California's 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
Farmer Larry Cox walks in a field of Bermudagrass with his dog, Brodie, at his farm Monday, Aug. 15, 2022, near Brawley, Calif. The Cox family has been farming in California's Imperial Valley for generations. 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.
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.
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. The irrigation district was historically entitled to more water than either Arizona or Nevada, though it's given some up over the years in exchange for payment from cities like San Diego and Los Angeles. In 2019, its board rejected a drought contingency plan signed by other water users in Arizona, Nevada and California.
Already, Cox said he's making decisions about whether to plant on all of his vegetable fields this fall because he's getting less water than normal under a new system adopted by the board.And it's not just farmers who rely on the Imperial Irrigation District's water. Runoff from the farms feeds the, a massive inland lake created in the early 1900s when the Colorado River flooded.
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