For example, in 2018 the state’s department of food and agriculture gave a $1.9 million grant to a company called Calgren Dairy Fuels to capture methane at Vander Poel Dairy, a farm in Tulare County with a cattle population of approximately 11,000. The company used the funds to pay for the installation of a methane digester, a towering silo that traps emissions from manure before they can wreak havoc on the atmosphere. The agriculture department estimates that the project will prevent the release of 290,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent over a decade. It’s equivalent to removing 6,250 cars from the road in the same time period.

The California Air Resources Board, the state’s lead agency in charge of overseeing air pollution and climate initiatives, logs these avoided emissions toward the state’s progress on its 2030 methane targets for the livestock sector, which are mandated by state law. But this isn’t the only instance where the agency is counting the methane reductions at Vander Poel Dairy toward California’s climate goals: The agency is also attributing the emissions savings to a separate program called the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, or LCFS.

First implemented in 2011, the LCFS program has one overarching goal, which is to reduce the average carbon footprint for transportation fuel in California. Each year, the air resources board sets a so-called “carbon intensity” target for fuel, which gets progressively lower with each passing year. Gasoline and diesel producers regularly exceed this target, because they are considered to have a high carbon intensity — in other words, they emit a relatively high volume of greenhouse gasses per unit of energy produced.

On the other hand, renewable fuel producers can fall below the target; when they do, they’re allowed to generate and sell lucrative LCFS credits, each representing a metric ton of carbon dioxide saved relative to the year’s carbon intensity target. The idea is that credits and deficits will balance each other out, year after year, resulting in a gradual decline over time. This is where dairy farms come into play: After methane is captured from manure, an energy company can convert it into natural gas and sell it for use as a transportation fuel.

When natural gas is extracted from fossil sources, such as through fracking, the air resources board considers the fuel to have a relatively high carbon intensity. However, the agency actually considers natural gas produced by dairy digesters to have a negative score. That’s because the air resources board calculates carbon intensities for fuels based on what it calls a “well to wheel” analysis, adding up emissions associated with both the combustion of the fuel in a vehicle and those used to generate the fuel in the first place.

Because natural gas production at dairy farms is an alternative to manure methane being released directly into the atmosphere, the fuel’s carbon intensity score is credited with a large negative number that reflects the tons of methane would otherwise get released from manure. In other words, for the purposes of LCFS, the air resources board considers natural gas produced by dairy digesters to be a fuel that has essentially pulled emissions out of the atmosphere, rather than one that’s contributing to new emissions.

“California is treating factory farm gas systems at dairy farms like they are devices that suck carbon from the air,” said Brent Newell, a lawyer who worked as a senior attorney for the Food Project at Public Justice, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization, until March of this year. Newell represented state residents who had petitioned the air resources board to reconsider the way it calculates carbon intensities for dairy digester fuels.

Even if one endorses the LCFS program’s negative scoring for certain fuels, it still appears that the air resources board is counting the avoided emissions at Vander Poel Dairy twice: once toward progress in reducing emissions in California’s dairy sector, and again toward shrinking the average carbon footprint of the state’s transportation fuels, potentially overinflating California’s purported climate progress in the process.

“That is a classic case of double counting,” said Danny Cullenward, a lawyer and policy director at the nonprofit Carbon Plan, an organization that evaluates climate programs. “The same ton [is] counted in two places.”

After reviewing publicly available data on dairy and livestock sector climate subsidies, Grist and The Counter have identified at least 10 instances where the state is double-counting climate benefits across both the livestock and transportation fuel sectors. The air resources board estimates that these farms will collectively reduce agricultural emissions by 1.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent over a decade. Separately, the air resources board is also counting captured methane at the same 10 farms toward its target of reducing the carbon intensity of transportation fuels by 20 percent by 2030.

The agency does not disclose exactly how many LCFS credits any individual dairy farm generates, citing business confidentiality. However, according to aggregate program data, manure-based fuels generated a total of over 2.1 million credits in 2021. This represents about 10 percent of total credits generated last year, despite the fact that manure-based fuels represented a much smaller fraction of the total renewable fuel volume. As a result, the continued success of the LCFS program depends at least in part on considering dairy digester fuel to be carbon negative.

For some, this arrangement raises questions about the legitimacy of credits generated under LCFS. According to the air resources board, each credit is supposed to represent a metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent that would have been emitted into the atmosphere, if not for the program. In cases where dairy farms have already received grants or subsidies in exchange for their commitment to capturing methane, well before LCFS was part of the equation, critics argue that those farms should be ineligible to participate in the program. 

In an email response to questions from Grist and The Counter, the air resources board disputed the term “double counting” but did not dispute that it was counting the same emissions reductions multiple times across different climate programs.

“California’s numerous greenhouse gas emissions reduction programs often incentivize emissions reductions in the same sector,” an agency spokesperson wrote. “The same general concept applies to the interplay between the Low Carbon Fuel Standard regulations and other programs — by encouraging the capture of methane emissions at dairies and directing that methane in the transportation sector, the program supports dairy sector methane emissions reductions and rewards the displacement of fossil fuels in the transportation sector, thereby reducing [greenhouse gas] emissions associated with transportation fuel use.”

Nevertheless, nothing about LCFS requires natural gas from dairy farms to replace natural gas from fossil sources; it simply gets added to the state’s overall fuel mix. It’s also far from self-evident that LCFS is reducing greenhouse gas emissions associated with transportation fuel. By design, the program is focused narrowly on lowering the average carbon intensity across all fuels. Under this arrangement, it’s feasible for average carbon intensity to go down over time, even as total emissions rise.

The double counting arising from the LCFS program’s design is not limited to methane reductions in the dairy sector. In a petition filed to the air resources board last fall, a coalition of environmental groups and California residents represented by Public Justice flagged eight instances where the state was attributing the same methane reductions to both LCFS and a third climate initiative called the Aliso Canyon Mitigation Agreement.

The Aliso agreement is a program administered by the air resources board to offset a massive natural gas leak that took place in Southern California in 2015, one of the largest such leaks in U.S. history. The disaster unfolded at a facility belonging to the utility SoCalGas, and it resulted in the release of 109,000 metric tons of methane into the atmosphere over 100 days. The leak sickened nearby residents and forced thousands of families to flee their homes.

Under the terms of the Aliso agreement, the air resources board has distributed a total of over $25 million in loans to California dairy farms to fund the construction of digesters to capture methane from manure. The agreement’s goal is to ultimately capture 109,000 metric tons of methane across participating farms, offsetting the climate effects of the 2015 disaster.

Two players heavily involved in the Aliso agreement are the energy companies Chevron and California Bioenergy, whose shared investments in eight dairy digester projects across the San Joaquin Valley are estimated by the air resources board to capture 1.9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent over a decade. However, while these emissions cuts are intended to offset the Aliso methane leak, the same eight projects are simultaneously participating in the LCFS program. That means that the state is counting their methane emissions reductions a second time toward its progress reducing the carbon footprint of transportation fuels.

The petitioners point out that allowing dairy farms to simultaneously participate in the Aliso agreement and the LCFS program leads to one “perverse result”: The arrangement actually enables greater emissions than a scenario where LCFS is out of the picture. That’s because when a dairy digester generates and sells an LCFS credit to a fossil fuel producer, that credit is the necessary license for the buyer to emit more greenhouse gases than it would otherwise be allowed. In other words, when a dairy farm participates in both programs, it’s first reducing methane emissions under Aliso, then generating credits that permit higher emissions under LCFS, effectively undercutting Aliso’s claims to offset the natural gas leak on a one-to-one basis.

“The Aliso Canyon Mitigation Agreement that [the air resources board] negotiated with [SoCalGas] legally requires SoCalGas to pay for methane reductions at factory farm dairies in California,” the petition reads. “Under no circumstances should mitigation for the Aliso Canyon disaster simultaneously qualify for credits generated and used in the LCFS.”

By design, the LCFS program is supposed to incentivize the production of low-carbon fuels at the expense of high-carbon fuel producers. However, if a dairy farm is already capturing its methane emissions, thanks to a loan from Aliso agreement or dedicated grant from the agriculture department, then the LCFS program isn’t incentivizing anything at all, according to Newell, the attorney who worked at Public Justice.

“There is no causal link between the LCFS and those reductions happening,” he told Grist and The Counter.

