The Colorado River basin is entering a nightmare that responsible policy makers have warned about for more than a century. With a severe drought facing the entire basin and 40 million people and many farms depending on the river for water, prospects of a dried-up river below Lake Mead are real.
The lower basin states where most Colorado River water is used, are hoping to prop up Lake Powell by drawing down many reservoirs from southern Wyoming to southern Colorado and use the water to bring up the level of Lake Powell which is dangerously low. This would also make water available downstream. Of course, those upper basin reservoirs are also falling as the winter of 2026 has had little snow across the Rockies. Locals will need the water in those reservoirs.
John Wesley Powell, for whom Lake Powell is ironically named, warned the United States that there was not enough water for large scale agriculture or large urban areas in the arid West when he was writing and speaking back in the 1870s. He was dismissed at the time and now we are living in the world he tried to warn us about.
Powell was blown off by the very capitalists who have put our water supplies in crisis today. Forget the big cities and their swimming pools and bathtubs. The main users of the Colorado River are the farmers, particularly the livestock industry and its rapacious abuse of watersheds and its cattle feed farms. They were the ones who urged policy makers to dismiss Powell’s warnings because they wanted to make money raising cattle and growing various crops in the desert.
To really get the Colorado River in order and use its diminishing water supply in the best interest of the public, we must make some hard choices now. I suspect we, as a society, are incapable of making these choices and following through.
Where Does Most of the Water Go?
Watering crops in the Colorado River Basin uses 80% of the river’s water. Of that water, 70% is used to grow crops for cattle feed in the dry deserts of the Southwest. Large amounts of this water evaporates before it reaches roots.
This 70% does not account for water lost to cattle grazing on national forests and other public lands in the Rocky Mountains or to growing hay along headwater streams and tributaries. Public land ranching is extremely damaging to source watersheds and the larger water supply.
Cattle and their feed can be grown in the Midwest and the South where water and good soils are abundant. If people were serious about saving the Colorado River’s water for people and the environment, we would shut the livestock industry and its attendant farmers in the Southwest. How we do that is an open question.
Think Like a River
Start at the top. The Colorado River originates from National Forest lands in the southern Rocky Mountains. Snowmelt forms springs, creeks, rivers, and ultimately the Colorado River. The headwaters are on public land and almost all National Forest land is overgrazed by livestock put there by ranchers who use federal subsidies to graze their cattle. Cattle ruin streams and, without going into too much detail, they cause streams to dry up and no longer feed into the Colorado River. Researchers have found that more than 50% of the streams in the Southwest are degraded by cattle grazing to the point where they no longer produce water for downstream users. That’s about 3000 miles of streams.
If we were being serious about restoring the Colorado River, we would remove cattle from National Forest lands in all the upper watersheds. Doing so would have no measurable impact on the economy since less than 2% of the US beef supply comes from public land cattle and ranchers contribute only a miniscule amount to local economies. Removing cattle from public lands would also yield huge bonuses for wildlife, but that is another topic.
Removing cattle from public lands will be extremely difficult because of the political power of public land ranchers. They are firmly entrenched and exercise political power far out of proportion to their contribution to the economy.
As water leaves the public lands and enters high altitude valleys in the Rockies, it is often diverted to water hayfields for cattle. This practice uses water that never reaches the Colorado River. In places like Colorado’s Gunnison Valley, significant amounts of water go to watering cattle for dairies hundreds of miles away. Dairies in the desert demand significant amounts of water, whether they are in Arizona, California or New Mexico.
In southern Arizona and the Imperial Valley in southern California, vast acreages are sown in alfalfa, a thirsty crop used exclusively to feed cattle. The Imperial Valley is a dry desert where Colorado River water arrives by canal, the exclusive water supply. Fifty percent of the 500,000 acres of the irrigated Imperial Valley is planted in alfalfa. This is a vast waste of water given that alfalfa can be grown without irrigation in the Midwest.
In southern Arizona, farmers mine groundwater to water alfalfa, some of which is shipped to Saudi Arabia to feed dairy cattle there. Ground water and surface water are interconnected and ground water replenishes only over many generations in dry deserts.
Low water demand crops for direct human consumption could replace alfalfa in the Southwest deserts or the land could be fallowed. Doing so would free up very significant amounts of water for people and the environment. The political power of farmers and the fact that Imperial Valley farmers have senior water rights on the Colorado River will make doing this tough. But it must be done if people are serious about restoring the Colorado River.
Here are the necessary steps:
– Remove all cattle from National Forests and Bureau of Land Management lands in the Colorado River watershed in Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and southern Utah. Within a couple of decades water flow from these lands will significantly increase as riparian areas recover and start to produce water again.
– Buy out the water rights for ranchers and farmers growing hay and alfalfa in these regions. Allow rivers and streams to flow with minimal diversions. Restore beaver in streams to replenish aquifers and increase streamflows.
– Shut down alfalfa production in desert agriculture areas of Arizona and Southern California and either fallow this land or convert it to lower water demand crops to support the farming economy. Use regulation or buyouts with compensations.
Again, livestock are using 70% of the Colorado River’s water. Cattle can be grown elsewhere in the US. By removing this industry from the Southwest, huge amounts of water would be available in the Colorado River, especially after the streams in the headwaters recover from cattle damage and begin to flow again.
I don’t expect this to happen, but we need to understand that restoring flows in the Colorado River will require exactly these steps to be taken very soon. We will see the cattle industry deny they use much water and they will say jobs and profits require that they do. Ranchers will use their political power to protect their decimation of upper watersheds. They will refuse to acknowledge the damage they do and the federal agencies that enable them will look the other way.
Are we serious about providing water to the 40 million people who depend on the Colorado River in the US? Are we, or do we just want to do easy things and hope it all works out?
Tom Ribe
