In Southern Arizona water is everything. And for one family farm, the future of that water hangs in the balance as Colorado River negotiations continue.
Brian Wong is a fourth generation farmer and president of BKW Farms. The farm is located in Marana and harvests several kinds of wheat and grains as well as blue oyster mushrooms.
Wong’s great-grandfather came to the United States from China in the late 1800s to start working on Arizona’s early railroad system. In the 1920s he decided to settle down and open up a grocery store in downtown Tucson. The rest of the Wong family immigrated to the U.S. including Brian’s grandfather, who worked in the grocery store, saving up enough money to buy his first cropland in 1935 in Red Rocks, just north of Marana. In 1939, he planted his first crop.
“In 1941 he decided to gamble on cotton…he heard about it. It was mainly grown in California, Wong said. “Generally, you plant cotton about, probably April time, he didn’t get it in the ground till June.”
A few months later, Pearl Harbor was bombed, leading the U.S. to enter the Second World War. By sheer luck, the Wong farm was one of the few that still had cotton in the ground. Overnight, the price of cotton jumped from eight cents to more than one dollar a pound as a wartime commodity.
Wong says his grandfather took that money and reinvested it back into the farm. It peaked in the 1970s he said, farming on about 25,000 acres in the Red Rock area, Marana, Casa Grande, Wilcox and even into California. In the 1990s, the Wong family took a pivot and decided to re-centralized in Marana and lease their land to other farmers in the area.
“We would take care of all the water rights, all the land leases, all the regulatory parts so that allowed the farmer to actually focus on growing the crop rather than have to do all the paperwork pushing, Wong said, adding that water availability is one of the biggest challenges for irrigated agriculture.
“Where is it going to come from in the future? And you can always just try to do your best with planning and projecting out into the future but things are always going to be volatile that you could never plan on,” Wong said.
Part of BKW sits next to the Central Arizona Project – the 336 mile long canal system that feeds Colorado River water to 80% of Arizona’s population. The farm has about 12 pumps that sit on the canal and feed into their irrigation system.
Each pump is a Chevy 454 engine that’s been converted to natural gas and that’s capable of delivering about 9-10,000 gallons per minute,” Wong said.
The farm is a groundwater savings facility which means it has agreed to stop pumping groundwater, and in exchange, the Arizona Department of Water Resources gives them water from the CAP.
“Our entire farm is 100% GSF. We actually converted to that in the late 90s and we actually haven’t pumped any groundwater since then,” Wong said.
The farm partners with municipalities like Tucson Water, Metro Water and Marana Water to use their allocations of CAP water, however, it is uncertain what those allocations will look like in the coming year.
“Until we kind of get more firm or hard numbers, we can’t determine how much irrigation water we are going to have going into the future,” Wong said. “Personally I really don’t want to return back to groundwater if we don’t have to.”
The Colorado River irrigates more than 5 million acres of farmland in the U.S. but the Basin is in crisis as it continues to experience a decades-long drought and hotter and drier conditions. For farmers like Wong, that means planning for a future that’s still unclear.
An uncertain supply
With long-standing operational rules of the Colorado River set to expire, federal and state leaders are preparing to fight over how to share a river that keeps shrinking.
The canal system’s water users have been operating under a drought contingency plan for the past seven years, says Brian Buzard, the director of operations, power and engineering with the CAP.
“The guidelines that were established on how we operate the system during times of drought were established in 2007... Obviously those are expiring at the end of this year and so there is a…spirited debate about how we’re going to divvy up a smaller river,” Buzard said.
CAP water users have continued to give up about 30% of its water supply, or about 18% of the state’s cut from the Colorado River. But Arizonans have already learned how to operate with less.
Patrick Dent is the assistant general manager of water policy at the CAP. He says that the Lower Basin – made up of Arizona, California and Nevada – has been working voluntarily, for the most part, since 2013 to try to reduce its overall Colorado River use.
“8 to 9 million acre feet between what’s been mandatorily required to be reduced and what’s been voluntarily committed back to the system,” Dent said.
But this past hydrologic year has been a doozy, Dent said, with runoff into Lake Powell possibly reaching historic lows. According to the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center, precipitation in March was less than 50% of average. Snowpack in April was also a record low.
“Lots of concern in the coming months about dropping water levels at Lake Powell. If they reduce the release from Lake Powell to Lake Mead, they’ll now be dropping water levels at Lake Mead as well. And so there’ll be more calls for more reductions in water use and more conservation too,” Dent said.
Dent says the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum – who serves as the water master of the Lower Basin –needs to release water from upper initial units or storage reservoirs in the Upper Basin, in order to meet its 75-million-acre-feet obligation under the 1922 Colorado River Compact. Burgum has authority over the reservoirs within the river’s infrastructure
“That’s never really been done before, the United States has largely operated in those reservoirs and kept them full,” Dent said.
At a meeting with mining stakeholders in Tucson earlier this month, Burgum said that no final decision has been made in terms of releases but that decisions will have to be made on water levels that would be released. He added that it’s unlikely that the seven basin states will come to an agreement, leaving it up to the Bureau of Reclamation to make a decision.
“It’ll be numbers that no one will be satisfied with because there’s not enough water in the system and certainly this year, not enough water. It’ll be balancing the issues of water rights, power generation, water supply,” Burgum said.
The Lower Basin has already offered more cuts for post-2026 operational guidelines: 27% for Arizona, 17% for Nevada and 10% for California.
Burgum says the federal government will have to balance everybody’s needs, even if everybody makes “powerful claims” about their needs.
“I would just ask everybody that’s involved to keep coming with their best ideas on new sources, supply, on conservation, on trade offs,” Burgum said. “We want to keep listening to everybody on this and then I would seriously say, pray, pray for more rain too.”
Officials with the CAP say that they want to work with the federal government on immediate actions to address this coming year, but that effort needs to be focused on a long term plan.
