Farmers Hold the Key to Western Water Conservation

Addressing the West’s water scarcity means working with agricultural water users, not against them.

By Shawn Regan, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and Senior Advisor to the American Conservation Coalition

Across the American West, worsening drought, growing cities, and emerging environmental pressures have prompted a recurring question: In a region where water is inherently scarce, why is so much of it used for agriculture?

It’s a fair question. Across the West, vast amounts of water are used for agricultural purposes—whether to grow alfalfa in Utah, almonds and rice in California, or lettuce and other produce in Arizona. At a time when cities are growing, drought is worsening, and ecosystems like the Great Salt Lake are under stress, it can sometimes seem like water in the West is badly misallocated.

But the usual story about “wasted” agricultural water is incomplete, and often counterproductive. As the West gets drier and new demands emerge, it is true that water will sometimes need to move to new and different uses—including, in some cases, out of agriculture. The path forward, however, isn’t to villainize farmers or take away their water rights. It’s to make it easier and more rewarding for farmers to conserve water and lease or transfer it to other uses, whether for cities, industry, or even environmental purposes like restoring the Great Salt Lake.

Efforts underway across the West—and particularly Utah’s work to restore the Great Salt Lake—show how this can be done.

Agriculture plays a central—and often misunderstood—role in western water conservation. Farmers have longstanding legal rights to much of the West’s water, rooted in the history of western settlement. For generations, they have built entire rural economies around those rights, supporting food production, livelihoods, and the open spaces that define much of the West.

Understanding why farmers hold so much water in the West—and why moving it to other uses can be so difficult—requires understanding several basic features of western water law. The first is that, in the American West, a water right is the legal right to use a certain amount of water, in a particular way, at a particular time and place, for a recognized “beneficial use.” Changes to water rights generally must be reviewed to ensure that they do not impair a downstream user’s water rights. This requirement also means that if a user stops putting that water to any beneficial use, their water right could eventually be considered forfeited or abandoned.

The second is that Western water rights are governed by seniority. Under the prior-appropriation doctrine, rights are prioritized according to when water was first put to beneficial use. During times of drought, water rights are “curtailed,” or cut, according to seniority. The more senior a water right is, the less likely it is to be curtailed in dry years.

Together, these principles help explain why so many Western water rights are agricultural water rights. Agricultural rights are among the most senior because farming and ranching were the first major water uses in many western valleys. Under western water law, then, the most secure and dependable water rights often belong to farmers. This same set of laws gives not just the incentive, but the legal requirement to either use this water for agriculture, change its beneficial use, or risk losing the water right altogether.

For most farmers, the choice is often clear: use the water to grow the highest-value crops available. While changing the beneficial use is possible, it is generally a slow and expensive process. In many places, these barriers make it simply too difficult to lease or transfer water to other uses. In others, the physical infrastructure does not exist to move conserved water where it is needed. The result is that water often remains in agriculture because it is too costly, risky, or complicated for farmers to transfer it elsewhere, or it is moved permanently away from agriculture and toward the development of homes or industry.

Selling valuable land and water might sound enticing, but for farming families, it is a daunting choice. Both land and water in the West are often passed down from early pioneering settlers. These farming families know that once they sell that land and water, there is usually no getting it back.

This is why farmers are central to western water conservation—and why working with them is essential.

Farmers hold much of the water but often have limited ability to benefit from conserving it or transferring it to other uses. Even when a temporary exchange could benefit farmers and other users alike, the transaction may be too costly, risky, or complicated to complete.

Utah’s efforts to restore the Great Salt Lake illustrate what a different approach can look like. The lake’s decline poses serious risks to the region’s ecosystem and economy. But the effort to restore it has also become one of the West’s leading examples of practical, large-scale, market-oriented conservation—built on working with farmers, not against them.

Over the past several years, Utah has overhauled its water laws and institutions. The state now recognizes supplying water to the Great Salt Lake as a beneficial use, allowing water to be conserved, leased, or dedicated to the lake without being treated as unused. Utah has also invested heavily in agricultural water leasing—essentially paying farmers to dedicate water to the lake on a temporary basis. The state has also authorized more flexible arrangements, including split-season leases that allow farmers to irrigate during part of the growing season while leasing a portion of their water to the lake. And this year, Utah lawmakers streamlined the approval process for these types of water leases.

These reforms effectively give farmers alternatives to the traditional all-or-nothing choice between continuing to irrigate and permanently selling their water. Leasing allows them to make water available for other uses while retaining their underlying rights and keeping their farms in production.

There is still much more work to do. Some farmers are understandably hesitant to lease their water, even temporarily, out of concern that their water rights could be jeopardized in the future. But by working closely with farmers, building trust, and developing flexible leasing arrangements, Utah is making encouraging progress. The state has already dedicated over 476,000 acre-feet of water to the Great Salt Lake, and that total is expected to grow.

The broader lesson is that water should not remain locked into one use simply because conserving it is too risky or transferring it is prohibitively difficult. To bring western water to new uses, farmers must be allowed to send water to new uses in a way that benefits them, without giving up the agricultural way of life that has made the West great.

Agriculture will always play a critical role in Western water conservation. Farmers hold rights to much of the region’s water, but they also sustain rural communities, open space, wildlife habitat, and hydrological systems that benefit users far beyond the farm. The goal should be to give farmers more ways to conserve, lease, and exchange water without putting their rights or livelihoods at risk.

But the principle applies across the West. Meeting the region’s growing water challenges will depend on making water more flexible and easier to move while respecting the people who hold the rights to it. That means working with farmers, not against them.

Shawn Regan is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a senior advisor to the American Conservation Coalition.