician of the Walker River Paiute Tribe, points out that the Paiute took their names from their food sources.
The Pyramid Lake people are the Cui-ui Dicutta, or Cui-ui Eaters, named after the omnivorous lake sucker endemic only to Pyramid Lake and the lower Truckee River, she says. The Walker River people are the Agai Dicutta, or Trout Eaters. And the Fallon people are known as Toi Dicutta, Tule Eaters.
“Pine nuts remain important to us,” Wachsmuth says. “The tribes’ food also includes rabbit, deer, antelope, groundhog, and game fowl. They used to gather buckberries, too.”
These food traditions are linked to ecosystem health and the health of people. Many of these traditions, such as the cutthroat trout in Walker and Pyramid lakes, have been degraded or destroyed in part due to systems of water management that historically privileged agriculture above other uses and users.
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| Photographer Peter Goin’s friend holds a tumbleweed Photo by Peter Goin |
The Question of Irrigation
While people do grow things in Nevada, like the slogan says, surprisingly, irrigated agriculture in the state didn’t develop from a local demand for food or other non-edible agricultural products such as fiber. Instead, irrigated farming in the West, we can argue, came from a larger political desire to settle the last remaining public lands left “unclaimed.” Close to home, in the Truckee and Carson basins, is where this part of the story begins.
Nevada Congressman Francis G. Newlands, who lived in a home overlooking the Truckee River in Reno, was the primary author of the 1902 Reclamation Act. This policy was written to get folks onto homesteads by making dry land farmable. The story, as it was reported back east in The New York Times, reveals much about the challenges and ambitions that shaped our current food system.
Perhaps it begins here. From rain gauge data collected from Reno to Ogden, Utah along the Pacific Central Railroad, The New York Times conclusively announced in 1876 that indeed irrigation would be necessary for the future cultivation of crops in both states. The question for the next quarter century then became as follows: Who should pay for the dams and ditches needed to make the brown West green?
The stakes quickly increased as Newlands and others argued for the federal government to fund reclamation. By 1895 The New York Times was reporting that “upon this question of water depends the future of the almost entire vacant public domain.” And, moreover, the prospect of irrigating the West seemed to be growing more complicated as state leaders negotiated their new roles as neighbors with streams running across and along their borders. These conundrums were “becoming more and more complicated,” the paper reported that year, “and the demand for laws, for regulations which shall impartially settle the disputes, are becoming more urgent.” As it happened, states, tribes, irrigators, and other users in the Truckee and Carson watersheds have spent the past century working out a series of agreements to settle the issues that required the decisive action called for more than a century ago.
Under the Newlands Project, Derby Dam was built and finished in 1905, outside of Wadsworth, Nev., and this marked the first federally funded irrigation enterprise organized under the Reclamation Act. Along with a new canal, this dam enabled water managers to transfer Truckee River water out of the basin to the Carson watershed to be stored in the Lahontan Reservoir for farming in and around Fallon where, in addition to alfalfa, much of our local food is grown today.
Food, though, was not how Newlands pitched the purpose of the Reclamation Act before it became law. In 1902 the Nevada representative wrote an editorial in The New York Times, trying to garner support to pass his bill.
“The purpose of this bill,” he stated, “is to provide homes for actual settlers.”
Much later, the debate over water in the region positioned urban and suburban development against agriculture, a tension that still seems to define our perception of water issues today. In the 1980s, the paradox was that water availability in the Truckee watershed would limit the urban development of Reno.
Weighing the Costs
When water travels from plant to atmosphere, it leaves less flow for local ecosystems. As such, irrigating the desert has had serious unintended consequences. From 1910 to 1967 Pyramid Lake dropped roughly 86 feet, a consequence of the Derby Dam and water diversions, affecting important fish and wildlife habitat. Further, in 1938 seasonal Winnemucca Lake, also fed by the Truckee, dried up completely.
Author of the recent book Water Politics in Northern Nevada, Dr. Leah Wilds writes, “Since the completion of the Newlands Project … Nevada wetlands have been depleted by 85 percent.” Locally, she adds, this has especially affected the Lahontan Valley wetlands, an important habitat for ducks, geese, swans, ibis, bald eagles, American white pelicans, and other birds migrating along the Pacific Flyway. In the remaining wetlands in the state, the University of Nevada, Reno professor adds, water quality has generally declined as well, creating problems for animals.
Fish and fisheries have suffered, too. In an exhaustive chronological study of the Truckee River, Gary A. Horton records that the Pyramid Lake fishery that legendarily boasted 4-foot trout, and once commercially supplied the markets and restaurants of Reno with its speckled fish, saw the lake’s endemic strain of cutthroat go extinct in the 1940s. This commercial and recreational fishery crashed for a number of reasons but the Derby Dam and water diversions were essential causes. Later, cutthroat had to be re-stocked in Pyramid Lake with a similar strain of fish that holds a different genetic history. Nonetheless, the commercial fishery hasn’t recovered and the endemic cui-ui was listed as endangered in 1967.
Wachsmuth and Elveda Martinez, who also works on the water and environmental issues faced by the Walker River Paiute Tribe, say that due to over-allocation in the Walker Basin, little water makes its way to Walker Lake. This, in addition to water quality problems, means that the endemic Lahontan cutthroat trout strain of Walker Lake, from which the tribe takes its name, has nearly gone extinct like its Pyramid relative.
In September of 2008 the Truckee River Operating Agreement was signed by officials representing the states of California and Nevada, the Department of the Interior, the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, and the Truckee Meadows Water Authority. While the agreement is only partially in place, as Professor Wilds explains in her book, it enables a more flexible water management plan for different users to have “most of their needs met most of the time.” The Pyramid Lake Paiute is one of few tribes in the West to find success in arguing for restoration of water for livelihood and ecosystems. Meanwhile, Walker River Paiute Tribe members and other entities are engaged in a similar process to save Walker Lake.
