Resolve to Solve with Miles O'Brien

MILES O'BRIEN: The American West as we know it would not exist without the Colorado River.

Born in the snow-covered Rockies, it flows nearly 1,500 miles through seven states and into Mexico.

Left untouched, it would run freely to the Sea of Cortez.

But for more than a century, we have dammed, diverted, and engineered it to fuel the growth of the arid West.

Today, the Colorado sustains more than 40 million people and irrigates six million acres of farmland.

It is one of the most over-allocated rivers in the world.

And one of the biggest straws is right here: the Imperial Dam, near Yuma, Arizona.

Here I met a young man trying to solve a thorny problem-- how to share a river that is diminishing even as demand for it grows.

His name is JB Hamby.

This is a hard-working river, isn't it?

HAMBY: It is.

It doesn't claim to be the... the largest river, or the longest river, but it works very hard.

O'BRIEN (voiceover): At 30, he chairs the Colorado River Board of California-- putting him across the table from negotiators from the six other basin states.

He represents the biggest user of Colorado River water, giving him outsized influence in a shrinking system.

Every drop of water that we-- that originates up in the Rocky Mountains as snowfall ends up here, and along the Colorado River and is used and reused and is diverted and taken from.

O'BRIEN: From here, what remains of the Colorado is funneled into a vast network of canals and diversions, transforming this desert into some of the most productive farmland ever created by human hands, starting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

HAMBY: There was a number of folks who saw there's an opportunity to take this, uh, untapped Colorado River that was flowing really muddy and wild into the ocean and turn it to be able to produce crops.

O'BRIEN: This dam feeds the All-American Canal, which carries water 80 miles west, irrigating a half a million acres of farmland in the Imperial Valley.

Farmers here use about 850 billion gallons of Colorado River water each year-- about 20% of the river's annual flow.

For more than a century, that enormous diversion has been a source of tension throughout the basin.

As the river produces less and less water, it's become a full-blown crisis.

To understand why, I paid a visit to Brad Udall.

Brad, Good to see you again.

- Hey, Miles, good to see you too.

O'BRIEN: All right... (voiceover): He's a senior water and climate scientist with the Colorado Water Center at Colorado State University.

He says upstream states faced a stark fear.

UDALL: California would gobble up everything, and the upper basin, all other states, would be left with an insignificant amount of water.

And that was the impetus behind the, the Compact in 1922.

O'BRIEN: The seven basin states reached a compromise worthy of Solomon.

The Colorado River would be divided in two: the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, and the Lower Basin states of California, Arizona, and Nevada.

Rather than allocating percentages of the river's flow, the Compact assigned each basin a fixed amount of water: 7.5 million acre-feet a year-- about 2.4 trillion gallons.

It was an expedient political solution.

There was just one glaring problem.

UDALL: They ignored science that suggested they were allocating too much, but effectively the basin was split in two, and each basin got half, in perpetuity.

O'BRIEN: They assumed the river carried more than 16 million acre-feet of water each year.

Modern science suggests the long-term average is closer to 12 million, and diminishing as the climate warms.

In effect, the Compact promised far more water than the river could reliably deliver.

Percentages would've been a smart way to begin this, I suppose, right?

It, it would've been, and also listening to a number of scientists back in the 1920s that said, "You're over-allocating this system, "and you're gonna create a complete mess later if you do it."

And we're at later.

We're at later, and we're at that mess.

O'BRIEN: He and other scientists believe the Colorado River Basin may be experiencing something more profound than drought: a long-term shift toward a hotter, drier climate.

They call it aridification.

The flows in the Colorado River, as a result, are down 20% on average compared to the 20th century.

The last seven years are actually horrific.

The flows are down fully a third compared to the 20th century average.

O'BRIEN: The winter of 2025-2026 was the warmest on record in many parts of the basin.

And it didn't end well for the river, either.

