In Nevada, alfalfa farmers are being paid to retire their water rights

EUREKA, Nev. — Denise Moyle was a no. Her sister Dusty was a no. Their father was against the idea, too.

None of them wanted a part of Nevada’s first-ever proposal to buy farmers’ water rights in parts of the state where people are draining the aquifers. Nevada officials expected it would draw skepticism. In a state known for being the driest in the nation, selling your water has historically meant quitting agriculture. It meant letting your land go dry, inviting erosion, dust storms and invasive weeds. It meant being a bad neighbor.

“You start from a gut reaction: ‘No, I’m not selling my water,’” said Denise, 47. Raised with her two sisters on her parents’ alfalfa farm in central Nevada’s remote Diamond Valley, she grew up understanding that water was crucial. “We’ve been programmed our whole lives that the water is the only value the land has,” she said.

But Deanne Moyle-Hicks, the eldest Moyle daughter, thought differently.

“Step back and look at it from a business perspective,” she told Denise. “What would you do with the land if you couldn’t farm it?”

As the only state in the Great Basin that doesn’t use Colorado River water for agriculture, Nevada’s farmers rely on groundwater wells. Yet many of the state’s aquifers are shrinking, threatening its cattle ranches and its cash crop, alfalfa hay, which helps feed California’s dairy cows. Groundwater is vanishing all over the country — the result of decades of excessive use and climate-change-fueled drought. In some states facing severe groundwater decline, officials are beginning to penalize over-pumping or ordering farmers to stop irrigating because conservation alone won’t be enough.

Nevada’s approach is more carrot than stick. With $25 million in federal pandemic aid, state officials decided to run a one-time test of whether farmers would be interested in selling all or a portion of their legal rights to draw groundwater. They focused on Nevada’s most depleted basins, where over-pumping is emptying rivers and threatening future crops.

By this spring, they had their answer: There were more applicants than money to pay them. Farmers and ranchers offered to sell $65.5 million worth of water rights, more than 2½ times the available funding.

“We have been blown away by the level of engagement and interest,” said Peter Stanton, executive director of the Walker Basin Conservancy, a nonprofit that works to reverse the decades-long collapse of Walker Lake, located southeast of Carson City. The Northern Paiute people call it Agai Pah, which means “trout lake.” But decades of farms and ranches gulping water from the lake’s headwaters have left it depleted, with saline levels too high to support fish.

The conservancy got $4 million from the state to buy water rights from willing sellers, Stanton said, and it had nine times that level of interest. In the Walker Basin alone, multiple people applied to sell more than $4 million worth of groundwater rights.

“People want to participate in this,” Stanton said.

Among those drawn to the state’s offer were Deanne and Denise Moyle.

Last month, the sisters stood on the edge of one of their fields and pointed out the wells they planned to sell. Together, they own a portion of their family’s farm, which has expanded from the 320 acres their father bought in the 1970s to roughly 5,000 acres today. Deanne’s deaf chihuahua, Penny, set out and appeared to vanish amid a green oasis of alfalfa that put the distant arid mountains in stark relief. Across the valley, farmers were running their pivot irrigation systems all day and night, pumping millions of gallons of water out of the ground.

By giving up even a fraction of their water rights, the sisters were placing a big bet on the future, and on themselves.

“Will it hurt in the long run?” Denise said. “It’s hard to predict.”

Chasing the water table

Nevada’s groundwater crisis began more than four decades ago, when state officials overestimated the size of the state’s aquifers and gave farmers rights to water that didn’t exist. When people ask Jeff Fontaine, the executive director of the Central Nevada Regional Water Authority, why the state should spend taxpayer dollars to buy out water rights, he starts the story here.

“We knew a lot of people moved to Nevada to farm, but we didn’t really think that many people would be successful or use their full allocations,” Fontaine said. “They didn’t have the scientific understanding we do today.”

Today, Nevada is estimated to have about 2 million acre-feet of groundwater — and it has given water users the right to pump 3.5 million. One in 5 of its groundwater basins are being pumped faster than they can be replenished by precipitation. A study by the Nature Conservancy of over 6,500 Nevada wells found that 39 percent have significantly declining groundwater level trends, a sign of widespread overuse.

In Diamond Valley, where the Moyles live, the situation became so dire — the aquifer is over-pumped by more than 160 percent — that wells dried up and farmers had to drill deeper, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to chase the water. In 2015, the state engineer ordered water users to come up with a plan to collectively reduce their consumption or face cuts according to the seniority of their rights. A majority agreed to spread the pain by voluntarily lowering their water use over the next 30 years to stabilize the aquifer.

