Within the thousands of acres that rancher Randy Barker surveys each day by pickup truck, nothing is more valuable–or more coveted–than the water in the ground beneath his wheels.
Although 50 years of constant use have lowered the local aquifer somewhat, it still means life for everything from chili crops to crossbred cattle around this small town that a sign by the highway calls “The Valley of Hidden Waters.”
Lately, those liquid riches also have beckoned businessmen intent on buying land and piping water to the increasingly parched sprawl of El Paso, 90 miles to the west.
This is how the land and a way of life may slip away in the American Southwest, experts say. The same search for water that led people like Barker’s father to wrest farmland from desert could force the desert’s return as thirsty cities extend their reach across the landscape. Using underground water to supply the metropolis means the land above may lie fallow–perhaps for good.
“If they start pumping water to El Paso, that’ll end all this,” Barker said on a recent morning as he drove to check on water troughs for his cattle.
Keeping arid lands productive poses a challenge even discounting the cities’ needs.
Rio Grande dry at mouth
In California and the lower Rio Grande valley, salty buildup from irrigation is forcing some farmers to switch from salt-sensitive crops such as green beans and oranges to hardier but less lucrative wheat and barley. Drought, choking river weeds and intensive agriculture in Mexico have so depleted the Rio Grande that last month it ran dry at its mouth for the first time since the 1950s.
And throughout the estimated 90 percent of Western agriculture that relies on irrigation, ballooning natural gas costs have taken large chunks from the bottom line of farmers who need gas to run their water pumps. Gas bills can reach $100,000 a month at some of the larger farms in Dell City.
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Such hard realities have led many Dell City landowners to welcome the prospect of selling water to El Paso, despite the risk to their town’s traditions. Even Barker, who favors going slow on water export, shook his head when asked if he wants his sons to stay in the family business.
“I don’t encourage them to,” said Barker, lowering his usually booming voice. “You don’t get rich doing this.”
El Paso’s aquifer shrinking
Geologists say that within 25 years, El Paso’s growing population of 560,000 will have used up the Hueco Bolson aquifer that sits below much of west Texas and parts of New Mexico. That impending shortage could bring opportunity for Hunt Building Corp., an El Paso-based company that in the last year has bought more than four thousand acres in the area around Dell City.
Hunt Corp. released a report in February on the feasibility of building a treatment plant and pipeline from Dell City to El Paso, at a cost of up to $300 million. The study indicated that the small town could provide 50,000 acre-feet of water to El Paso each year–about one-fifth of the growing city’s needs. An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to flood 1 acre to a depth of 1 foot.
But that outflow of water would take up nearly half of what Dell City farmers now use to grow their crops. If the plan goes forward, farmers will have to pull much of their land out of production, said John Edmondson, Hunt’s vice president for government and public relations.
“It’s a trade-off,” Edmondson said. “The water that you export will not be used for irrigation. It is natural for all those folks [in Dell City] to have concerns. What we need is to talk about how you would create an alternative economy for people as you give up the agricultural side of life and convert your agricultural use into water use.”
Some town residents are skeptical of the company’s ideas about other businesses that could take the place of agriculture. One possibility, Edmondson said, would be to pump the briny waste water from a planned desalination plant into a nearby salt lake bed. The salt concentration should be about right to make a shrimp farm, Edmondson said.
Turning whole regions of crop land back to the wild often brings unintended effects, said Gary Woodard, a professor of hydrology at the University of Arizona and an expert on sustainable water use in semiarid lands. Adding fertilizers and making other changes to desert soil affects the kinds of plants it can support, Woodard said.
“After many years of cultivation, you have a completely different kind of soil,” Woodard said. “If you quit growing cotton or alfalfa, you don’t get the native plants coming back in–you get nuisance plants like tumbleweed. It can cause serious dust problems.”
Similar problems arose in Arizona during the 1980s, when booming real estate prices convinced cities such as Phoenix and Mesa to buy up large tracts of rural land on the possibility that the cities might one day need to drill for more water. When the farmers left, Woodard said, dust and tumbleweed invaded their old land, and nearby repair shops and cotton gins went out of business.
That round of Arizona “water ranching,” as it has come to be known, ended when the 1980s real estate bubble burst and the state passed laws discouraging the practice.
In Texas, water ranches are still a relatively new and untested investment.
The arithmetic of self-preservation was on the agenda at a recent meeting of Dell City’s local water conservation district, located near the town’s only paved intersection. Kit Bramblett, who arrived in the valley during its first farming boom in the late 1940s and early 1950s, said he believes piping some water to El Paso is almost inevitable.
“If 2 million people need the water, then 75 farmers can go to hell,” Bramblett said. But he urged that the board hire a lobbyist to argue against a proposed state law that might make it easier for outsiders like the Hunt Corp. to pump water from under their feet.
“If we lose the right to control our water, we’ve lost everything we hold precious here,” Bramblett said.
Mountain blessing
Unlike the Hueco Bolson or practically any other water source in the desert near El Paso, Dell City’s aquifer gets a large recharge each year–most likely from melting snow in mountains to the northwest and moisture from the nearby Guadaloupe Mountains, area hydrologists said.
The abundance makes an abrupt contrast to the wasteland of desert scrub that dominates the road from El Paso. Elm and cottonwood trees shade the streets of Dell City, planted there decades ago by the area’s first farmers.
Bramblett said he remembers when water in the valley was so plentiful that he needed only to thrust a spade in the salt flat outside of town to make the liquid gurgle up. Today, he said, the water starts at least 10 feet down. Many farmers drill their wells to 150 feet.
The prospect of supplying water for the next wave of urban expansion in the West has lured some Texas tycoons who made their original fortunes on oil.
In 1994, the billionaire Bass Brothers spent $60 million of their real estate and oil fortune on extensively irrigated farmland in California’s Imperial Valley. They then lobbied the irrigation district to sell Colorado River water to fill faucets in San Diego. The deal came through in 1998, by which time the brothers had sold their land to another company for $250 million.
Last year, 1980s oil takeover artist T. Boone Pickens proposed piping groundwater from his property in the Texas Panhandle to cities as far away as San Antonio, several hundred miles south, at a cost of up to $2.5 billion.
Cities themselves have been gobbling rural land for water. El Paso bought 46,000 acres in the last decade at two ranches about 160 miles east of the city. One Panhandle utility purchased the water rights to more than 42,000 acres; Lubbock alone has bought rights to 72,000 acres in a neighboring county.
El Paso’s water needs are intertwined with those of its larger Mexican neighbor, Juarez, which has an even more pressing shortage. Although the two cities share the same aquifer, the Mexican side is projected to run out of usable water for Juarez’s 1.4 million residents in just five years.
There are no easy alternatives to the El Paso’s dwindling aquifer. The city’s use of the Rio Grande for drinking water has doubled to about 40 percent of the city’s water intake since an expanded treatment plant opened in 1993.
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But the city gets no river water during the winter months, when dams upstream must recharge so they can supply farms with irrigation water in the spring.
For Dell City, one advantage of water export would be greater predictability. Depending on what El Paso is willing to pay, a farmer with 1,000 acres could bring in a steady flow of $200,000 a year or more selling water to the city.
Yet some farmers won’t feel right about letting go of the land even if the local economy thrives. Robert Carpenter, who has been farming in the area for 20 years, said he can’t see trading in his way of life for more money.
“I’m doing something that I love,” Carpenter said. “Once it’s gone, what do you do? Where do you go?
“At some point you wonder, how are we going to feed ourselves? It’s going to be harder to put the farmland back in than it was to take it away.”