The question of whose local foods have been valued, supported, and preserved is the contentious past that continues to play out in our foodshed today.
Field Survey
The most recent Census of Agriculture from 2007 lends perspective to local food and water use in our area. While irrigated acreage in Nevada mostly increased over the past 100 years, it has declined by 2.5 percent from what it was in 1910.
In the bi-state watersheds of the Truckee, Carson, and Walker rivers, close to 60 percent of irrigated land was used in 2007 for growing crops, including hay, and the other 40 percent was used to irrigate pasture for grazing.
Statewide, 92 percent of harvested cropland is dedicated to the production of hay and alfalfa. Meanwhile, only 2.2 percent of harvested cropland goes to growing vegetables, but this number has more than doubled since 2002. To put it in economic terms, producing animals is three-fifths of the market value of agricultural production in the state and feed is the largest expense for these farmers. In this sense, a farmer holding a calf in a field may be a very apt symbol for Nevada.
Judging from these numbers, I would say our water mostly ends up as hay and alfalfa for the production of meat and animal products consumed here and around the world. The local fruits, vegetables, and flowers we see in our local farmers’ markets are perhaps a small fraction of where our local water goes.
On the Ground
Some local farmers and ranchers provide useful examples of how water and its efficient use determine how they do business.
Along with their two sons Andrew and Daniel, Joe and Teri Bertotti of Hole-In-One Ranch in Janesville, Calif. (about 1.5 hours from Reno), raise Black Angus cattle that are fed on grass from their pastures. While on average it takes 14 months to bring grain-fed cattle to market, the Bertottis’ animals take three times as long to mature.
What’s remarkable about Hole-In-One Ranch is that the Bertottis are working with less water than other farms in our foodshed. In the wettest years they may receive 30 inches of water to irrigate with, but this is more often 18 inches. Farms in other parts of our foodshed may get closer to 3½ to 4 feet of water per year.
Since the Bertotti family lives far from the major markets in Reno and California, growing certain crops, say spinach for example, which need to get to the shelves quickly, are out of the question. As Joe Bertotti sees it, there are just two logical choices: grow hay for the California dairy industry or raise their own cattle. Whereas feedlots draw on the water abundance from other regions and allow farmers to produce more cows with less land, raising grass-fed beef means keeping a smaller herd, limited by available winter pasturelands. It also means much less energy goes into growing, watering, fertilizing, and shipping feed.
“There is very little fossil fuel in our food chain,” Bertotti says.
I asked Bertotti why he doesn’t just grow hay. For him, he says direct trade of their own beef makes more sense, by the books and socially.
“People are full of anticipation,” Bertotti says of his customers at the farmers’ markets. He tells me that they come for a variety of reasons: to eat healthier beef, to get a better quality steak, and to tread more lightly on the earth. And it’s in these relationships — customers and farmers trading face-to-face — where Bertotti feels best about meeting specific needs of his customers.
“We also believe in the sustainability in our ranching ethic and stewardship for the land,” he says.
In most of the United States, fattening cattle is done with corn and soy. With grain-fed beef, a major environmental cost comes as runoff of organic waste, such as manure, and with the chemicals used to grow feed. This degrades our watersheds. Environmental Protection Agency literature claims that agriculture is the dominant contributor of water pollution in the U.S.
By taking cows out of the feedlot, and feeding and selling them locally, we indeed mitigate these problems. But it’s not a magic bullet.
“We will have to double meat production by the year 2050 just to sustain current consumption levels,” says Mark Bittman, a food writer and journalist for The New York Times. It’s a proposition that would further tax watersheds and increase greenhouse gas emissions. A “plant-heavy” diet, in Bittman’s view, is healthier and more sustainable. Grass-fed beef, such as the Bertottis raise, fits locally into our water-scarce food system because growing enough corn and soy is probably out of the question.
In Fallon, Rick Lattin’s farm has been continuously irrigated since the 1860s, well before the Newlands era, and his family has cultivated the property for a century. Lattin has seen firsthand the story of the Newlands Project unfold.
Like most Nevada farmers, the Lattins grow alfalfa with flood irrigation. But they also cultivate a wide range of organic produce such as melons, corn, squash, tomatoes, berries, garlic, onions, and beans, all grown with drip irrigation.
In 1992, with the farm receiving only 26 percent of its allocated water due to shortages, Lattin rethought his approach to irrigation and farming. Now using tile drains, he captures what doesn’t sink into the ground after he waters the alfalfa fields. This water is held in a pond and re-used in a drip irrigation system to grow Fallon’s prized Hearts of Gold melons and other crops. The storage also allows Lattin to grow food in hoop houses when the irrigation is turned off from mid-November to mid-April. About 15 to 20 percent of his farm, he says, now relies on drip irrigation.
If Hole-In-One Ranch and Lattin Farms show us how local water scarcity informs the innovative and beneficial choices the Bertottis and Lattins have made, the larger ecological and historical contexts help us see how water scarcity hitches us all together. While we can’t just buy or eat our way to an equitable or sustainable future of water use, local food has a critical role to play in how we collectively value water use, recognize different food traditions, and imagine new images of agriculture for the future.
David Stentiford teaches composition at the University of Nevada, Reno where he recently earned a master’s degree in English with an emphasis on literature and environment.
On the Cover Photo by Jeff Ross. Teri and Joe Bertotti with Hole-In-One Ranch stand in Willow Creek, which has been nurturing ranches near Susanville, Calif., where Teri’s family has been ranching for more than 100 years.
