Stressed Colorado River keeps California desert farms alive

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — When Don Cox was looking for a reliable place to build a family farm in the 1950s, he settled on California’s Imperial Valley.

The desert region had high priority water rights, meaning its access to water was hard for anyone to take away.

“He had it on his mind that water rights were very, very important,” said his grandson, Thomas Cox, who now farms in the Valley.

He was right. Today the Imperial Valley, which provides many of the nation’s winter vegetables and cattle feed, has one of the strongest grips on water from the Colorado River, a critical but over-tapped supply for farms and cities across the West. In times of shortage, Arizona and Nevada must cut first.

But even California, the nation’s most populous state with 39 million people, may be forced to give something up in the coming years as hotter and drier weather causes the river’s main reservoirs to fall to dangerously low levels. If the river were to become unusable, Southern California would lose a third of its water supply and vast swaths of farmland in the state’s southeastern desert would go unplanted.

“Without it, the Imperial Valley shuts down,” said JB Hamby, a board member for the Imperial Irrigation District, which holds rights to the largest share of Colorado River water.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part of a collaborative series on the Colorado River as the 100th anniversary of the historic Colorado River Compact approaches. The Associated Press, The Colorado Sun, The Albuquerque Journal, The Salt Lake Tribune, The Arizona Daily Star and The Nevada Independent are working together to explore the pressures on the river in 2022.

A century ago, California and six other states — Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — created a compact that split the water into two basins and set rules for how much water each would get. A series of deals, laws and court cases that followed led California to get the most water and made it the last to lose in times of shortage.

Fear and frustration over California’s use of the river has driven the compact since its early days. In western water law, the first person who taps the source gets the highest right, and California cities and farmers have relied on the river for more than a century.

Other western states worried California would lay claim to all the river’s water before their own populations grew. The compact and the series of deals that followed attempted to find a balance to…