Special Reports

Farms, tribes to quench our thirst

Agriculture will wither and tribal lands will stay dry so cities can flourish. At least, that's what Arizona's water policies assume through the next century. Few farmers will fight the change. Their share of water flowing into the state via the concrete river known as the Central Arizona Project will dwindle over time, and they stand to score hefty profits from land sales. Less certain is whether the state's tribes, many of which only recently have won legal rights to the water that passes through their land, will choose to lease their water - something growing cities are counting on - or use it to transform their lands back into greenbelts and breadbaskets. The loss of non-Indian croplands - mostly corn, lettuce, cotton and hay - will be a hit to the state's historic identity and cultural diversity, farmers say. And if the same thing happens across the rest of the West - which produces about a quarter of the country's agricultural products including food, cotton, cattle and dairy products - then "pretty soon we won't produce enough to support the population and we'll have to rely on imports," says Herb Guenther, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, "which puts us in the same situation we're in with petroleum." Tribes' water decisions will be just as important to Arizona's future. If tribes choose to lease their allotment, they could gain tremendous clout in the state, becoming water brokers to an ever-growing and ever-thirsty West. But if they choose to use their water themselves - and many, including the Tohono O'odham, are considering doing just that - Arizona's cities would lose a key source of the water they need to keep growing. For Tucson, tribal supplies represent up to 15 percent of the city's projected water use after 2050. Without tribal water, the state could look to water banks - where CAP users have been injecting water underground - or divert even more water from farms to cities. The city won't run dry anytime soon. In the short term, we'll use more mineral-rich Colorado River water, depending on a special treatment plant to improve the water's taste and make it less likely to damage appliances. Another envisioned plant, to make wastewater drinkable, could carry us through the next 50 years or so. Beyond that, the state has assumed cities would slowly take water from farmers and lease it from tribes. But if that's not enough, prices - already expected to rise to pay for the high-tech treatment plants - could soar as demand outstrips supply. And the state could be forced to limit the growth that has been Arizona's lifeblood for more than 50 years. The wild card

For more than a century, non-Indian water users have been slurping up water that didn't belong to them, by tapping into water supplies before the West's most senior water rights - those promised to reservations - were recognized and quantified. "Virtually anyone with water rights, whether upstream or downstream, even on the remotest tributary, is potentially in competition with any Indian reservation on the system," write the local authors of a new book, "Negotiating Tribal Water Rights: Fulfilling Promises in the American West." Now, because of settlements trickling through the courts and Congress, Western Indian tribes are taking it back. Since 1990, the state has settled water rights claims with eight tribes, more than any other state. Arizona has watched more than a million annual acre-feet of water flow to the tribes through the settlements - about one-seventh of the state's total annual water use. But there's still a long way to go: 21 tribes live on about 20 million acres in Arizona, about a third of the state's land base. Most of their water claims still are unresolved. Policy-makers say it's worth it to try. Only after the claims are settled will tribes know how much they can use, and growing cities will then know where to turn when supplies get pinched. Built into many of the settlements is a provision that allows tribes to lease their water, particularly the portion that comes from the Central Arizona Project, to other users in the state. The Central Arizona Project, a 336-mile-long intrastate canal, shunts water from Lake Havasu along the Colorado River to its end just south of Tucson - and to all the agricultural districts, businesses and cities that are customers along the way. Long-range water plans for some cities, including Tucson, count on access to Indian water. Some tribes - including the Ak-Chin, Fort McDowell and Salt River Pima-Maricopa communities - already have entered into water leases with communities in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Water earmarked for the tribes is being delivered by the Central Arizona Project to the cities, and will be for the duration of renewable agreements lasting up to 99 years. Other tribes, like the Navajo and the Tohono O'odham, have been slower to embrace water deals. Some have plans for their water. But for others, it's about trust. Stanley Pollack has represented the Navajo Nation for 20 years in water disputes so complex they haven't yet been settled. He worries that when it comes to the potential for water leases, his clients are "being sold a bill of goods." "Once you start leasing the water, you'd better be prepared to lose it," he says. "Non-Indian communities are always going to have more political power than the tribes have. You can say all you want that the lease is limited. What happens in 99 years? The people with more political power are going to get your water. It's just as simple as that. Water is about money, and water is about politics." Besides, Pollack says he's working with a tribe that's fighting for water it needs itself. "We have a population here where half the people are hauling water," he says. Hauling water is rarer on the Tohono O'odham Nation, but Tribal Chairwoman Vivian Juan-Saunders says the tribe has been unable to plan for growth without guaranteed water supplies. "We want to build homes," she says. "Districts want to pursue economic development, and it's impossible without basic infrastructure." The Arizona Water Settlements Act, signed into law by the president late last year, has cleared the way. It stands out among the state's other tribal water settlements because it wasn't resolved in the courts - Sens. Jon Kyl and John McCain pushed it through Congress instead. The act provides water to the tribe along with $24 million for projects to help the tribe make use of it. Once the tribe determines the best places to sink wells and locate buildings, each district will have a better idea of which lands are prime for development, Juan-Saunders says. "There's a need for hotels on the reservation, housing is another thing … and retail opportunities," she says. "We have individuals who approach the nation with proposals." Until the tribe knows how much water it needs, it's impossible to say whether any of the water it earned in the recent settlement can help solve other communities' water demands. "Certainly there's a possibility," says Juan-Saunders, "but at this point we're looking at using our allocation internally." Into the future