The petitioners insist that the LCFS program is supposed to produce what’s known in climate programs as “additionality”: emissions reductions that are attributable to the program and the program alone. If it’s not doing this, argue the petitioners, then the LCFS program isn’t actually doing anything to advance progress on climate. It’s simply taking credit for reductions achieved through other initiatives, like the agriculture department’s grants or the Alison Canyon agreement.

By allowing dairy farms to participate in multiple climate programs, California climate regulators risk over-incentivizing methane capture. This occurs when digester subsidies become so lucrative that the production of manure and the methane it releases becomes a revenue stream in and of itself — meaning there is an incentive to produce more manure and its associated methane, rather than less. Dairy digester developers themselves have suggested that this may already be happening. In an investor meeting last fall, Chevron executives projected that the company’s investments in digesters are expected to yield “double-digit returns” in the coming years, thanks to the negative carbon intensities associated with natural gas production from dairy methane.

Under these projections, private entities stand to reap generous payouts from digesters funded in large part by public climate dollars. In industry parlance, collecting multiple streams of revenue to support a single digester is known as “stacking.” Michael Boccadoro, executive director of DairyCares, a coalition of dairy farms and trade groups that has lobbied in favor of methane capture subsidies for the livestock sector, defended stacking across programs like LCFS, Aliso, and livestock sector grants. Without multiple sources of revenue, he argues, digester technology would be financially impractical for farms.

“It takes the stacking of incentives to make the projects work,” Boccadoro said.

An additionality test could make it much harder for dairy farms to receive subsidies from multiple climate programs simultaneously. When asked whether the air resources board should implement an additionality test for the LCFS program, the agency defended its current administration of the program, noting that such a standard isn’t required under state law.

But environmental advocates, including last fall’s petitioners, say that such a standard would strengthen the state’s climate programs, in part by ensuring that emissions reductions aren’t double counted across multiple initiatives.

“We need to have actual reductions, not paper reductions,” said Tyler Lobdell, staff attorney at Food and Water Watch, one of the petitioning organizations.

It remains to be seen whether the California Air Resources Board will consider changes to the LCFS program in response to recent concerns about additionality and double counting. In January, the agency denied the petition, arguing that it couldn’t consider any updates to the LCFS program due to potential conflicts with other, ongoing efforts to update the state’s overall climate strategy.

In the meantime, dozens more dairy digesters supported by public funding are currently under construction. In a March report, the agency estimated that another 96 digesters will be completed by the end of this year — projects expected to also participate in the LCFS program once they begin capturing methane and producing natural gas.

The post Is California giving its methane digesters too much credit? appeared first on The Counter.

According to Troutt, the problem will require multiple solutions. Source elimination—removing 6PPD from tire production—is the obvious priority, though there is hardly an instant fix. “Finding a salmon-safe, eco-safe alternative as an ozone protection for tires is critical, and it’s got to happen on an urgent time frame,” he said.

But there will be legacy effects for 15 or 20 years, he said, even if an ideal alternative was found tomorrow. In addition to getting rid of 6PPD, Troutt said, we need to find better ways to filter stormwater runoff before it carries toxic chemicals into our waterways.

That’s where the Nisqually Tribe’s biofiltration system comes in; the Tribe hopes it will prove to be a scalable, effective way to protect the ecosystem and the coho that are such an important part of it.

Partnering with Long Live the Kings, a Seattle-based nonprofit dedicated to preserving and reviving salmon in the Pacific Northwest, the Nisqually Tribe recently set up its first pilot installation along Highway 7 at Ohop Creek, to collect water as it runs off the road, channeling it into a dumpster-size box where it can be treated—filtered through a mix of sand and organic matter before being released back into the surface waters.

The system was contributed by Cedar Grove Composting, following several experiments led by Jenifer McIntyre, one of the Washington-based researchers who has emerged as a leader in this effort. Most recently, McIntyre collaborated with Cedar Grove Composting and the city of Bellevue, Washington, to pilot test some ‘BUR’itos—Bioretention Urban Retrofits that, like the Nisqually Tribe’s prototype, aim to increase treatment, in this case in stormwater retention ponds. That project showed that the retrofit successfully removed more chemicals, reducing overall toxicity of the stormwater. The installation along Highway 7 was informed by the success of these bioretention systems, but designed to be mobile, and used in harmony with existing stormwater drainage systems.

McIntyre testified before the U.S. House of Representatives in July of 2021 about the threat of 6PPD-quinone—and, while she is not certain what impact her testimony had, researchers have also been collaborating with the Washington State Department of Ecology, the U.S. Tire Manufacturer’s Association, and others to try and decrease the amount of this chemical that enters the waterways, through both regulation and education. The Washington State Department of Ecology has been collaborating with industrial, municipal, and other facilities that convey identifiable and discrete sources of discharge into surface waters, to brainstorm what future regulation may look like in Washington state. These entities hold permits with the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System—the program which regulates sources of discharge in the United States, as authorized by the Clean Water Act.

According to Tian, several questions remain. What mechanism is at work between 6PPD-quinone and the coho? Is it in the brain or the bloodstream? What other species are affected by this chemical? How about humans? The coho that swim upstream to spawn are already at the end of their lifecycle, and are not the ones that humans eat, but the full impact of 6PPD-quinone remains unknown.

Tian believes that the answers to many of these questions will be found in the next five years or so. The bigger problem, he says, will be figuring out how to get rid of all the 6PPD already out in the world.

Back in the valley, where Highway 7 and Ohop Creek intersect, Troutt hopes that the singular biofiltration system is just the beginning. Based on the results of the pilot program, the Tribe and their partners hope to install more of them in the area, and encourage their implementation across the region. There may be areas where the water flow rate overtakes the ability of these biofiltration systems to filter it, but Troutt and the Nisqually Department of Natural Resources are already encouraging state representatives to install the systems wherever feasible, to enable salmon to spawn without the threat of this life-ending chemical.

The post Your car is killing coho salmon appeared first on The Counter.

Japan has been legislating around agrivoltaics—simply, solar panels that allow for some kind of ag-related use around and under them—since at least 2013, when it required what it calls “solar sharing,” in which solar projects set up on farmland must allow for various crop or livestock production. The country is also looking to use agrivoltaics as a potential way to get abandoned farmland back in production.

Here in the U.S., Hunter said that farm-based solar “is a space with a ton of possibility;” it can protect plants from too much sun and heat, it can lower water usage, it can increase yields. “But it’s just very early” in its development, with the biggest challenge to implementing it at scale being cost. Solar panels might sit too low to allow a farmer like Cobb’s tall native plants to grow, or to let his cattle meander beneath them, or to let agricultural machinery through, which is where the expense comes in. “Just getting those [agrivoltaic panels] off the ground takes more steel for the posts they sit on,” Hunter said, and more steel equals more money. 

More basic agrivoltaics are being used across the U.S. in conjunction with sheep, which are lower-slung than cattle and therefore better able to graze in tandem with solar panels. But we still need what Hunter called “cutting-edge” systems that have moving panels to allow light to reach plants underneath, or that optimally manage rainfall so that it reaches the soil in the right spots—let alone accommodate cows. “We’re just still at a place where we have to identify economically efficient scalable models,” he said.

It is being studied, though. At the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado, lead energy-water-land analyst Jordan Macknick is looking into what he called “opportunities for solar development that can benefit and provide value to agricultural land and soils.” NREL’s InSPIRE project, funded by the Department of Energy, is looking at the potential of agrivoltaics on crop, grazing, pollinator habitat, and greenhouse systems in 25 locations around the country—researching both the solar specifics each system requires and also how the panels affect things like soil moisture and erosion. 

Still, Macknick agrees with Hunter that cost is a major barrier to getting such projects implemented, although some workarounds exist. Rather than raising solar panels to allow for the passage of livestock and equipment, “You can also just increase the distance between the rows of panels,” he said. “We’re really thinking about how do we design these systems with the farmers from the beginning, to make sure that there are sufficient walkways… and that you [think] about where will the irrigation infrastructure be… and that fences are not too close to the panels so you can’t turn a tractor around—small things that in the end can make a big difference on whether a farmer will say yes, I really want to do this, or no, this this will not be worth my time.”

