Sunday, November 24, 2013

Healthy Watersheds - A Rancher’s Perspective

Note:  This column is based on a presentation Wilmeth gave to the New Mexico Water Conference last Thursday.

A Rancher’s Perspective
Healthy Watersheds
Layered Investments
By Stephen L. Wilmeth


             Good afternoon … thank you, Madame Moderator, agenda participants, New Mexico leadership present and invited guests. It is distinct honor for this rancher to be included in the matter of New Mexico water management and the realities of our water resources. I suspect it might have been awhile since a rancher was in the midst of this esteemed group of water experts. I appreciate your invitation and it is my intention to offer a glimpse of our water resources from a very fundamental position. That will come from my shadow across the lands of which I have had the privilege of stewardship.
            Ranching colleague, Don Thompson once told me that “there is not a land anywhere that expects less and gives more than New Mexico”. His words ring truer each and every year. New Mexico, last among all states as a percentage of actual surface water to total area, it is a land inhabited by a citizenry that can be as inventive and creative as anybody in the entire world.
            Much of my professional career was spent in California’s San Joaquin Valley. I formed Met West Agribusiness with Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and that management company farmed Met Life investment properties south from Sacramento south to Kern County and the foot of the Tehachapis. Of the nearly 13,000 acres of permanent crops we farmed, we dealt with water that ranged in charges from $18.50 per acre foot for shallow lift costs to just under $300 per acre foot for emergency aqueduct water. Certainly, we preferred the former over the latter, but we made both extremes work. Free and independent men have an amazing capacity to overcome constraints.
            New Mexico has no magic Lake Shasta nor does it have the amazing watershed of the Sierra Nevada, but we do have our versions. We must consider ourselves lucky to have what we have.
            The players
            Many times I was asked by California colleagues where the best farmers in the world exist. My response was … West Texas cotton farmers. My rationale was that, in order to be successful in West Texas, a farmer had to be better than good. Pumped water, weather risks, and the nature of the commodity they farmed forced them to be darned good or they were … failed managers.
            If I was asked that same question today, my answer might be different. My answer would be best managers are those farmers who are successful growing any federal program crop. My whole view has changed dramatically since I have returned home to New Mexico and now deal with various farm programs. As a beef producer, I don’t have direct subsidies, but I do have federal program involvement with drought and cost share investment programs. I don’t like them.
Having dealt with commodities that don’t have federal regulatory demands, I think farmers who have to deal with federal programs put themselves at great risk. They become dependent on a system and they become less nimble in dealing with all fluctuations not the least of which is market. They lose the ability to maintain what I refer to as stepwise or layered investments.
            I’ll submit to you those leaders who conceptualized and carried out the construction of Elephant Butte would understand my position. Who in 1898, could possibly envision the extent of wonders of what impounded and managed distribution of that project would do to the Hatch and Mesilla Valleys? Who could have envisioned the benefit to this state? One reality of the continuing benefit would be the actual footprint of Las Cruces and all other towns under the Butte. Without Elephant Butte, annual flooding would disallow a greater proportion of the current growth patterns of those towns.
            Now, we gather in this and similar forums to discuss matters of future water management. Most of the discussion centers around conservation rather than resource enhancement. Conservation in itself is not bad. In fact, it is a great motivator as long as the steward is free to act upon constraints as they apply to him personally. Examples are widespread. The technology of nut and grape mechanical harvesting are examples of how free and independent men, faced with blistering constraints, figured out revolutionary methods to dispense with overwhelming labor constraints.
            Drip irrigation is a better example for today’s discussion. When I first visited Howard Wertz and Scott Tollefson in Arizona in 1981 and observed what the were doing in underground dripped cotton I knew where the future of western farming, in general, was going to move.
The same impact of benefits from irrigation technologies such as that of the Israeli Netafim altered my personal awareness and corporate investment strategies. We immersed ourselves … first with more sophistication and higher costs and then with less sophistication and learned practicality. We adapted high levels of sophistication with practical farmer experience to form a more perfect operational and economic union. When our property portfolio was sold at the turn of the century as the consistently fifth largest fruit company in America, we were farming nearly 10,000 acres of drip irrigated permanent crops. The rest was still dedicated to flood irrigation, but, that, too, would have been converted in a short time horizon.
            But, ultimately without resource enhancement, conservation alone, whether it is tied to crop programs or water sources, is a one way ticket to past glory. Congress agreed with that over a half century ago. In 1955, a Senate Select Committee on Water Resources predicted, without importations, the West would be out of water by 1980. The efficiency of agriculture has done a much better job than anybody gives credit, but it is time to secure next generation water supply. That is where New Mexico, generally, finds itself. 