REPORTER: The lack of snow this season in Colorado... REPORTER 2: One of the worst snow packs on record in Colorado history... REPORTER 3: A terrible winter for snow packing... REPORTER 4: What does this mean for our water supply?

REPORTER 5: That marks the lowest snow pack in more than 40 years... REPORTER 6: Could be a sign of things to come.

UDALL: In March, ten Fahrenheit warmer than the 20th century average, we lost about 70% of our snow in the fastest and most dramatic decline in snowpack ever.

O'BRIEN: By May, this was the scene at the headwaters of the river.

Normally at this time, the snowpack would be deep.

The consequences are already being felt downstream.

Farmers here are in crisis mode.

Their only source of water for irrigation comes from melting snow.

And it's all but gone.

Even some farmers with senior water rights are receiving only half of their usual allotment.

Reid Fishering grows sweet corn here in Delta County.

As we walked his farm, he showed me the stark line between the fields he was able to plant and those he was forced to leave fallow.

FISHERING: This shows the demarcation line of... you know, possible money, versus us having to just sit fallow and not make any money on it.

So this kind of represents, um, our economic outlook, uh, for 2026.

O'BRIEN: In a normal year, Reid plants about 1,000 acres.

This year, it's closer to 500.

This valley receives just ten to 12 inches of precipitation a year.

Not enough to grow anything.

Farming here depends entirely on an intricate network of reservoirs, tunnels, canals, ditches, and diversion structures that snake through the landscape, delivering precious mountain snowmelt to the fields below.

And we have three large canals that then feed this, you know, 88,000 acres in this valley.

All right, and this is all gravity-fed.

All gravity-fed.

O'BRIEN (voiceover): State water engineers control the gates, carefully managing the flows to ensure each farmer receives the water allocated under Colorado's system of decreed water rights.

Reid has senior rights, but this year, he expects to receive half of his normal allocation.

That's virtually unheard of.

This almost feels like this... hopefully is not the last nail in the coffin, but, you know, it has the looks of it, for sure.

O'BRIEN: At the other end of the river, the Imperial Valley sits downstream of two massive reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

Together, they act as a giant savings account, buffering water users from the whims of weather and the uncertainty of the annual snowpack.

The incongruous, almost magical, nature of this lush oasis in the desert really dawned on me during a visit to Gina Dockstader's Citrus Grove.

DOCKSTADER: What do you think, Lalo, you want to pick one off for us?

This one right here?

DOCKSTADER: Yeah.

O'BRIEN: There we go.

(voiceover): It was January, early morning, not long after sunrise, when she gave me a fresh-as-it-gets taste test.

We sampled some organic minneolas.

All right, so-- and so, what's the proper way to eat it?

Well, we, we could-- we could've sectioned it, but yeah, just... the juice is great.

O'BRIEN: Oh, my gosh.

Oh, that's delicious.

(voiceover): Citrus isn't the big story here.

Vegetables are.

About two-thirds of the winter produce sold in the U.S.

is grown here.

Fine-looking lemons here!

DOCKSTADER: We need some lemonade, huh?

O'BRIEN (voiceover): Gina took me to her family's packing plant.

This is a place that can produce a lot of food in a very relatively small area, right?

Right.

High economic value in a small area.

O'BRIEN (voiceover): After all the lemons were boxed and shipped, Gina unpacked her family story.

I am fourth generation, and my son is fifth generation.

We are very, very proud of that fact.

O'BRIEN (voiceover): Gina is also a director on the board of the Imperial Irrigation District-- the public agency that holds and manages the single largest entitlement to water from the Colorado River.

Besides citrus, her family grows dates and, like just about everyone here, alfalfa and Bermuda grass, both of which get bundled up into hay bales to be fed to livestock.

You can't put all your eggs in one basket, right?

Otherwise, how do you make it from year to year?

O'BRIEN: No crop demands more Colorado River water than alfalfa.

Farmers across the basin use roughly five to six million acre-feet a year to grow hay for cattle and dairy operations.