Cheap land and a seeming abundance of groundwater helped Herb Kai's parents turn broad and varied investments in 1938 into an agricultural legacy for their children. Today, Kai manages the family's cotton and pecan farms in Red Rock, Marana and Oro Valley, and serves as Marana's interim mayor. He wants his son Mike, who graduated from Yale this year, to stay in the family business, too - but Mike will be growing cities, not crops. His job will be to sell off the family farms. "Hopefully we'll make him a real estate developer one of these days," says the elder Kai of his son, who's currently working for an online company and surfing. Herb Kai brims with affection for his beach-loving, mischievous son. But he shows no nostalgia when he talks about the future: "I think it's just being able to change with the times." For now, agriculture still uses the majority of the state's water supply - about 74 percent. But that number has been steadily falling. Farming accounted for 80 percent of the state's water use in 2000 and 97 percent in 1950, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The decline is no surprise. The Central Arizona Project offers its cheapest rate to farmers - they pay only the cost of pumping water to their locales, which comes out to about $40 an acre-foot. That's less than half what a city pays for CAP water, before treatment costs. But there's a hitch. To get those cheap rates, a farmer must sign away his rights over time. It's assumed that, as tribes and cities claim more CAP water, there will be less available for non-Indian agriculture. So the farmers' contracts have built-in reductions, with most expected to zero out by 2030. That's true for about 390,000 acres, or 97 percent, of the state's agricultural land irrigated by the canal. Farming in Arizona is a $6.6 billion a year business "that's not just going to go away," says Katie Decker, a spokeswoman for the Arizona Department of Agriculture. But the slow erosion of farms already is obvious at the borders of our cities. Kai figures his Marana acreage is ripe for sale, but it'll be another 20 years before his farm at Red Rock, about 30 miles north of Tucson, gets swallowed in the city's amoeba-like advance toward Phoenix. Warren "Toops" Culbertson, chief executive officer of the Farmers Water Co. in Green Valley and part owner of the Farmer's Investment Co. that operates Green Valley Pecans, says his operation has already started selling. "Just today I drove through an area where the pecan trees are being cut down and moved out for houses," he says. Culbertson arrived in 1949, just before Arizona agriculture hit its peak - and started its decline. "Probably 50 percent of the agriculture that was here 50 years ago is gone," he says. Reclaiming the past

As Arizona's non-Indian farming makes way for growing cities, some believe tribal agriculture will hold out - or even replace it. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's most recent census, published in 2002, put tribal croplands at 122,106 acres of 1.26 million acres across the state - just under 10 percent. That number may be low because tribes don't always report all their holdings - as a general rule, farmers consider the information proprietary. But now that they're getting water, many tribes want to expand crop production. The Gila River Indian Community near Phoenix has announced plans to expand its farming operations to 146,000 acres - a tenfold increase over a decade ago. Those plans got a boost late last year with the passage of the Arizona Water Rights Settlement Act, which awarded the tribe 300,000 acre-feet of CAP water plus a roughly equal amount from groundwater and other surface supplies. Many of the tribal settlements give Indians a competitive edge because they don't have to pay for their CAP water. "It puts a typical farm in Arizona at a disadvantage," says Herb Kai. "They can produce feed at its market value, whereas I have to look and say, 'How does that make economic sense to me?'" The future of Tohono O'odham farming also got a boost from the settlement. The newly won water is split between two tribal farming districts south of Tucson: the Shuk Toak, where the tribe operates some of its farms, and the San Xavier Co-operative Association, which includes about 700 Tohono O'odham members. Agriculture at the co-op has been kept to a minimum since the 1970s because the groundwater was sucked below the wellheads by a thirsty Tucson. Now that water is flowing to the farms again, the co-op is beginning to grow. Over the next several years, 300 acres of organic alfalfa, oats, a bermuda grass mix and traditional and nontraditional food crops will expand to 1,000, says Renee Reddog, the co-op's farm administrator. Within a decade Reddog expects the co-op will boast up to 2,500 acres of crops, including traditional foods like squash and tepary beans. For now, the majority of the co-op's goods are sold on the reservation, to a health-conscious Green Valley community and at farmers' markets in Tucson. Tribal members also are gobbling them up, particularly on feast days. "Everybody's starting to go to a traditional Thanksgiving meal now," she says. Reddog is optimistic local appetites will grow to support San Xavier's planned expansion - even as nontribal agriculture dries up. "We will probably be the only green belt in the city of Tucson," she says. Most water experts agree that type of projection - based on the year 2050 and beyond - is too distant to see clearly. But Arizona is smart to grapple with it now, says Sharon Megdal, a water economist and the associate director of the University of Arizona Water Resources Research Center. Every water arrangement, she says, will have to be re-evaluated over time, whether it's because of drought's effects on groundwater supplies, the political realities of sharing supplies or emerging science that opens - or restricts - new technologies like wastewater recycling. But Arizona "is planning for 100 years," she says, "which is a lot more than other areas are doing."