It is time to enhance the resource base.
            Enhancing the resource base … the tale of two alternatives
            Before I return to my beef operation, I’ll submit two concepts of resource enhancement of merit that must be pursued in southern New Mexico. The first is water banking. It works and it works exceedingly well where free and independent men are allowed to act.
To those of you who are familiar with Kern County’s Lost Hills or the Arvin Edison Irrigation District, you might have some knowledge of the significance of water banking. How and where the water comes from is certainly a complicated matter, won’t be debated herein today, but it must be set in motion and accomplished unless leadership is content to remain at the helm of a declining system. That has no place in a society that is truly intent on maintaining and enhancing generation to generation productivity.
            Subterranean water banking is critical. It is environmentally friendly, and it is relatively inexpensive compared to surface banking and permitting.
            Alternative number one … Water Banking! We must do it and we must pursue it with gusto.
            The second alternative in my world and on the minds of my colleagues and fellow board members of the Dona Ana Soil and Water Conservation District is something out of the ordinary. Many of you have heard that Dona Ana County is the future site of the largest inland port in the world. That is no longer a dream. It is a reality under construction. The Port of Santa Teresa is being built!
            With that port is a rail right-of-way and future link from the Port of Guaymus on the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. Our concept is to marry the right-of-way across northern Mexico to the Port of Santa Teresa with a pipeline connection, not to a temporal source of future water, but to an ocean of permanent water. One of our board members, John Smith, did a white paper for Harry Reid when Commander Smith was the executive director of the Range Commanders Council at White Sands Missile Range. The thrust of the proposal took similar Sea of Cortez water from Mexico, distilled it through a series of parallel nuclear driven desalinization plants at two locations across the international boundary, and pumped it north.  That water, estimated to equate to 600 million gallons per day would ultimately serve as the primary source of potable water for the Las Vegas metropolitan area.
            Our concept proposes to pump ocean water into Dona Ana County within the established port right-of-way and use the 300º F heat source at a depth of 12,000’ under every square foot of Dona Ana County to provide the safe heat source for the desalinization process. The byproduct, salt, would be stored in the saline water deposits at similar depths. The water, too expensive for agricultural use, would become a primary future water source for potable water demand in the Rio Grande corridor.
            Can’t do it, you grouse? Such a reminder should only be posed to the conceptual pioneers of Elephant Butte in 1895 or visionary leaders who conceptualized the Owens Valley, Central Valley Project, or the Central Arizona Project 35 years before their inception. Free and independent men can do truly amazing and productive things … if they are allowed to act.
            Meanwhile, back at the ranch
            As a rancher, I am within the ranks of an endangered societal species that, collectively, is a most important ally to water conservation in New Mexico’s future. I’ll tell you why.
            In an arid setting and regardless of where it is, the most important conservation action of stewards is to ‘minimize runoff and to maximize retention’ of the moisture that falls on the landscape. Nobody is more important to that task than the ranching community of this state. And, yet, nobody is more assailed, minimized, and misunderstood than this segment of our citizenry. I am not seeking sympathy. I don’t want sympathy. I simply want leadership to recognize the vulnerability our lands are placed if stewards of lands, engaged stewards tied to these lands with the risk of financial failure, are displaced.
            On the screen is a picture of one of my pastures post monsoonal 2013. That pasture had a monsoonal accumulation of 1.75” in 2011 and a lessened accumulation of 1.25” in 2012. In 2013, it got about 7.5”. The picture story paints the case of underlying system health that rebounded when adequate rainfall again fell on this land. Seventy percent of this ranch is now cattle free during the monsoons. I drive a pickup with 350,000 miles and I work in pens that are less than efficient, but I ride pretty good horses and I have water in these pastures that allows me to concentrate cattle and rest that 70% when rainfall does fall. We have capitalized water to the detriment of everything except the health of the land, but this picture demonstrates, not past glory, but engaged 2013 management.
            ‘Minimize runoff and maximize retention” is the continuing theme of utmost importance to our landscape. The rest of my story should be reserved for another discussion, but the point must be made. These ranch lands are vital to the system health of our land. Good ranchers are not born … they are made, and they can and are being destroyed. Past glory is no longer an option for our watershed system. Future glory is what we must strive to achieve, and it starts right here, right now, with leaders who don’t have biased blinders.
            Thank you very much and thank you, God, for the bounty and the resilience of our New Mexico lands!

Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “If there isn’t a copyright pending on ‘minimize runoff and maximize retention’, I would propose it be assigned to the ranching community of New Mexico. Those folks understand the concept from their shadow on the ground … to a better vision for our future”

No comments: