ALBUQUERQUE – Jimmy Beal is waiting to see if the Rio Grande will give him enough water this spring to plant a few of his 100 acres in oats.
The irrigation ditch that runs along the river in Albuquerque’s South Valley and feeds his crops was as dry as he’d ever seen it this winter.
As of Monday, Beal had received water to irrigate his fields just once.
Record-low snowpack levels in Colorado and Northern New Mexico and record-high temperatures in March have left the Rio Grande and other waterways in dire conditions. Forecasters in New Mexico warned last week of the potential for rivers to run at 10% to 40% of their normal levels.
Rainstorms over the last several days brought some welcome relief across the state but weren’t expected to make a dent in the worsening drought.
A proposed settlement in a long-standing conflict between New Mexico and Texas over water use in the Lower Rio Grande Basin calls for cuts on the New Mexico side. But after a dry winter promised dismal spring runoff into the river, some are warning the Middle Rio Grande – the roughly 120-mile stretch between Cochiti Lake and Elephant Butte Lake – might be in trouble, too.
If he gets some more water, Beal will plant a couple plots with oats in an attempt to recuperate some of his costs – or, at the very least, hold in the soil for a fruitful year in the future. He isn’t expecting to break even this year, regardless of whether he can plant the bare fields.
“We’re just not going to do it,” Beal said. “It’s not going to happen.”
The Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, which operates an irrigation system for thousands of farmers like Beal and six pueblos, warned Wednesday water deliveries to Corrales, a village north of Albuquerque, could be impacted without additional flows in the Rio Grande.
A week earlier, the water level had dropped so low a pump station needed to deliver irrigation flows into the Corrales Main Canal was at risk of being unable to function – but rainfall farther north, upstream of the Cochiti Dam, prevented that.
“Water users across the MRGCD have been advised that current river conditions are not consistent with a typical spring runoff, and water availability is becoming increasingly limited very early in the irrigation season,” the conservancy district said in a statement.
As early as February, the conservancy district was warning of a “challenging year for farmers,” with below-average snowpack, lower than normal spring runoff and limitations on storing native Rio Grande water.
In March, the district announced dwindling supplies.
Following a brief increase in flows in early March, the district said in a message to irrigators, “flows have since dropped to approximately 30% of those earlier levels, while demand for water continues to rise.”
It was still unclear “whether the high-elevation snowpack will generate a secondary runoff pulse,” the district said.
Even so, the district noted, upstream factors outside of its control could diminish flows that reach the Middle Rio Grande, including obligations to pueblos with “prior and paramount” water rights.
“Although hydrologic conditions and upstream activities are outside our control, our collective response is not,” Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District CEO and Chief Engineer Jason Casuga said in a statement. “This season will require efficient use, strong cooperation, and a shared sense of responsibility from all of us.”
Farmers were told to expect longer wait times between deliveries and uncertain irrigation opportunities in the future and were encouraged to “take water when it is available.”
They were also urged to “proceed with caution when making farming decisions, carefully considering one’s own water needs and those of others.”
“Our focus remains on maintaining equitable irrigation deliveries throughout the District, which becomes increasingly difficult as water supplies decline,” Casuga said in the statement. “Farmers should prepare for little to no water availability during summer and fall if seasonal rainfall does not return.”
Signs of climate change and the effects of a quarter-centurylong drought have become more conspicuous on the Rio Grande in recent years:
The river ran dry in Albuquerque in 2022 for the first time in decades.
In long stretches last year, water flows withered amid dry conditions.
Five of the state’s hottest summers on record occurred in the last eight years, according to a March presentation by the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer and the Interstate Stream Commission.
Forecasters predict another summer with above-average temperatures is coming.
About 70% of the state is now in severe or extreme drought conditions, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, and when it comes to precipitation, meteorologists each week tell the same story: Some relief from rain in the forecast but likely not enough to turn around a season of scant snowpack. They point to a March that saw record highs and was the driest in recorded history in many parts of the state.
Reservoirs in New Mexico along the Rio Grande and Rio Chama were at some of their lowest levels on record last month, according to the March presentation by state water officials, with Heron Lake at 7% of capacity, El Vado at 11% and Elephant Butte at 12%.
Hot weather will mean more water lost as it flows in the Rio Grande, although losses during conveyance are already at a high rate, said Norm Gaume, former Interstate Stream Commission director and president of New Mexico Water Advocates, an organization focused on the state’s water future and “successful adaptation to increasing water scarcity,” its website states.
If the tides don’t turn and low flows continue, the state’s groundwater also will be at risk.
The state will face difficult choices to address lower flows, Gaume said, and sacrifices may be necessary. But he believes the first step is assessing water resources through widespread metering and monitoring.
“Our straws into the aquifer and into the river are more than the resource could bear – considerably more, given that the resource is shrinking so much … with the loss of snowpack,” Gaume said. “That’s a permanent thing that’s not going to change. It’s going to get worse. We’ve lost our renewable water supply.”
Gaume believes the state is hurtling toward a violation in the next few years of the Rio Grande Compact, the decades-old water use deal between Colorado, New Mexico and Texas – this time in the Middle Rio Grande.
“Droughts end,” Gaume said. “This is not going to end.”
The consequences of violating the Rio Grande Compact, a 1938 agreement between states on sharing the river’s waters, can be severe.
In the Lower Rio Grande, it meant a lengthy, expensive lawsuit between Texas and New Mexico that finally reached a proposed settlement last year, after more than a decade of litigation. But disputes date back much longer.
Congress in 1905 authorized the Rio Grande Project, a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation water infrastructure initiative that includes the Elephant Butte and Caballo dams in Southern New Mexico and allocates water deliveries to the states of Colorado, Texas and New Mexico, as well as Mexico. The three states signed the Rio Grande Compact in 1938.
As surface water flows changed over the decades and groundwater pumping increased, disagreements over deliveries began to emerge.
In 2008, irrigation districts and the federal government negotiated an operating agreement for the Rio Grande Project. New Mexico sued over the agreement in 2011, however, claiming Texas was getting more than its fair share of water. Texas then sued New Mexico in 2013, alleging excessive groundwater pumping in Southern New Mexico was depleting deliveries to Texas.
About a decade later, the states came to an agreement to resolve the conflict, but the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the proposed settlement in 2024.
A new agreement reached last year would allow New Mexico to continue pumping groundwater, although the state will have to reduce its water depletions by 18,200 acre-feet per year over the next decade in the Lower Rio Grande – scaling back by about 5% to 7%, according to the Interstate Stream Commission – including by permanently retiring water rights. The state also will have to draft a water management plan for the Lower Rio Grande within the next two years.
The state is expected to pay farmers millions of dollars to fallow about 8,300 acres this year.
The new deal is now awaiting approval from the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Compact violations result in litigation,” Casuga said in a February interview. “That’s just what happens.”
Farming has changed more in the past 10 years than in the previous 50, Beal said.
“This field probably should have been replanted five years ago, six years ago,” he said, looking out over an alfalfa field on a recent day. “It needs it.”
He feels the Rio Grande Compact has placed undue burden on farmers like him in the Middle Rio Grande and left water managers at the whims of water supplies. Control over water has been lost as the state tries to meet obligations farther south with an ever-shrinking amount of water, he said.
“The only way that I know to get rid of both of those things, put you back in control of the water – and I hate to say this, but I haven’t had anybody rebut it – is to (temporarily) fallow the system,” Beal said.
He thinks there has to be a system-wide effort, from El Vado to south of Elephant Butte, to cut water use.
“They’re not going to like it,” Beal said. “But I don’t like it, either.”
