The Colorado River's Alfalfa Problem

What About Water? with Jay Famiglietti

The meat and dairy industries are some of the biggest water users in the American West, thanks to one of cows' favorite foods – alfalfa. As aridification continues across the American southwest, water is becoming far more scarce on the Colorado River. A critical source of water for roughly 40 million Americans, we look at why so much of the Colorado River's freshwater goes toward growing water-intensive hay crops, and at what can be done to significantly scale back consumptive use in the future.

In this episode, we hear from people who've traveled from around the world to see the Hoover Dam. With white bathtub rings marking a long-past high water mark, Lake Mead is severely overdrawn. Together with Lake Powell, America's two biggest man-made reservoirs are losing water faster than ever as cities, towns and farms withdraw their legal allocations.

To find out why farmers in this region keep growing such water-intensive crops, our producer Megan Myscofski meets up with alfalfa farmer Larry Cox. They tour his farmland near Brawley, in California's Imperial Valley. With no potable water, Cox's home, farm and livelihood depend entirely on his farmland's senior water rights from the Colorado River. Leaving the fields fallow is not an option.

Jay then sits down with Dan Putnam, an expert on alfalfa and other forage crops at the University of California, Davis, and Sarah Porter, director of Arizona State University's Kyl Center for Water Policy. They discuss why it's so difficult legally and economically to uproot water-intensive crops such as alfalfa, and they bring up solutions to get ‘more crop out of each drop’. They also discuss what cities and urban areas will have to do, to ensure there's enough water to support everyone in the lower Colorado River basin.