{"id":170110,"date":"2025-03-11T11:33:55","date_gmt":"2025-03-11T15:33:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=170110"},"modified":"2025-03-11T15:20:17","modified_gmt":"2025-03-11T19:20:17","slug":"the-prom-of-the-colorado-river","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/03\/11\/the-prom-of-the-colorado-river\/","title":{"rendered":"The Prom of the Colorado River"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"\"

Photograph by Meg Bernhard.<\/p><\/div>\n

Alfalfa smells warm and earthy and sort of sweet, like socks after a long hike, but not in a bad way. It is soft, with oblong green leaves the size of a pinkie nail. <\/b>I know this because on a chilly February afternoon I drove a hundred and forty miles to the Imperial Valley, one of the state\u2019s largest farming regions, pulled over to an unattended field, and ripped up a clump. It was a brown day; the wind turbines in Palm Springs were spinning and a dust storm was brewing. The air was more humid than normal. Alfalfa grows everywhere around the West, but it\u2019s peculiar to see vast green fields in this place\u2014a low, dry desert where vegetation is scarce and water even scarcer. But the Imperial Valley, home to an accidental salt lake and a mountain made of multicolored painted adobe clay, is one of California\u2019s weirder places. The Salton Sea\u2019s gunky shoreline takes off-road vehicles prisoner. A roving mud puddle eats at the highway. <\/b>Roughly a hundred and fifty thousand acres of alfalfa grow in a place that sees fewer than three inches of rain a year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

People love to hate alfalfa. It\u2019s become the Southwest\u2019s boogeyman, chief offender in the megadrought. Farmers use alfalfa for cattle feed because it\u2019s high in protein, but the crop, a perennial, requires a lot of water\u2014by one estimate five acre-feet per acre in the Imperial Valley. By comparison, Imperial Valley <\/span>lettuce uses about three acre-feet per acre, while, on average, grapes across the state use about 2.85. (An acre-foot is about enough to cover a football field in water a foot deep; alfalfa, then, requires five of those per acre.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

I think about alfalfa a lot, but only in the abstract, as a crop that uses too much water and enables the existence of more cows, which burp methane and make the climate crisis worse. I wanted to see it up close, and I also wanted to speak with one of the West\u2019s most fervent students, and defenders, of alfalfa. His name is John Brooks Hamby, and he\u2019s the vice chairman of the board of directors for the Colorado River\u2019s largest single user, the Imperial Irrigation District, also called IID. Unlike alfalfa farther north, which may see a couple of harvests a year, Imperial Valley alfalfa enjoys a long season, he told me <\/b>when I arrived at a sterile IID office in El Centro decorated with photos of canals and footbridges. \u201cWe can get ten-plus cuttings here,\u201d he said. \u201cReally thick, dense stands.\u201d Alfalfa is not the valley\u2019s only crop; when I was visiting, lettuce was in season, as was celery. I\u2019d apparently just missed the carrot festival in Holtville, where sixteen-year-old Ailenna Salorio was named the 2025 carrot queen. There are dates and lemons and broccoli and spinach and onions too. But alfalfa is king.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

John Brooks calls himself JB. JB <\/b>grew up in the Imperial Valley town of Brawley. There, as he tells it, his great-grandfather had come from Texas to dig irrigation ditches. His grandfather worked in land leveling, and his father went away for college but returned to grow and sell produce. At his parents\u2019 wedding, guests ate his father\u2019s asparagus, which he had to quit growing, JB told me, after NAFTA<\/small> cut into California farmers\u2019 asparagus profits. JB grew up tagging along as his dad checked fields and irrigated crops late at night. Water shaped the political and economic landscape of the Imperial Valley, whose water district has some of the oldest, most senior rights to the Colorado River.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