The high cost of drilling deeper wells, combined with the pressure to conserve and the ever-present threat of cuts is why, when the state announced its cash-for-water offer, most of the demand came from Diamond Valley.

“Folks here see the writing on the wall,” said Jake Tibbitts, natural resources manager for Eureka County, which encompasses Diamond Valley. “We know there’s no math equation that will work unless some lands come out of production.”

Tibbitts said many applicants plan to continue farming. They didn’t put all of their water up for sale, choosing instead to hold back their most senior rights or their most productive wells. Those farmers have options: They can fallow some fields, turn them into dryland pasture for cows, horses and sheep, or experiment with crops that thrive on less water. Those planning to sell most of their holdings are typically older, Tibbitts said, without children or grandchildren who want to take over the family farm.

Solar developers are also sniffing around the valley, offering to lease farmland in anticipation of major transmission lines being built some day.

Billy Norton, 64, said the state’s offer would equal as much as nine years’ worth of savings — a deal too good for someone nearing retirement to let pass. He is holding back enough water to graze cows on his property; the rest of his water rights will be permanently retired.

“Was I totally excited about it? No. And even today I’m not. But I do feel it’s the right decision,” Norton said. “It’s a wonder that we’ve been able to go this long with over-pumping like we have in this valley.”

Russell Conley, a farmer in the valley, said the state’s offer was attractive to his parents, who wanted to devote more of their attention to their cow-calf operation. But while they are selling, Conley said he is not ready to give up his water rights.

“I still like doing this. This is still my passion,” he said, adding that he is banking water and fallowing land to prepare for a future in which he needs to draw on those reserves. If all goes according to plan, he said, he should be able to keep growing alfalfa in the high desert for the next 25 years.

Preserving the water underground

It’s not just Nevada trying to buy back groundwater rights to correct years of unchecked pumping. Similar strategies have been attempted in Kansas and are being used in Colorado, where residential development, farming and reduced rainfall are straining groundwater supplies.

Two years ago, Colorado lawmakers set aside $60 million to retire groundwater wells used to irrigate farmland in the San Luis Valley, in the south-central part of the state, and the Republican River basin, near the eastern border with Kansas. But growers there have been less interested in the program than their counterparts in Nevada. After offering to pay water users $3,000 per acre-foot to permanently retire their irrigation wells, officials in the San Luis Valley agreed to compensate them for partial reductions in pumping.

Dan Waldvogle, former director of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, said few Colorado farmers who count on groundwater are interested in cashing out, shutting off their pumps and trying to farm by relying on rainfall alone.

“Agriculture is such a huge driving economic force that supports everything from Main Street to schools to all of the ag support businesses,” he said. “If you just do full dry-up, it has really big impacts on the community.”

As aquifers dry up and droughts intensify, the nonprofit Colorado Open Lands is trying to use conservation easements to preserve water and help families facing difficult decisions about whether to continue farming. Known primarily as a route to land preservation, conservation easements are a legal mechanism that allows families to stay on their land, lower their taxes and receive compensation for reducing their groundwater use — or stopping pumping entirely.

The group has completed one agreement, paying a farmer to stop irrigating his 1,800-acre farm in the San Luis Valley. Sally Wier, a conservation project manager for Colorado Open Lands, said the idea is that by reducing consumption voluntarily, farmers can prevent painful cuts that might lead them to abandon rural communities. According to supporters, the U.S. Agriculture Department is considering experimenting with this approach for farmers who tap the dwindling Ogallala Aquifer, which runs through eight Plains states. A USDA spokesman declined to comment.

But groundwater easements haven’t soared in popularity, Wier said, because of disagreements over payment.

“We don’t have a playbook right now in the West that says this is the value of water,” Wier said.

As Nevada tries to pull back on excessive groundwater use, farmers who have agreed to sell their water rights are waiting for the deals to close later this year. Then they have to decide what to do with their land — and what to do with the money.

“We could pay down some debt, buy some equipment, maybe buy another business,” Denise Moyle mused several months ago. She didn’t ponder the question long — in June, her family purchased a feed store in Reno, giving them more control over how their products are sold and distributed. They would fallow some of their land, but most of it would stay in alfalfa.

When she imagines the future of Diamond Valley, Denise said she pictures land still covered in green crop circles. Between the local farmers’ hard-won plan to reduce pumping and the state’s buyback offer, she was confident the next generation of her family could succeed at farming.

But it’s not the valley of today she’s envisioning. It’s the land of 50 years ago, when her father arrived.

“There were about half as many farms as there are now. There were still people taking brush out,” she said. To protect the aquifer, and allow those who want to farm to continue, “that’s about where we’ll need to get,” she said.

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In Nevada, alfalfa farmers are being paid to retire their water rights

Chasing the water table

Preserving the water underground