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”
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