JB is twenty-nine. He is bookish and talkative, fond of bolo ties and Navajo concho belt buckles, at ease with cattle ranchers and water scholars. He is also California\u2019s lead negotiator on the Colorado River, which serves forty million people across seven Western states, thirty tribes, and two Mexican states. Each of the American states that the river feeds\u2014including Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico, considered the \u201cupper basin,\u201d as well as Nevada, Arizona, and California, \u201cthe lower basin\u201d\u2014appoints a principal negotiator to hash out what water usage across the river ought to look like. The lower and upper basin negotiators always fight over who has to cut back on water. Alfalfa, as the symbol of California\u2019s excess in a time of drought, is an easy target. This irritates JB. \u201cYou go into the grocery store, go into the whole dairy section. You have Fage or Yoplait, Horizon grass-fed milk, or you\u2019re having any of the nonvegan ice creams. Beef. All of that comes from alfalfa,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a foundational part of the food supply for both humans and animals.\u201d Alfalfa earned $269.7 million for Imperial County in 2022. That year it sold for $325 a ton.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Photograph by Meg Bernhard.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u00a0<\/b>***<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

I first met JB during the Colorado River Water Users Association conference\u2014affectionately called CRWUA<\/small> (pronounced “crew-uh”)\u2014at the Paris Casino in Las Vegas last December. It was, at first glance, like any other Vegas conference: morning registration a few feet away from people who\u2019d been up all night playing slot machines, panels held in windowless ballrooms, attendees milling around in lanyards, with a few casino-specific details like fake French boulevards, not to mention \u201ctoilettes<\/span>\u201d instead of restrooms. The Colorado River folks wore their western wear: cowboy boots, turquoise. Some wore cowboy hats, though the national finals rodeo was also happening in Vegas that week and it was hard to differentiate the cattle people from water people.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

CRWUA<\/small>, as JB put it to me later, \u201cis the prom of the Colorado River.\u201d \u201cEverybody shows up. You’ve got the exhibit hall where you can do whatever. There’s the drinks\u201d he said. The panels. \u201cIt\u2019s the only time the entire basin comes together in one place.\u201d By the entire basin, he meant negotiators, lawyers, scholars, water managers, conservationists, tribal chairpeople, consultants, engineers, hydrologists, cloud seeders, solar panel marketers, Bureau of <\/span>Reclamation bureaucrats, and people with job titles like Colorado River Basin Salinity Control Forum director and Irrigation and Electrical Districts director.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

I didn\u2019t really meet<\/i> JB; he was venting about the upper basin to a reporter friend of mine who was somehow still on good terms with him even though he\u2019d investigated the Imperial Irrigation District\u2019s water usage. My friend and his colleagues had found that, in 2022, one farming family used more Colorado River <\/span>water than all of southern Nevada. JB argues that California, which has half the Colorado River basin\u2019s population and the bulk of its agricultural activity, has been doing its part to be efficient with water, and other states need to follow its example. Last summer, Imperial Valley farmers agreed to leave their alfalfa fields fallow during the hottest part of the year, to conserve Colorado River water, in exchange for federal payment. \u201cCalifornia gets it done,\u201d JB said, on a public panel at the conference. He and the other lower basin states want the upper basin to cut their water usage if need be. He wants to avoid litigation over the river, which, if historical lawsuits foretell anything, could last the rest of his life.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

I kept a mental list of terms I\u2019d never heard before. Water masters and CRSP units and water-storage accounts and water credits. Water was bought and sold and saved, claimed and reclaimed. There was beneficial use to water, and abandonment of water, the doctrine of prior appropriation, otherwise known as \u201cfirst in time, first in right.\u201d The doctrine of public trust. The \u201cvirgin flow\u201d was what happened when a river was allowed to run naturally. There was even water court.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The Colorado River starts as snowmelt in the Rocky Mountains and winds 1,450 miles through the Southwest. Centuries ago, it was a wild and muddy and biodiverse river, but as settlers came to the arid west, they dammed and diverted it. It turned blue. In 1922, the federal government apportioned the seven states (not Mexico or tribal nations) fifteen million acre-feet of water to divide among themselves annually; they believed the river carried as much as twenty million acre-feet of water. That year had been unusually wet, and normally, the river averaged only fourteen million acre-feet of water a year. Today it\u2019s more like twelve million, and that initial water flow miscalculation is at the root of the Colorado River\u2019s crisis. The river should<\/i> flow into the Gulf of Mexico, but drought\u2014plus a series of aqueducts, dams, and reservoirs meant to divert water for agricultural and urban use\u2014have prevented the river from reaching its terminus. Now by the time it gets within a hundred miles of the ocean, it\u2019s reduced to a trickle.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

A century after the original Colorado River Compact was signed, Lake Mead, the country\u2019s largest man-made reservoir, reached its lowest level ever. Vegas didn\u2019t see rain for two hundred and forty days. Bodies, some decades old, starting surfacing in the reservoir. Observers blamed the Mob. Lake Mead got within two hundred feet of \u201cdeadpool\u201d\u2014the level at which the reservoir can no longer release water downstream. In 2023, it finally rained. Lake Mead was no longer in critical condition, but the West is still dry.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

At the time of CRWUA<\/small> last December, Las Vegas hadn\u2019t seen rain since July and the negotiators were getting emotional. Normally, the seven of them hold a public panel together, but river talks were so tense that they held two separate panels, one for the lower basin and another for the upper. They still couldn\u2019t come to an agreement on what river operations would look like when a number of rules and regulations expired in 2026. The upper basin claimed that their states suffered more from climate change; the lower basin disagreed. They all wanted to grow their cities and farm, and they thought the other side should do less. JB used the word propaganda<\/span><\/em>\u00a0to <\/b>describe the upper basin\u2019s handouts. Brandon Gebhart, <\/span>Wyoming\u2019s negotiator, implored the lower basin to stop \u201csaber-rattling.\u201d Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s negotiator, called the upper basin\u2019s experience of the river \u201cthe Hunger Games.\u201d She teared up.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Photograph by Meg Bernhard.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Apparently, some people called the negotiators \u201cwater buffaloes.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s an older phrase,\u201d JB told me, \u201chistorically used for these big players who were titanic figures on big water projects or moving water around the Colorado.\u201d \u201cI\u2019ve been deemed one,\u201d he said, \u201cbut I don\u2019t self-identify.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

***<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

In a conference room for vendors, JB\u2019s IID booth stood near a conservation group passing out Swedish fish to warn about invasive species on the Virgin River and a United States Geological Survey booth presenting the agency\u2019s latest drone technology. The exhibition hall was where people went to drink coffee and eat pastries, sip wine in the evening, take phone calls, and talk around the watercooler, which only sometimes had water. (More than one person made a drought joke.) To decorate, JB had asked a farmer\/water district colleague for two of her \u201cbiggest, most beautiful bales\u201d of Imperial Valley alfalfa. He set them on the carpet alongside a placard that read \u201cAmazing Alfalfa,\u201d with the subtitle: \u201cMore Than Just Hay\u2014This Bale Powers Your <\/span>Everyday!\u201d He listed forty-four different cow products in alphabetical order. Anti-aging cream. Beef bourguignon. Chewing gum. Crayons. Feta cheese. Footballs. Hot chocolate. Lattes. Shoes. Short ribs. Steak frites. Smash burgers. Soft serve. Whipped cream.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Farmers feed the need that exists, JB told me. People want their lattes. Their burgers. If they wanted rainbow chard, we\u2019d be growing more rainbow chard. Instead, we grow alfalfa to feed the cows that people want to eat. Moreover, alfalfa fixes nitrogen, he said. It\u2019s essential for crop rotation. Healthy soil.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\"\"

Photograph by Luke Runyon.<\/p><\/div>\n

After JB created the IID booth, he was inspired to make beef bourguignon, which he\u2019d included on his list of products to prove that beef could be elegant. It took him eight hours to make the dish, and he was pleased with the result, but he ate it for too many days in a row. \u201cI was sort of put off by beef for a little bit, even though I did an amazing job making it,\u201d he told me later, in the IID office in El Centro. \u201cSince then, I\u2019ve been healthy. I\u2019ve been eating a lot of fish and greens. And so I feel better.\u201d He continued. \u201cDespite the fact that it\u2019s not the most healthy thing,\u201d he said, \u201cpeople consume it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

It was possible to cut down on consumption, he told me. Look at his own beef pause.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

There were more panels. An HDR-sponsored wine tasting. <\/b>A retirement party in someone\u2019s hotel room. A rumor about star-crossed lovers across the basin divide (unfounded). Invocations of drought as enemy. Opaque references to climate change. (CRWUA<\/small> president and Utah negotiator: \u201cThe hydrology of the river is uncertain.\u201d) A Colorado-based consultant told me he once hung out with the writer Edward Abbey on a boat. The upper basin held a last-minute press conference asking the lower states to acknowledge their pain. Which was more painful: the upper basin\u2019s low snowpack or the lower basin\u2019s high evaporation? A Colorado State University water scholar tried to use an extended metaphor about Alice in Wonderland <\/span>to explain the river. No one followed. \u201cWay too long,\u201d the man sitting next to me texted someone. \u201cHorrible,\u201d his correspondent replied.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

I took a bus with several dozen conferencegoers to see the Hoover Dam, which holds back Lake Mead. We put on hard hats and descended into a diversion tunnel. There were gasps. Exclamations. \u201cThis is an amazing amount of concrete,\u201d said one person. \u201cI teach an architecture class,\u201d said another. \u201cI want to teach them how to do this, build a dam like this.\u201d A former U.S. representative from Colorado <\/span>leaned over to me. \u201cApparently,\u201d he said, \u201cthe first person to die building the Hoover Dam was the father of the last person to die.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

***<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Within two months, river talks would improve. The negotiators had changed their seating arrangements for in-person meetings and were discussing the ideal table shape to facilitate dialogue. In January, JB reached out to other basin states to have free-flowing, informal conversations without the pressure of everyone being in the same room. By early February they still hadn\u2019t arrived at a deal, but they were meeting every other week in a different state and appeared to be getting closer. <\/b>\u201cThings were really bad in 2024. Twenty-five is off to a good start,\u201d JB told me in El Centro. \u201cBut things are still fragile and sensitive.\u201d No one, he said, wants to go to court over the river. Arizona\u2019s proposed state budget, however, now includes several million for Colorado River litigation. <\/b>(One of Trump\u2019s early executive orders has halted payments to users who conserve Colorado River water, making the river\u2019s status even more uncertain.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Driving through the Imperial Valley, I made a pit stop at the roving mud puddle, which was even more interesting to me than alfalfa. Scientists do not know why the puddle, called the Niland Geyser, propels forward; it\u2019s moved sixty feet over the last few years. The puddle is bubbling and smells like sulfur. It dissolves all rock and road that stands in its way. The California Department of Transportation had to divert a highway around it, and now it\u2019s inching toward the Union Pacific train tracks. When I saw the pile of rocks surrounding the puddle, I laughed. Railroad officials built a seventy-five-foot underground wall to trap it. Engineers dug wells. But nothing can stop the water.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Meg Bernhard\u2019s essays and reportage have appeared in <\/em>The New York Times Magazine, <\/em>Harper\u2019s,<\/em> The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of<\/em> Wine,<\/em> part of<\/em> Bloomsbury\u2019s Object Lessons series.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cAlfalfa is king.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2339,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68551],"tags":[67827],"class_list":["post-170110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dispatch","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Prom of the Colorado River by Meg Bernhard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 11, 2025 \u2013 \u201cAlfalfa is king.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/03\/11\/the-prom-of-the-colorado-river\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Prom of the Colorado River by Meg 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