The Water Tap: Our thirst for beef may be harming fish, new research finds
Joan Meiners
As part of this new water series, each Friday (Saturday in print) we will be addressing a new topic that is relevant to water security in Iron and Washington counties. Check back each week for updates on ongoing water issues, interviews with experts, and explorations of how we can ensure a better water future for the growing communities in southwestern Utah.
The Colorado River has less water than it once did. It’s a problem for the states that have divvied up its dwindling supply, for the recreation users whose boats skim its sandy bottom and for the thirsty Cottonwood trees that line its banks.
Now, new research has found that falling river levels are also a problem for hundreds of species of Western fish and that the fault may lie with the beef industry.
“We didn't set out to investigate the water requirements of cattle feed crops specifically,” said Brian Richter, a professor at the University of Virginia and the lead author on the study just published in Nature Sustainability. “We really started with wanting to gain a better understanding of the extent to which rivers and streams across the United States are being depleted or being dried up because of human uses.”
What they found was that crop irrigation, specifically for cattle feed crops like alfalfa, grass hay and corn silage, is the single largest consumptive user of water at both national and regional scales. Growing these crops for cows accounts for 23% of all water use nationally, 32% in the western United States and 55% in the Colorado River basin.
“We were able to break down water use to a finer level of definition than we had seen in previous research by others,” said Richter. “And that included being able to see how much water was going to each individual crop, you know, to cotton, to corn, to sugar beets, to alfalfa.”
These figures align with local estimates from the Central Iron County Water Conservancy District, which show that agricultural irrigation accounts for up to 75% of water depletion in Cedar Valley, or about 22,000 acre feet annually. One acre foot of water is the amount that would be required to fill an area about the size of a football field to a depth of one foot.
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A 2017 Census of Agriculture County fact sheet from the United States Department of Agriculture showed that alfalfa and other cattle feed made up a majority of Iron County crops, with forage crops listed as occupying nearly 60,000 acres of the county’s irrigated land.
Allocating 55% of water across the Colorado River basin to feeding cattle is a choice that has consequences for all manner of plants and animals. In the recent study, Richter’s group focused on the impacts to freshwater fish. The researchers estimated that 60 different fish species in the Western U.S. are at increased risk of local extinction due to declining river levels, with 53 of those species’ imperilment directly tied to the irrigation of cattle-feed crops.
Not only is this loss of fish biodiversity a concern for fishermen and the overall health of river ecosystems, but the decline of sensitive species due to over-consumption of water ends up costing big in species recovery efforts. Actions to recover habitat and restore health to fish species listed as part of the Endangered Species Act now tip the scale at more than $800 million per year.
Richter anticipates that, with reduced rainfall, lesser snowpack and increased evaporation due to rising temperatures, this situation will only worsen with time unless major changes are made to the way we irrigate crops.
“The Colorado river system is really in a pretty dangerous situation right now,” said Richter. “The level of water consumption relative to the amount of water that flows through that river system every year, it's gotten out of balance. We're over-consuming the water in the Colorado River system by 15 to 20%. And that situation is going to get worse in the coming decades because the climate is warming.”
When the river level drops, water quality suffers. Chemicals and human-introduced nutrients in the water become more concentrated, which creates hazardous conditions for fish and other aquatic species. This includes iconic Colorado River species like the Colorado Pike Minnow, the Razorback Sucker and the Humpback Chub.
“The fact that we could actually push these species to the brink of extinction is very disturbing,” Richter said. “It's very unsettling to me. These fish species were in the Colorado River system before the Grand Canyon started.”
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The answer, the researchers suggest, lies in paying farmers to rotate cropland out of production so that less of their acreage is being irrigated at any one time. Fallowing a portion of a farmer’s fields each year has the potential to save huge volumes of water and can benefit farmers too, says Richter.
“There seem to be some pathways forward,” Richter said, “specifically in the western U.S. where farmers of those cattle feed crops are being incentivized financially to use less water by resting some portion of their field on a rotational basis. Then they're compensated for the saved or conserved water. When we looked at some of those case studies in detail, we saw that, well, the farmers actually can end up coming out better.”
Indeed, the 2017 Recommended State Water Strategy for Utah includes a section titled “Recommendations based on public input” that suggests the state: “Explore alternative agriculture-to-municipal water transfer methods … such as … long-term rotational fallowing.” (Section was shortened for clarity.)
It should be noted, though, that some of the water used in irrigation is not of sufficient quality to convert to other uses. There is, therefore, a limit on the amount of potable water savings that can be accomplished by reducing irrigated land. That topic will be explored further in a future “The Water Tap” story.
The 2017 report goes on to acknowledge that “Experience has proven that programs which compensate landowners for private conservation activities … can be less expensive and more effective than purely governmental activities.”
In 2020, however, the state of Utah does not seem to have any such programs in place.
James Greer, the Deputy State Engineer for the Utah Division of Water Rights said in an email that the UDWR is “not opposed to such projects,” but that currently there aren’t any active programs in Iron or Washington counties to incentivize fallowing fields to save water.
R.J. Spencer, Conservation Director for the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food also confirmed that he was not aware of any active programs in the state of Utah to rotate fields out of use to save water.
"There are no state programs and the federal government is doing away with them," said Spencer.
Even though the agricultural water in southern Utah does not come directly from the Colorado River (yet, in the case of Washington County with the proposed Lake Powell Pipeline), the hazards Richter and colleagues found to fish and other aquatic species due to water use for cattle feed crops are likely to hold true in regional watersheds.
“These iconic Western river landscapes can really be damaged by taking too much water out because it perpetuates a very low water table,” Richter said. “We see a lot of areas where cottonwood trees are no longer sprouting up and reproducing because the water in the creek or in the stream has been dried up. We see wetlands that are drying up because the water table has dropped too low.”
Joan Meiners is an Environment Reporter for The Spectrum & Daily News through the Report for America initiative by The GroundTruth Project. Follow her on Twitter at @beecycles or email her at jmeiners@thespectrum.com.