It’s also important for the solar industry to think hard about how it can accommodate agrivoltaics. For some companies, agrivoltaics align with their overall mission to reduce carbon emissions and improve environmental conditions. For others, the fact that operating and maintenance costs can be lower when grazing sheep “mow” the plants growing around panels is a plus, since this translates into a financial incentive for the solar operator. Nevertheless, Macknick believes industrial row crops, which reside on a large portion of ag land that’s suited to solar, are, and will continue to be, a weak link when it comes to agrivoltaics—solar panels and giant combines make for poor companions. But smaller, regenerative farms are well suited to solar. To that end, “We try to incorporate practices and provide research that contributes to how can agrivoltaics can be a part of this broader regenerative agriculture movement,” Macknick said.

How to keep farmers farming the land until some sort of fortuitous balance between ag and solar can be worked out is a looming question. Once again, it mostly comes down to finance. “A big obstacle for doing more regenerative farming is most people can’t afford to spend $30,000 on a seeder they only need once or twice a year,” said Hicks. She sees sharing equipment, as well as finding knowledgeable mentors who can help save time and resources, as ways to make farming more affordable. Likewise, agricultural conservation easements from Marin Agricultural Land Trust (MALT) and AFT, which buy development rights from landowners (or in the case of AFT, provide the landowners with tax incentives to give up the right to develop) and extinguish them, to ensure that land is farmed in perpetuity; this gives farmers money to add value-added products to their operations, for example. With her MALT easement, Hicks built a creamery and expanded her barn.

Back in Texas, Cobb wasn’t sure how long he’d be able to continue working the land. Adding to his stress, his parents had been thinking about leasing out a portion of the family farmland. “They don’t want to do it but they’re on a fixed income,” said Cobb. “If they put 80 acres in solar, they can make $50,000 a year. But that would take 80 of my grazing acres away.” That loss would be bigger than it might appear on paper.

“A farmer who retires from farming, that’s a lot of knowledge that that one person holds that’s no longer available to agriculture, not to mention the [loss of] land,” said Hunter. “Theoretically, solar panels can be removed and you could farm [the land] again. But the knowledge, the community, the infrastructure if half of your neighbors sell out and now there’s nowhere to bring your product, well, that’s a big concern. We need to start talking very seriously about balancing the tradeoffs.”

The post More regenerative farming may be a climate solution. But another climate solution is impeding its progress appeared first on The Counter.

Now, as Audubon works to recuperate these ravaged ecosystems, cattle ranchers will play an unlikely but significant role in the solution.

Creating a supply chain of “bird-friendly beef,” backed by in-house scientific research, could rewrite the conservation playbook, while giving consumers a more concrete, easy-to-understand metric to fixate on, and putting some more money in ranchers’ pockets.

In this vision, birds are both end-goal and proof of concept: Their abundance makes the health of an entire system beautifully visible. Save the birds, the story goes, and you will have already improved the larger whole. 

It’s the flip side of the canary in the coalmine: call it the bobolink in the barnyard. 

In a TEDx talk from 2019, Marshall Johnson, who is today Audubon’s chief conservation officer, appears on a dark stage in a pale button-down shirt with rolled-up sleeves, black jeans, and a white cowboy hat.

“Birds are the prism through which Audubon views our work,” he tells the audience, in the soothing baritone of a nature film narrator, “and the grassland birds are the most imperiled in the entire world.” 

In 10 minutes flat, he connects the dots between birds and beef to explain the rationale behind Audubon’s unlikely bird-friendly certification program. Called the Conservation Ranching Initiative, the program is its master plan to save these birds, which have declined in number by 53 percent in the past 50 years—a greater loss of birds than in any other biome.

The major reason for the precipitous bird declines is extreme habitat loss: “Less than half of the historic U.S. grasslands remain,” Johnson says.

Grasslands are the most massive natural ecosystem in the U.S.—and the most threatened. “Largely forgotten and misunderstood,” is how Audubon’s North American Grasslands and Birds Report describes them.

So, Audubon’s top priority is to preserve the surviving 370 million acres.

The tallgrass prairies stretch westward from Illinois, turning to mixed grass near the Rocky Mountains while the shortgrass prairie extends southward into Texas, reaching north into Canada and southward into Mexico. In the Great Basin, Intermountain West, Southwest, and California there are islands of arid scrubland and sage grass. Historically, savannas and prairies mixed with woodlands in the moist climates of the eastern states.

These spare, achromatic landscapes are easy to overlook, at least for relative newcomers to this continent. The Great Plains, once called the Great American Desert, has a long history of erasure—first the Native people and then the land, from the 1862 Homestead Acts through the Dust Bowl to the age of industrialized farming.

This explains, in part, why the land is vulnerable to development for cities and housing developments, roads and electrification, wind towers and solar panels, oil and gas mines, and row crop agriculture. For many, the grasslands just look like a good place to plow.

But left intact, these native lands are dynamic, high-functioning ecological systems. Invaluable and irreplaceable. “When we lose grasslands, we lose so much more,” Johnson tells the audience. 

The best way to appreciate this particular ecosystem is to plant two feet spread wide over a patch of prairie, hitch forward at the hips, and look straight down. A bird’s eye view. An array of native grasses in heathery greens and amber come into focus, sprinkled with pink, yellow, and white wildflowers in May and June. This beauty is short-lived. By summer, the colors bleed away and the grasses go dormant.

“Senesce” is the word rangeland ecologists use, a term that sounds like wind fluttering through the dried perennial grasses. For most of the year, the plants look brittle, practically dead. 

But underground, their roots plummet 10 feet or more with a total biomass up to six times the plant matter apparent on the soil’s surface. Invisible to the naked eye are the complex natural processes at work, circulating, purifying, and directing fresh water, like a giant built-in cooling system. Pink nitrogen-fixing nodules cling to the roots, microbial life forms that absorb and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. According to a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, grasslands could be more reliable carbon sinks even than forests in a warming climate. 

“The preservation of the grasslands are essential to the future of humanity,” Johnson announces from the stage. With stakes this high, Audubon has determined that the best way to save them is to collaborate with the people who control most of the remaining grasslands in the U.S.—cattle ranchers—a group not typically considered conservation allies. 

Audubon’s strategy is to recruit these landowners to adopt habitat management plans designed to improve the soil, water, and plant conditions for the sake of grassland birds. On every enrolled ranch, science teams conduct comprehensive bird surveys using the Bird Friendliness Index, a monitoring tool developed by Audubon’s scientists to measure the overall abundance, diversity, and resilience of a bird community.

In exchange for going through the ropes, ranchers with lands certified by Audubon receive the organization’s “raised on bird-friendly land” seal to leverage sales of their beef for environmentally conscious consumers. 

In 2017, the year it launched, the conservation ranching program certified 32 cattle operations in the Great Plains. By 2019, the year of Johnson’s TEDx Talk, it had more than doubled to 65 ranchlands in eight states. By enlisting two million acres of ranchlands, the bird-friendly campaign extended Audubon’s reach well beyond its own center and sanctuaries.

In 2021, in an unprecedented move, brokered by Johnson, the organization publicized its first band partnership with Panorama Organic meat company, slated to bring an additional one million acres into the fold. 

 How could this 116-year-old organization wholeheartedly embrace cows as a solution to an environmental crisis? And why would it adopt the motto, “No cows, no grass, no birds”? 

The reasons for this pivot are rooted in the peculiar ecology of grasslands and how Audubon’s youngest state director in a North Dakota outpost (staffed by an office of one) championed a renegade idea within the organization. His mission to grow bird-friendly beef to save grassland birds has become Audubon’s signature conservation campaign.

“I probably shouldn’t wear my cowboy hat as much as I do,” Johnson chuckled, when I mentioned that he dresses like a rancher during our first meeting over Zoom last April. He explained that his uncles in Texas all wore them (although only one was a cattleman)—as did his boyhood hero, Bass Reeves, the first Black U.S. Marshall and former slave rumored to be the model for the Lone Ranger. “I remember picking up a book when I was 7 years old, and I had all of these questions because here was a Black face and a cowboy,” Johnson said. 

Raised in Dallas and Los Angeles, Johnson comes from a family of trailblazers. His father was one of the first Black flight crew chiefs with the Air Force SR-71 “Blackbird,” the world’s fastest plane, and his mother was a disc jockey in the early sixties. 

I suspect that the hat and his mile-wide smile smoothed introductions when Johnson took a part-time job in Fargo with Audubon. Fresh out of the University of Minnesota with a business management degree, he worked part-time as a field organizer for renewable energy reforms. Johnson expected the gig to last six months, tops.