The Imperial Valley is one of the world's most productive hay-growing regions.

Thanks to a year-round growing season and easy access to Pacific ports, as much as half of its alfalfa is exported to Asia and the Middle East-- controversial destinations for a crop irrigated by one of America's most stressed rivers.

You're kind of shipping the Colorado River to other countries.

DOCKSTADER: Right.

What do farmers say to that?

I will say... "Do you like your leather belt?

"Do you like your tennis shoes?

"Do you like the modern conveniences "that you have in your life that's coming from these places?"

Because they're feeding their cattle, and that's how you're getting leather products back into the United States.

O'BRIEN: Alfalfa is a thirsty crop, and the fact that a significant share of it ultimately leaves the country doesn't sit well with many people.

But Gina says folks in the Imperial Valley are accustomed to being in the crosshairs.

DOCKSTADER: We've always felt that other people were looking at our water because we have such a significant... priority right.

You think municipalities are gonna come in, you think the cities are gonna come and, and take our water.

O'BRIEN: That's exactly what happened in 2003.

As it became clear the Colorado River could no longer meet all the demands placed on it, the federal government required California to live within its legal allocation.

The result was the Quantification Settlement Agreement, or QSA.

It requires the Imperial Irrigation District to transfer water to San Diego.

In return, the San Diego County Water Authority helps fund conservation projects that enable farmers to use less water while keeping much of their land in production.

DOCKSTADER: Now I can pay for a sprinkler pipe.

I can sprinkle, I can use less water to grow the same crop, and that's how the water gets created.

We're getting smarter.

Farmers are resilient.

They, we all know we have to do more with less.

O'BRIEN (voiceover): That message is resonating in the Imperial Valley.

Not far from Gina's citrus grove, we caught up with farmer Jon Shields.

It was watering day for one of his fields.

This one is wheat.

I got 9.3... feet going into the field.

O'BRIEN: Farmers around here don't pray for rain, they just order it up, and a zanjero-- or ditch rider-- making the morning rounds opens the floodgate.

It all flows downhill, no pumps required.

(water rushing) SHIELDS: And he delivered it at 6:30, and then here's his measurement what he took, 9.3.

So, how long will this gate be open today?

Uh, well, this gate, um... it'll probably run till morning to irrigate that whole field.

The next morning.

- Yeah, till-- it's probably a 24-hour run.

O'BRIEN (voiceover): The water flows into some canals on his property.

SHIELDS: It goes under this pipe, then it goes into our delivery ditch.

O'BRIEN (voiceover): From the ditch, water flows directly onto the field, already seeded and fertilized.

It is flooded from edge to edge.

How frequently do you have to water?

30, 40 days we'll be back with another water.

So you're good for a month.

On the, on the-- after the first water, then when the crop starts to mature more, then... the demand will be more, we'll have to irrigate more frequently.

O'BRIEN: Flood irrigation requires very little energy.

But because it wets the entire soil surface, more water is lost to evaporation in hot, dry climates than with sprinkler or drip irrigation.

To conserve, Jon is not tilling as frequently as he used to-- and a few years ago, he had his field laser-leveled, ensuring a more even and efficient distribution of water.

SHIELDS: Before we started doing leveling, I think we were using significantly more water.

And the minimum tillage also, I think, is... the ground isn't loosened up, so the water's not penetrating as deep.

And, uh, it's sliding across a little bit faster, so we're using less water.

O'BRIEN (voiceover): Jon has also tried some other water-saving strategies.

He showed me an alfalfa field that he put in the Imperial Irrigation District's Deficit Irrigation Program, or DIP.

Farmers are paid to cease irrigating some of their crops during the hot summer months when evaporation is at its peak.

SHIELDS: I think we stopped watering here for 45 or 49 days, something like that, and then, um... O'BRIEN: This is the hottest part of the year.

(voiceover): The hope is that the alfalfa will be stressed but not killed.