At 24, he became state director of Audubon Dakota, one of the organization’s main hubs. Within a few years, Johnson was spearheading collaborative conservation projects in the Northern Great Plains, leveraging partnerships with landowners, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and other agencies. At the same time, he effectively fundraised for the state office, where he was both vice president and all the staff, raising $50 million for grassland preservation in the Dakotas. 

Over the past 13 years, Johnson has evolved from outlier to the leader for Audubon’s most paradigm-bending restoration project, soaring into national leadership as one of the architects and vice president of the Conservation Ranching Initiative. By the time we spoke again in late summer, he had been appointed Audubon’s chief conservation officer at 34 years old.

Surprisingly, he is not a bird watcher, preferring to hunt upland birds. “I love birds,” Johnson told me. “But I love nature more.” He reminds me of Aldo Leopold—the ecologist and one-time Audubon director—who wrote in A Sand County Almanac of the people who can live without wild things and those who cannot.

Traditionally, Audubon took a preservation approach to grassland conservation, concentrating resources on its own preserves. In 2012, Johnson was managing two of them in the prairie potholes region, a critical breeding area for waterfowl and 300 other species. “I was a sponge for knowledge,” he told me. Whenever he cold-called on neighboring ranches, he noticed vibrant humming—bees, butterflies, and birdsong in the wake of the cattle.

“As someone not trained in biology, it was an anecdotal snapshot,” he told me. But he was struck by how the buzz of biodiversity on those ranchlands indicated something about the management that was absent on the Audubon sanctuaries. Cows, grass, and birds were somehow functioning together in those landscapes. “They were part of a working system,” Johnson said. And that system depends on ruminants to thrive.

One of the most unique and lesser-known features of the grasslands is that they evolved with grazing, along with other natural disturbances of fire (both natural and set intentionally by Native Americans) and drought. Prairie plants need disturbance as much as they need the sun to photosynthesize. It is part of their natural life cycle. And the complement of vegetative, insect, and wildlife communities in the grasslands also all depend on it.

Historically, wild grazers include bison, elk, deer, pronghorn antelope, prairie dogs, and grasshoppers, depending on geographic location. Bison are increasingly being re-introduced to take back their place in the food web across the Great Plains (especially on Native lands where they fulfill essential ecological and cultural roles).

Domesticated livestock still dominate most open lands where their presence is often more destructive than anything else. For example, in pcontinuous grazing—where cattle roam freely within an entire property—cows use their binocular vision to select the tastiest plants, which get consumed, and their least favorites proliferate. Eventually, the grasslands lose the diversity and structures that support all wildlife. 

But many argue that it doesn’t have to be that way. The working principle of regenerative grazing is to control the timing and intensity of livestock grazing patterns to sync with a grassland’s natural functioning. (While lightweight, movable fencing prevents cattle from congregating in waterways or trampling sensitive areas.) Ideally, the animal activity cultivates a natural mosaic of plants to support birds’ needs for food, nesting, and shelter.

Cattle, and increasingly goats and sheep, are playing a crucial role in grassland restoration projects across the U.S. The World Wildlife Fund, The Nature Conservancy, Ducks Unlimited, and Bird Conservancy of the Rockies employ livestock as tools for conservation. Along with state and federal agencies, tribes, and universities, these environmental organizations are partnering on working rangelands to enhance sustainability and address climate change as part of game-changing grasslands conservation strategy.

As the young upstart from the Fargo outpost, Johnson, along with a handful of other state directors, made the case that the traditional preservation approach—nature left untouched and protected—was “a crash course in what not to do.”

Beginning in 2012, Johnson was among a group of rebels within Audubon who introduced these practices on their preserves. In place of the one-size-fits-all conservation approach, it applied a patchwork method using livestock to enhance the habitat for grassland birds.

The out-of-the-box approach took the Audubon leadership by surprise. “The folks in headquarters said, ‘What’s going on out there? Are you trying to fence in North Dakota?’” Johnson said.

But on these sanctuaries, dramatic changes unfolded, from the streams and plants to pollinators and birdlife. When well-managed cattle are present, Johnson said, the land “comes to life.”

These initial, postage stamp-sized demonstration projects bolstered evidence that grasslands need grazing in order to support healthier populations of the 42 bird species that depend on the grasslands to nest, breed, feed, and overwinter. It kicked off a series of strategic planning sessions at the national level to explore how Audubon could leverage grazing to achieve better bird outcomes in places where their populations continued to nose-dive.

The conservation ranching concept got its first dry run on the Audubon Rockies preserve near the Colorado front range. And it also turned out to be the organization’s first foray into the beef business.

Kiowa Creek Ranch, located an hour south of Denver, is an oasis of rare mixed grassland and towering Ponderosa pine trees encircled by housing developments, big box stores, and suburban sprawl. It was donated to Audubon for protection. But left on its own, the property grew clogged with spindly doghair pines.

The woody overgrowth fueled 2013’s devastating Black Forest wildfire, and in the aftermath, Canada thistle, mullein, and other invasive plants moved in quickly, shading out the native grasses. 

In 2014, when rancher Dan Lorenz heard that 1,500 acres of grassland lay idle, he cold-called Audubon Rockies to see about a grazing lease. It was a first for Audubon. But Alison Holloran, Audubon Rockies’ director, already aligned with Johnson, faced the challenge and costs of managing the small sanctuary. So, a cooperative model made sense. “The ranch is a refuge for birds and wildlife in that area,” she said, “and I knew we could manage it better with the tool of livestock grazing.” 

Holloran was not referring to the Old West, freewheeling style of running cattle herds that has devastated landscapes, degraded waterways, and decimated wildlife populations. Instead, rangeland ecologists use managed grazing (also called rotational grazing, holistic grazing, and regenerative grazing) for habitat management. 

With the lease in hand, Lorenz and his partner Adrienne Larrew relocated their small-scale, pasture-based operation, Corner Post Meats, onto Audubon’s Kiowa Creek preserve. The mixed woodland-grassland savanna was ideal food for their cattle, pigs, sheep, and chickens. Lorenz and Larrew used temporary electric fences to control their herding behaviors across the property.

Over time, the livestock helped to transform the land. Bunched together, the animals munched the overgrowth, their hooves trampled native grass seeds into the dirt and left behind divots for water, and their droppings enlivened the worms, fungi, and bacteria. The soils, sterilized by the fire, reactivated. Then, once the animals moved off to another site, the grasses had time to regrow and recover.

All the while, Holloran’s team monitored the property to document new plant growth—shorter for the ground nesting birds and taller for shrub species, for example. Change did not happen overnight, but their bird surveys documented significant recovery.

Vesper sparrows, lark sparrows, and other ground nesting birds began returning to breed at Kiowa Creek. At the edges of Ponderosa forests, insect-eating western bluebirds and pygmy nuthatches were joined by a pair of Northern Goshawks, an elusive bird of prey. The fluting song of iconic western meadowlarks broadcast the news. 

For Audubon, this was proof of concept for conservation ranching as a solution to the bird crisis. Despite through-the-roof conservation spending, bird populations across the American prairies have dropped by more than half since the 1970s.

Although it is indisputable that livestock can cause significant negative environmental impacts, the flip side could also be true: Skillfully and intentionally managed grazing is essential to saving critical and endangered grassland bird habitats. 

Meanwhile, in return for its efforts, Corner Post earned the right to use Audubon’s seal with the phrase “raised on bird-friendly land” on its products. It was the beginning of a new paradigm, one that blurred the lines between two groups—ranchers and environmentalists—that have traditionally stood in each other’s way. It proposed that food production could work in support of, and even enhance, conservation outcomes for birds. And it pointed to a potential for tying grazing directly to the fate of birds on ranchlands throughout the U.S.

Audubon’s Bird Friendliness Index—its metric for evaluating birds’ response to habitat management has documented progress. The first 35 Audubon-certified ranches in the Northern Great Plains studied from 2016–2019 showed a significant increase over conventional ranchlands, with bird abundance on those lands improving by an average of 35 percent. “What we’re clearly seeing is that our protocols are producing more birds,” Johnson said.

Granted, cattle are not an ideal substitute for the wild ruminants that sustained a symbiotic relationship between animals and the land, regenerating nutrients over millennia. Some ecologists are skeptical that cattle alone heal the plains—and worry that their dominance may even represent another, harmful form of monoculture.

Jennifer Molidor, senior food campaigner from the Center for Biodiversity, urges caution when it comes to proposing cattle grazing as a “solution” to biodiversity loss. “Even ‘well-managed’ ranches have serious impacts on water resources, habitats, and species extinction crises,” she said. And she warns of confusing correlation with causation.