Jon had mixed results.

SHIELDS: Maybe 50% of the crowns came back.

There's a crown right there.

O'BRIEN: And that's dead?

SHIELDS: Well, I don't know if it's gonna come back or not.

O'BRIEN: And you sort of knew that going in, that that might be a consequence... I knew that.

I had some more optimism that it would come back better than it did, but, um, it hasn't.

We had a really hot summer, so... O'BRIEN (voiceover): Even so, he continues to participate in the program.

The century-old system that created this agricultural oasis is built on the notion of an endless supply of cheap water.

But everything has its limits.

It's hard to do this with less water is what it comes down to.

- Exactly, yeah.

We're all on a budget.

We're all on a water budget.

We have an apportionment... So, we have an apportionment and we have to live within that apportionment, and... that's it, you know, so we have to be careful with our water.

It's not like the old days where we could just water at will.

O'BRIEN: This season's sparse snowpack and weak runoff have underscored that reality and added pressure to already difficult negotiations.

In 2007, the seven Colorado River Basin states agreed to a new set of operating rules meant to manage shortages and slow the decline of the system's two largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell.

Today, Mead is only about one-third full, and Powell about one-quarter full.

The rules bought the basin time, but not a solution.

They are set to expire at the end of 2026.

And yet the basin states remain far apart on a new plan for sharing the vanishing river.

UDALL: We now need a transformational agreement on how this river is, is allocated, how the policy works, how these dams operate, how people use water.

It's gonna take basically getting rid of the expectations out of the agreement from 1922 and coming up with a whole new way to think about this river.

O'BRIEN (voiceover): It will be impossible to forge a new deal without addressing the water buffalo in the room: Agriculture.

It is by far the largest consumer of Colorado River water-- roughly ten million acre-feet a year.

That's three quarters of the water humans tap from the river.

The crop that uses the most water is alfalfa.

It's the recipient of nearly 40% of all the water consumed by humans from the Colorado River.

And that's much more than the municipal, commercial, and industrial uses of the river combined.

Western cities have taken conservation to heart.

In Phoenix, where population has grown nearly 70% since 1990, residential water use per person has fallen by a third.

No wonder farmers feel they have a target on their backs.

And now there's a new rival gunning for their prized senior water rights: A.I.

data centers.

A proposal to build one on agricultural land in the Imperial Valley has triggered fierce opposition.

Farmers worry it could open the floodgates to more sales, forever altering this landscape.

But even under ambitious growth projections, data centers would remain relatively minor users, especially when compared with the alfalfa fields next door.

UDALL: You can't solve this problem on the backs of municipalities with their roughly 20% of the use.

It's, it's gotta be solved by, unfortunately, really big cuts in agriculture.

You can't have 500 farmers taking water from five million people in Phoenix.

It just won't work politically.

It makes no sense economically.

O'BRIEN: To understand what's at stake, I sat down with JB Hamby at a restaurant in Imperial, California.

We need to cut by two to four million acre-feet.

The hydrology is so bad that there are scenarios within the next two years, that the river and the elevation of Lake Mead could get so low, you physically could not pass a drop of water through that dam.

O'BRIEN: For decades, the Lower Basin states-- California, Arizona, and Nevada-- have relied on water stored in Lakes Mead and Powell to meet demands that exceeded the river's natural flow.

Once evaporation, system losses, and deliveries to Mexico are included, that imbalance has averaged roughly 1.1 to 1.2 million acre-feet a year.

HAMBY: When I first began, it was California as the pariah.

California as the problem.

And what we have today is California in many ways being the leader, being the proponent of conservation.

O'BRIEN: In recent years, belt-tightening in the Lower Basin has saved about 3.7 million acre-feet of water.

But JB Hamby and his fellow Lower Basin commissioners argue conservation alone isn't enough.

They say any lasting solution will require mandatory reductions across the entire Colorado River Basin.

Upstream, that argument has found little support.

To understand why, I went to Denver to meet Colorado's chief negotiator, Becky Mitchell.

When the river ebbs and flows, we ebb and flow with it.

I say we dance with the river.

O'BRIEN: Unlike the Lower Basin, the Upper Basin has no giant reservoirs capable of storing years of water.

Here, the snowpack is the primary reservoir.

So, farmers face more immediate consequences of a dwindling river.

So, when the Lower Basin says to the Upper Basin, "Everybody should have some skin in this game," what do you say in response?

We've had skin in the game.

Come up here.

Come visit.

I think that view of that no matter what's happening to the snowpack, no matter what kind of cuts are being taken in the Upper Basin, that... that there's this entitlement component, and we're not entitled to something that's not there.

And I think Mother Nature's trying to tell us that.

O'BRIEN: In fact, the Upper Basin has never come close to using the 7.5 million acre-feet allocated to it more than a century ago.

Most years it uses roughly 4 million acre-feet.

This year, it will likely be less.

I think what we're doing up here is part of the story of how we get to a solution.

And so I, I ask them to join us in the cuts that we're taking.

Nobody's getting a big check, and nobody's getting a trophy.

Nobody's talking about it in the news.

They're too busy figuring out how they're gonna make it work on the ground.

O'BRIEN: The seven Basin states remain unable to forge a compromise on their own.

So the federal government has stepped in.

The Bureau of Reclamation is imposing the largest mandatory reductions in decades.

It doesn't call for mandatory cuts in the Upper Basin.

But beginning in 2027, the Lower Basin states-- Arizona, California, and Nevada-- would collectively reduce their use of the river by about one-fifth-- roughly 3.2 million acre-feet over two years.

Even deeper cuts are possible through 2036 if reservoirs continue to decline.

It seems to me that collectively there's not a, a, a truthful acknowledgement of the, kind of the unsustainability of the way things are headed.

I have to think that all of my partners... see the math and see the science.

Is the Upper Basin willing to change?

I think we're changing every day.

O'BRIEN: The changes they made in the Imperial Valley to conserve water are clearly making a difference, though not always in the ways people hoped.

Just to the north, lies a witness plate to a chain reaction of unintended consequences.

The Salton Sea: a saline lake fed by agricultural runoff.

It's now a shadow of what it once was.

Gina Dockstader took me there.

Our destination was Bombay Beach, a quirky, art-filled village with a Burning Man vibe.

This is a good metaphor, this shipwreck.

This, where we're standing is about where the water would be, right?

Correct.

This little levee right here, these rocks, yes, that's correct.

O'BRIEN (voiceover): The retreat began as farmers increased efforts to save water and reduce runoff.

DOCKSTADER: So, any time we are conserving, that means less water is passing through the field, which means less drainage water.

But it just points out how incredibly complex all these issues are.

Just when you think you got a, a solution, something like this crops up.

No good deed goes unpunished, right?

Mm-hmm.

There's a consequence to every action.

O'BRIEN: Today, it is shrinking by about a foot a year, reducing the lake's footprint by more than 40,000 acres.

But this salty lake has become a critical stop on the Pacific Flyway, supporting millions of migratory birds as wetlands elsewhere have vanished.

As the sea shrinks and grows saltier, the habitat is disappearing, too.

These rows of straw bales are part of California's effort to encourage plant growth and suppress toxic dust blowing off the exposed lakebed.

They're one piece of a multibillion-dollar state campaign to slow the environmental decline of the Salton Sea.

But should it be saved?

Can it be saved?

The best remedy is to pour more Colorado River water into here, or is that just a crazy idea at this juncture?

I would think that would be the easiest thing to do.

The thing is, the system doesn't have enough water.

Can you solve this problem?

DOCKSTADER: I wish I could.

I'm very cognizant.

People need the water, farmers need the water, Salton Sea needs the water, everybody needs the water.

We just all have to do better than what we're doing.