“There are a lot of caveats,” Bennett from the Smithsonian agreed. While cows can play a beneficial role in maintaining or improving ecosystem function on native prairies, they have no place in the rainforest. “In the Amazon, there may be no way to have bird-friendly beef that the bird conservation community can support.”

Johnson insists that Audubon’s focus is solely on the places where grazing is compatible with grassland habitats. And he bristles at blanket proposals that the best solution is to remove all the cows. “No one asks the next question, then what?” 

Still, Audubon is not in the business of defending all cattle or all grazing. Many environmental variables feed into the Bird Friendliness Index scores—from precipitation to invasive plants—and it is still being validated outside of the Great Plains. Also, not every ranch has experienced the same level of success, Johnson told me. The key is tracking the data over time; every ranch is evaluated every two years to see how the grassland bird community responds. In the aggregate, that model seems to be working.

“We have this baked-in view that cattle are bad for the environment,” he said. “But the data we’re collecting shows that we’re moving in the right direction, the lands have more birds than they did before we were there.”

Ultimately, it may be a moot point whether or not cattle are the best tool for the job. Of the surviving grasslands, 85 percent are privately owned, and much of that is already tied up in cattle production. Moreover, to have real impact, conservation efforts must match the scale of the grasslands themselves—and that means shifting the focus onto working lands.  

As Johnson put it: “Private landowners have to be a part of the solution.”

Bennett from the Smithsonian shares this perspective for one simple reason. “There are simply not enough protected areas on the planet to conserve the diversity that we want to conserve,” she said. “So, we have to do conservation and landscapes where people are dependent on those landscapes to live, to make money, to have sustainable communities.”

Bennett is one of the leaders of the Bird Friendly Coalition, a scientist-led initiative to establish more sustainable agricultural practices that support global biodiversity. What began as a certification program for shade-grown coffee in 2000 has now branched off into production standards forr maple syrup, rice, and now, bird-friendly beef.

And while private enterprise initiatives like these can smack of greenwashing, many conservationists see it differently. As coalition member and senior director at Center for Avian Population Studies at Cornell, Amanda Rodewald wrote to me by email, “We can turn the dial and improve practices in ways that provide meaningful benefits to birds, but we also have to be realistic and not allow perfect to become the enemy of good.”

The Conservation Ranching Initiative is a long-term agreement with private working ranches built on grazing management plans customized for each property. So, relationship building is a major part of Audubon’s investment. In fact, the first benchmark for Audubon’s partnership with Panorama was to get buy-in from all of its independent beef producers. 

Last April, Johnson walked through the golden senescent grasses on Hutchinson Organic Ranch in north-central Nebraska for the first time. He was joined by owner Dave Hutchinson and Kay Cornelius, the general manager of the grass-based cattle company Panorama Organic.

Hutchinson is one of the pioneers of Panorama, which was founded in 2002 by a group of ranchers who opted out of the commodity feedlot system. His family’s 5,000-acre ranch is on the Central Flyway, one of the country’s migration superhighways over the Great Plains, and it was a prime property for Audubon to secure in the deal.  

Hutchinson was one of the most reluctant about signing up for Audubon’s certification when Cornelius said that he would need to allow the team’s biologists onto his land for routine monitoring. “They better shut the gates,” she recalled Hutchinson saying. 

But meeting Johnson last spring eased all his apprehensions. “He’s really in tune,” Hutchinson told me. “He knows that if you don’t have good grazing practices, then you wouldn’t have all the birds.” 

As the son of a state soil conservationist, Hutchinson is a proud steward in the mold of Leopold’s “farmer as conservationist.” The Sandhills region is a delicate ecosystem of mixed grass prairie anchoring waves of sand dunes so tall Hutchinson told me you need a horse to climb up some of them. No chemicals or heavy machinery touch his fragile soils. “We’ve been ahead of the game for years,” Hutchinson said. 

With his daughter, Sarah Drenth, they rotationally graze bison, cattle, goats, and chickens, moving them after just three to five days on average. Often less. Then, they parade the animals onto new pastures to allow the first to rest and recover for up to a year. “We leave a lot of grass by moving them,” Drenth told me. 

On the Great Plains, large ranching operations like Hutchinson Organic serve as a bulwark to the wholesale conversion of native prairieland. Lands are being plowed up for corn, soybeans, and wheat at an average of four football fields per minute. The disturbed virgin soil causes the carbon stores, long secreted underground, to escape into the atmosphere.

“Just between 2000 and 2013, the conversion equates to nearly 300 million car emissions,” Johnson said. “That’s what happens when we lose ranchers.”

This expansion on croplands, often onto marginally productive lands, fragments habitat and devastates Monarch butterflies, waterfowl and other wildlife. Conversion is the smoking gun of the precipitous bird losses over the past 50 years, according to the North American Bird Conservation Initiative.

The Sandhill’s arid climate and unstable soils have safeguarded it from rampant row crop agriculture, the number one cause of the disappearing grasslands. (“It’s really numbers one through eight, to be honest with you,” Johnson told me.) But since the 1970s center-pivot irrigation tapping into the underground water reserves of the Ogallala Aquifer have brought more corn and alfalfa farming to the region. 

The immediate threat to Hutchinson Organic is Nebraska Public Power’s plans for new power lines that Hutchinson fears will chew up the big bluestem, Indiangrass, buffalo grass, green needle grass, and other native grasses. He is relieved to have the power of Audubon on their side.

“We like their philosophy because they see the whole picture,” he said, calling the relationship like a marriage. His daughter, Drenth, is hoping to leave the land to her two young daughters.

By August, even after a summer of record drought, thick swells of deep green grasses undulated across the ranch. It was hard to tell that they’ve been grazed at all, although Hutchinson told me that he just moved the cattle off the pasture that morning. The difference, he said, is grazing the grasses at the right time for the right amount of time to develop thick and deep root masses that hold moisture in the soil.

“Seeing is believing,” he said.

But lush pastures can tell only a sliver of the story. Tales from ranchers of the ecological health and biodiversity on their lands have long encountered deep skepticism. Strong scientific data is necessary to flesh out the details. So, Audubon is working to validate these observations by collecting evidence, ranch by ranch. 

The Bird Friendliness Index provides the snapshots. Biologists evaluate each property, noting targeted grassland bird species, and assign a score to certify the land as bird-friendly. The goal is to increase that number by shifting land management practices, such as the timing and intensity of grazing or hay mowing, for example. The idea is that over time, the score reflects changes in bird population numbers and communities.

But Audubon has determined that even rigorous bird monitoring is not enough. Along with vegetation and water infiltration tests, the program has added baseline soil monitoring to include biological activity and carbon in the soil. This will take time. “Three to five years from now, we’re going to have solid measures of how soil carbon is changing on all of our ranches,” Conservation Ranching Initiative director Chris Wilson said.

Ultimately, Audubon will know it’s all working when the downward trajectory off grassland bird populations starts to climb. By changing management with specific outcomes for birds across their ranges, this goal is in sight.

“Grassland bird species are going to tell us how we are doing,” Wilson told me. 

Hutchinson catalogs the birds that frequent and live on his ranch, telling me about how the resident greater prairie chicken, a threatened species, are so numerous here that ecologists capture them for repopulation efforts in Kansas and Iowa. The meadows and artesian springs on the property provide stopover sites for migrating Whooping cranes, green-winged teal and other water birds. 

But soon, he’ll have his first Bird Friendliness Index score to back up over 30 years of personal observations. Hutchinson may not subscribe to the science of climate change, but he’s happy to adopt Audubon’s management plan to benefit birds on his lands. Bennett from Smithsonian pointed out to me that birds are apolitical, so they provide a universal way to mobilize people of all stripes to work toward complex environmental goals.

In working individually with cattle ranchers, the challenge is to meet them wherever they are and shift their agricultural practices toward increasing biodiversity and sustainability. For some, like Hutchinson, it may take only small tweaks. For others, it involves weaning off of pesticides or fertilizer or eliminating continuous grazing, more significant changes that might face resistance. 

In all, Cornelius anticipates that it will take three years for all of Panorama’s ranchers to reach full certification and become 100 percent bird-friendly. For its part in the bargain, Audubon is invested in making sure that this works economically as well as environmentally for all of its ranching partners. Can it?

The premise of bird-friendly beef is that by buying Audubon’s certified products, consumers can help to restore the prairies, save birds, and other wildlife while also building soil health.

Called market environmentalism, this idea is being championed by Patagonia, General Mills, and other companies. It rests on the appealing but unproven idea that by choosing products that do right by the land (identified with an eco-seal), everyday eaters can influence supply chains through the retail market. And ultimately food production will become more sustainable. “Vote with your fork” writ large.

Johnson is convinced that the consumer market can underwrite habitat preservation for birds. “There’s a real power in the marketplace to drive conservation,” Johnson said. “I think that that’s where we really can start to turn the tide on grassland loss.”

But, to achieve this goal, it has to reach a certain scale. That’s where Panorama comes in to launch Audubon’s certification program nationally, and in turn, fuel more conservation work by more cattle ranchers on more lands.

As the largest national brand of domestic organic grass-fed beef, Panorama Organic is already the biggest player in a tiny but runaway meat category. For the first half of 2021, growth in organic beef sales outpaced the entire beef sector, up an eye-popping 32 percent compared to 2019, according to Chris Dubois, protein expert at the market research firm IRI. Demand for grass-fed, meanwhile, is tracking at 50 percent growth compared to pre-pandemic figures. 

Both organic and grass-fed, the Panorama brand is in prime position to hit it big. But the meat case is a highly competitive food category marked by label confusion. For Cornelius, the Audubon partnership provides an extra edge in a market rife with unverified claims.

 “I’m fighting for shelf space with product that says, ‘Product of the USA,’” she said, because in reality shoppers don’t realize that most grass-fed beef in the case is actually imported.  

So, the Audubon seal provides the brand with an easy-to-understand differentiator, one that boils the hazy, complex terrain of ecological science down into an easy-to-read bird icon. It also resolves the brand’s conundrum of how to communicate to shoppers the latest buzzword in sustainability: regenerative.

“To me it was the answer to the big fuzzy regenerative ag piece that we were missing,” Cornelius said. She told me that Panorama chose Audubon’s certification program over the Regenerative Organic Certified label because of the rigorous science behind the Bird Friendliness Index and the strength of the organization’s reputation. (The Savory Institute, often targeted for making outsized claims for the benefits of cattle grazing, also recently launched a regenerative certification seal.)

Panorama beef is raised in eight Midwest and Western states on certified organic ranches, meaning that the producers don’t routinely use antibiotics or apply synthetic substances (with some exceptions). The organic pastures are important for grassland birds because many species feed insects to their young, and pesticides are also a cause of bird declines.

Each operation is also animal welfare certified by the Global Animal Partnership as pasture-raised. These certifications add up to retail prices $2–3 more per pound than conventional ground beef. Along with long-term contracts, this premium delivers a stable, guaranteed market for Panorama ranchers.  

Colorado rancher George Whitten is a veteran bird-friendly-certified producer who says that the seal has real value in the marketplace. “Our customers don’t care about organic, but they love our certification with Audubon,” he told me. 

Whitten recalls that in the 1990s, Audubon sued him for grazing San Juan Ranch livestock on the Baca National Wildlife Refuge in southern Colorado. “That’s how far Audubon has come around,” he said. He is wary of the fact that Panorama Organic is owned by global meat giant Perdue Farms since he has strived to stay out of the conventional beef business. 

But he trusts this niche meat brand, which like subsidiaries Niman Ranch and Coleman Natural, focuses on humane animal welfare and strong farmer networks. Whitten said that as his biggest customer, Panorama’s terms make it easy for him to earn a living. ”I can sell a truckload to Panorama quicker than I can sell a ribeye to a lady at the farmers’ market,” he said.

The reality is that ranchers adopt only adopt practices they can afford, and the Conservation Ranching certification costs them nothing but time. Audubon also provides cost-sharing, training, and other incentives.

From Audubon’s standpoint, this method is far cheaper than other strategies. Compared to the old way of protecting bird habitat, the Conservation Ranching Initiative turns out to be a bargain. On average, Johnson told me that grassland conservation typically costs the organization about $80 per acre. But enlisting ranchers to handle the day-to-day management on these lands, Audubon’s program costs drop to $1.35 –$1.40, an acre. “Soup to nuts.” 

“Maybe it’s because I didn’t come up through the ranks as a biologist,” Johnson said, “but I thought the environmental community didn’t care about their bottom line.” With this program, ranchers’ livelihoods are one of the priorities. Keeping them in business keeps them on the land.

Bird-friendly beef ties improved farming practices directly to market opportunities and, potentially, increased profits. With certification, ranchers are rewarded by earning top dollar for their beef sold with the Audubon seal. In principle, it eliminates the environmental shortcomings of conservation programs like the federal Conservation Reserve Program, where once the payment incentives end after 10 or 15 years, farmers are likely to rip up the land for money-making row crops. Audubon’s market-based program, ideally, is self-sustaining. In theory, as the seal becomes more recognizable, profits should only grow.

With the Panorama deal in hand, the Conservation Ranching Initiative could improve land management practices on about 3.5 million acres—an area surpassing Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Canyon combined. 

“If the market can drive the program, it’s a far more efficient way to deliver grassland conservation at scale,” Johnson said. Funded by Audubon’s philanthropy arm, it could grow to 10-12 million acres at an annual cost of $10 – $12 million. 

Audubon is not charging Panorama for the use of the Audubon seal, and there is no revenue sharing arrangement. “One day Harvard Business School may do a case study on how dumb Marshall is,” Johnson quipped, “but it’s by design.” The arrangement creates a firewall between the high standards of the program and what’s happening with any individual ranch on the ground.

The scale of Conservation Ranching has exceeded Audubon’s projections. “We’re on the precipice of mainstreaming market-based conservation,” Johnson told me. The potential to increase market exposure is high with Audubon bird-friendly beef in the pipeline to 320 retail outlets in spring 2022. 

Johnson has already received a deluge of offers from dozens of other companies seeking  to have their own supply chains certified through Audubon. Given the amount of beef that moves through the market, capturing more brands, restaurants, and retailers translates into more ranchlands enrolled, certified, and managed according to bird-friendly standards. 

This voluntary program offers an alternative to federal mandates or tax-payer funded programs to address climate change. It also works towards the Biden Administration’s land conservation goal to protect 30 percent of U.S. lands and water by 2030. 

But market-based conservation raises deeper questions when the lion’s share of resources already flow to predominantly white landowners. “As we’ve seen with other market-based solutions, like carbon markets, they can be both ineffective and inequitable,” said Molidor from the Center for Biodiversity.

Through federal, state and local programs—from the Farm Bill’s Conservation Reserve Program to conservation easements and cost-sharing projects—U.S. ranchers have access to a wealth of resources and technical support, which also increase the value of those lands. When the vast majority of those landowners are white, programs like Audubon’s may further entrench an ongoing land access crisis—soaring prices that thwart the efforts of tribal nations, farmers of color, young farmers, and others to own land. 

Audubon is reckoning with inequities on several levels, including its own slaveholder namesake. When it comes to Conservation Ranching, two ranches owned by Indigenous people in South Dakota are enrolling in the program. And in Montana, a partnership with the Blackfeet Nation is a work in progress involving planning workshops and infrastructure inventories to address tribal needs. In Texas, the organization is reaching out to historically underserved farmers and ranchers.

Johnson recognizes the embedded inequities along with the risks of embracing the regenerative mantle. “I share a concern about regenerative agriculture because a lot of it is not based on the bigger picture,” Johnson said, referring to the focus on grazing’s potential to capture soil carbon. “And I think it sets us up for a regenerative ag bubble, where there are too many promises, not enough data and that bubble could burst.”

“What a tragedy that would be,” he continued, “because the principles of regenerative agriculture tie back to traditional ecological knowledge, which was refined, researched, observed, and implemented by Native people.”

In his vision, Audubon’s conservation ranching initiative is nothing short of transformative. By shifting food production toward more environmental practices that are supported by consumer markets, the food supply can become more sustainable for all eaters. “If it works and it’s good for the soil, it’s good for birds, and it’s good for biodiversity, why aren’t our kids [in schools] eating this?”

Johnson’s own Audubon origin story dates back to when he was still a college student. On an early spring day, his friends dragged him out of bed to a farm in northern Minnesota to witness the mating ritual of the greater prairie-chicken. To avoid startling this short-tailed type of grouse, the group had to arrive before sunrise. In the chilled dim of dawn, Johnson folded his six-foot-two frame to crouch behind the bird blind and peered out toward the open short-grass meadow to wait. 

At daylight, the annual spectacle of males performing their exuberant display, fanning their mottled brown feathers began, and he watched from 15 feet away. They pattered their feet like a drum roll while the yolk-colored sack at their throats uttered low toots like the sound of blowing over the mouth of a beer bottle. They tussled, fluttered, and fought. 

But what struck him most was that beyond the lek—the grassy center stage for the prairie chickens’ performance—there were cows browsing in the distance. In that moment, he fell for the wonder of this “charismatic, loud, and flashy species” flourishing in a human-managed landscape.

It was similar to the same images in the book of landscape paintings from the Hudson River School he picked up as a kid. “There’s always a bird element and a wildlife element,” he said. “It’s a dynamic system that works together and humans are a part of it.”

Johnson has built a career building on the vision that conservation and agriculture not only work hand in hand but can reinforce one another in a beautiful way. For decades, industrialization and homogenization has worked in opposition to conservation efforts. Environmental goals, seemingly, could come only at the expense of productivity. 

But that landscape has changed with an ecological mindset in the food system. It is not one or the other, but about managing the relationships within ecosystems that cannot exclude humanity.

The big question is, what practices can bring about positive changes for environmental health that affect wildlife, climate, and human well-being? 

Two years after the bobolinks first fledged at Stone Barns, I checked in with Algiere. The farm functions as a working holistic system where pigs are the edible subjects for agroforestry studies, laying hens trail the sheep for multi-species grazing experiments, and the compost operation is integral to the whole high-functioning system. Meanwhile, farm teams harvest heirloom vegetables and pasture-raised meats, linking ecology with food production. 

Algiere calls it “live agroecological science.” 

Since 2019, his team is conducting a collective research study of the whole operation that includes monitoring soil carbon, water quality, insects, plants, and birds. “It’s not a clean lab,” Algiere said. “Not the kind of science that we’re used to, and we’re creating it as we go.”

Based on the data, they are learning the methods that best restore balance and health on the farm as a whole. But in the complex natural system called agriculture, so much is invisible.

And so, the birds help to tell the story.

In the old hayfield where cattle grazed, the bobolinks arrived again and fledged 10 young last summer. They were joined by three more grassland specialists, eastern meadowlarks, Savannah sparrows, and kestrels. From the trees fitted with bird boxes at edges of the fields, bluebirds and tree swallows darted out for insects.

“I was pretty shocked at the speed of the response in the bird populations,” Goodwin, Stone Barns’s deputy director of ecology, said. “We saw almost immediate responses to the change in management.”

Every other measure—plant abundance, pollinators and insects, water holding capacity, and soil organic matter—showed increasing stability, diversity, and complexity on these lands.

“If we can physically see change in a human time frame, there’s a lot we can’t see,” Algiere said. And although insects are valid bioindicators (as are the soil microbes), the birds are the most eye-catching centerpiece of nature’s intricate web, tied to our own survival.

Perhaps, then, it’s no accident that bird watching has soared during the pandemic. Or that eBird, an app that crowdsources sightings from people around the world topped one billion observations.

It’s not only that birds’ colors, songs and flight are enchanting. Or that they provide valuable ecosystem services from free insect control and pollination to fertilizer in the form of “poop rain” from the tens of billions of migrating birds each spring and fall.

In a time of crisis with accelerated climate change and biodiversity loss, avifauna are pointing the way forward. At Stone Barns, on the Great Plains and across the west, the best ecological practices for birds appear to be the best practices for land, biodiversity, and even climate. In a world of slippery and hard-to-prove environmental claims, birds are proving to be our north star. 

After journeying throughout the globe, birds are the great connectors, the time travelers, and messengers of our fate. As the field researcher and nature writer Scott Weisendaul notes in his book, A World on the Wing: “Birds are the sentinels and bellwethers, the victims of our follies—but also, if we are heedful of their needs, guides to a more sustainable future for ourselves as well.”

Melissa Hemken contributed reporting.

The post The campaign for “bird-friendly beef” appeared first on The Counter.

Another view

About 50 miles south, another scenario of 21^st century Arizona is taking shape. The nearly 23,000-member Gila River Indian Community is modernizing: adding to its group of casinos, preparing to expand its irrigated farm acres, and elevating its influence in Arizona’s politics and economy. It’s doing so by virtue of one of the most secure and abundant water supplies in Arizona and the entire Southwest. 

Following decades of brutal discrimination and abuse by white settlers and state authorities during which the two Gila River tribes’ rights to their historic water supply were not honored, Congress approved an agreement between the United States and the State of Arizona that essentially guarantees tribal access to 653,500 acre-feet of water per year. That amounts to 213 billion gallons, or three times more water than industry and the 1 million residents of the Tucson metropolitan region use in a year. Almost half, or 311,000 acre-feet, comes from the Colorado River. Much of the rest comes from groundwater and reservoir storage on the Salt, Verde, and Gila rivers east of Phoenix. 

Tribal leaders did not respond to requests for interviews. But from previous statements by tribal leaders and in interviews with state water authorities, it is clear that the Gila River Indian Community, or GRIC, is using its abundant water to build a new age of wealth and influence on the 372,000-acre reservation south of Phoenix. GRIC is constructing a federally-financed irrigation network to increase farming operations to 75,000 ancestral acres from the current 35,000. It negotiated lucrative agreements to lease water to Phoenix, Chandler, and other communities. It is also marketing water that it stores in aquifers to willing suburbs and subdivision builders interested in long-term leases. 

Since 2016, GRIC has played a central role in storing over 370,000 acre-feet of water in Lake Mead, plus 130,000 more acre-feet this year to keep lake levels high enough to prevent a water shortage declaration more dire than the one the federal government issued last August. GRIC received $274 per acre-foot from the state and federal governments. In short, ample and secure water supply is the basis of the community’s plan to rebuild the vitality of its 8,000 year-old desert civilization that was ruined in the 20^th century.

Arizona’s future water shock

The water-abundant and thriving Gila River Indian Community amounts to one bookend scenario of Arizona’s 21^st century condition. The other bookend is the arid Rio Verde Foothills, where government decisions and meteorological disruptions trap residents in a water-related crisis that heat and drought aggravated, and state law did not anticipate.

In 1980, Arizona enacted an innovative groundwater management program intended to ensure adequate reserves of water for rapid home development and expansive population growth by designating four regions from Prescott to Tucson as Active Management Areas. (Santa Cruz, the fifth AMA, was carved out from the Tucson AMA in 1994.) The program included two important exemptions, however: its provisions did not apply to groundwater withdrawals outside of the AMAs. And within the AMA boundaries, owners of private wells that pumped less than 35 gallons per minute — in other words, many of the wells drilled for the state’s exploding residential real estate markets — did not come under state oversight.  

In 1995, the law set in place a consumer protection measure to require subdivision builders to assure buyers that their homes within an AMA had a 100-year supply of water. But another important waiver was included. Lawmakers lifted the 100-year supply requirement in AMAs for residential construction projects with fewer than 6 homes. Builders constructing individual homes, or clusters of five homes or less in an AMA, avoided the 100-year water requirement. Outside the AMAs, safeguards did not apply, creating what amounted to a home construction free-for-all.

Little more than 40 years after the statute was enacted and less than 30 years after the 100-year assured water supply rules were adopted, the subdivision and private well waivers have resulted in Rio Verde’s emergency. They also influenced a boom in home construction that has caused — and continues to cause — thousands of wells to fail inside and outside of AMAs. It is clearer by the day that, without significant strengthening, the state’s water management program is becoming increasingly irrelevant. The emergence of serious instances of water shortage from Kingman in the north, to the Chino Valley north of Prescott, to Cochise County in Arizona’s southeast has prompted civic campaigns for reform. They have yet to attract sufficient legislative support.

That seems certain to change. And soon, because of climate change.

This year alone, the latest scientifically respected studies reveal a number of disconcerting findings. The megadrought that has Arizona in its tightening grip is the worst in 1200 years. Climate change is responsible for at least 40 percent of the decline in Colorado River water supplies. And the Southwest, like other desert regions, is getting steadily hotter, drier, and more dangerous. Though future weather conditions are always difficult to accurately predict, a worst-case scenario for Arizona looks like this: Population growth stops. Residents start to migrate in droves away from the stifling hot and dry state. Home values collapse. The state enters an era of relentless decline. By 2060, according to several published projections, extreme heat and water scarcity could make Phoenix one of the continent’s most uninhabitable places.

It’s not much of a reach to conclude that Arizona is at the intersection of two paths to the future. By mid-century it will be a model of desert dwelling resiliency. Or it will be a weakened civilization that is starting to waste away. 

Cogent look at what to expect

When asked what the future portends, none of the senior state water management authorities interviewed for this project delivered a firm projection. But in 2014, as the megadrought was exerting its unmistakable influence on water supplies, the Arizona Department of Water Resources prepared “Arizona’s Next Century,” a well-regarded “strategic vision” for future water supply. 

The report’s authors projected colliding trend lines of rapid growth and declining water supply that plainly showed that the status quo will not hold in Arizona. According to the study’s findings:

—    Over 3 million more people are expected to live in Arizona by 2035, or 40 percent more than the 7.1 million who reside there today. By 2060, Arizona could be home to an additional 6 million people. 

—    As a result of anticipated population growth, annual water demand in Arizona will increase 1.2 million to 1.6 million acre-feet, or 17 percent to 22 percent above 2022 demand.  

—    By 2060, the population in the seven states served by the Colorado River, which supplied almost 40 percent of Arizona’s water until this year, could increase to 76 million, nearly double the number today. 

—    Demand for Colorado River water from its seven basin states is anticipated to increase by mid-century to 18 million to 20 million acre-feet, a nearly 70 percent increase from now. But due to drought, climate change, and extreme heat, the water supply from the Colorado River will drop to roughly 9.4 million acre-feet, 25 percent lower than today.

Taken as a whole, the data mean that Arizona’s share of the Colorado River will likely shrink to less than half the current 2.8 million acre-feet allotment. Arizona will rely much more heavily on its finite groundwater reserves to support population growth, residential construction, and new business starts that state officials continue to encourage. And though Arizona has stored over 13 million acre-feet of water underground to supplement supply during years of water shortage, never since statehood in 1912 has Arizona encountered such a long and deep period of water scarcity that science predicts will grow steadily more severe. 

It’s not at all difficult to project that “home buyer beware” warnings will be emailed, Tweeted, Instagrammed, Tiktoked, and taped to bulletin boards in many more communities than Rio Verde Foothills, Cochise County, north Chino Valley, Kingman, and Flagstaff, where water wells are failing. 

Unless.

Unless, said the authors of “Arizona’s Next Century,” the state’s Native American tribes make much more of their secure yearly right to 1.9 million acre-feet available for sale or lease. And unless Arizona’s elected officials, water authorities, and engineers develop and quickly execute an array of policy changes and infrastructure projects that converge over the next generation to head off calamity. 

Those steps include amending existing water laws or enacting new laws to increase water efficiency and conservation, more stringently oversee groundwater use in and outside the Active Management Areas, and make it much easier to move available water around the state. Another idea, already in place in Las Vegas and Aurora, Col. is to ban grass and “non-functional turf” because half of U.S. urban water use goes to maintaining outdoor spaces. Austin, Tex.  is  developing systems within its own buildings to stop flushing potable water down the toilet. Instead, the city turns wastewater into greywater for various uses inside and outdoors, a practice that could reduce demand by another half. 

The Next Century authors also called for somehow increasing the state’s water supply, as it did in the 20^th century. A favored proposal is to construct desalination plants. “Arizona’s future success is tethered to how effectively we continue to manage our water resources and develop new water supplies and infrastructure,” they wrote. “Yet, our present success cannot sustain Arizona’s economic development forever.”

Acting on future scenario

The response by state leaders to the 2014 study has been methodical but by no means urgent. Republican Gov. Doug Ducey formed expert committees. Finding more water is their most popular option. Last year, Ducey convinced the Legislature to invest $160 million to investigate “augmentation,” which is Arizona’s term for developing new sources of water. 

This year, the governor proposed establishing a new state agency, the Arizona Water Authority, to pursue new supplies and also asked the Legislature for $1 billion more, framing the request around the need to build a desalination plant, perhaps in Mexican waters, to produce 250,000 acre-feet a year. 

Other ideas for securing Arizona’s water supply — regulating groundwater use in rural areas, metering private water wells, increasing use of recycled wastewater, restricting natural grass lawns, and imposing land use and urban design requirements to collect and store stormwater — haven’t reached nearly the same level of clarity and legislative purpose. 

There’s a reason for that. Regulatory changes in water policy and practice are some of the steepest cliffs in Arizona’s political landscape. Any proposal judged by lawmakers to challenge property rights, raise costs, and impede growth is dead on arrival in the Legislature. Such proposals generate powerful winds of opposition in the executive offices of home builders, chambers of commerce, and every other economic development agency. 

Arizona’s leaders and communities vow to continue growing. One prominent example is Buckeye, a suburb in the desert west of Phoenix that is one of the country’s fastest growing cities. Buckeye supplies over 11,000 acre-feet of water annually to its 97,000 residents and businesses, according to city figures. 

Buckeye has enough land — and its current leaders sufficient moxie — to welcome 900,000 more residents by mid-century. At current rates of water consumption, Buckeye would need over 100,000 acre-feet annually, or 90,000 acre-feet more water than today.  

Where will it come from? The city’s latest master water plan includes a lengthy list of potential water sources that are either unreliable (Colorado River), difficult to secure and transport, and certainly more expensive. 

One idea, for example, is to help finance construction that will raise the height of 83-year-old Bartlett Dam, located east of Phoenix, to add 130,000 acre-feet to Bartlett Lake’s storage capacity. Whatever portion of the added supply that Buckeye gains would then be transported to the city over 100 miles through existing canals. 

Another idea is to build a treatment plant to remove salts and impurities from a brackish aquifer within the city limits to use as water for landscaping, and maybe for drinking water.

Two more ideas involve purchasing groundwater from basins distant from Buckeye and transporting it by pipe and the Central Arizona Project (CAP) aqueduct to the city. Sounds simple in concept. In real-life application it’s not. The administrative challenges, water leasing contracts, and infrastructure requirements are costly and tricky.  

One of those sources is the Harquahala groundwater basin beneath the desert further west of Buckeye, in Maricopa County. The state says it holds a total of 15.5 million acre-feet, though not nearly all of that can be recovered. If Buckeye relies on the Harquahala basin for most of the 90,000 acre-feet it will need, that represents perhaps a 50-year supply. Existing state law requires subdivision builders in Buckeye to assure they have a 100-year supply of water before they can begin construction. Harquahala, in effect, helps a bit in meeting that ment. Buckeye needs more than Harquahala for its new sources of water. 

Second, transporting groundwater out of the Harquahala basin to Buckeye involves 1) building a 30-mile long pipeline, 2) transporting water via the Central Arizona Project (CAP) canal, and 3) paying a fortune for the water. 

The first obstacle likely requires a formal environmental assessment, or a more complex environmental impact statement required for state, and perhaps the federal government’s review and approval. 

Transporting water in the CAP is similarly complex. It involves review and approval by the director of the Department of Water Resources and the U.S. secretary of the Interior. Following those approvals, Buckeye would need to negotiate and sign a wheeling contract approved by the federal Bureau of Reclamation and the leadership board that oversees the CAP. 

The third element, actually gaining access to Harquahala groundwater, significantly raises the cost of water in Buckeye. Buyers seeking a long-term lease for Harquahala water told Circle of Blue that the current price quote is a one-time fee of $7,000 to $10,000 an acre foot, or somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion. 

When asked whether Buckeye will have sufficient supplies of water to meet the demand of 1 million residents, Annie DeChance, the city’s communications manager, did not hesitate. “Absolutely,” she replied. “We have the water we need. are aware of the complexities and challenges.”

Rio Verde scarcity

The majestic Four Peaks mountain range was painted in a luminous morning shade of purple the day Karen Nabity and Jennifer Simpson collected petition signatures in support of a plan to secure a permanent source of Rio Verde Foothills water. Nabity and Simpson had waded into the complexity of Arizona law and regulation, and the rugged terrain of politics, to find a solution. They are leading a local campaign to establish a domestic water improvement district, in effect a state-sanctioned community utility would have the authority to negotiate agreements to secure an alternative source of water. 

It’s a big idea for a distinctive Arizona community. Beneath Rio Verde Foothills lie groundwater supplies that never were robust. Some of the community’s homes were built without wells and buyers knew they would always rely on trucked water. Most others had private wells that delivered sufficient water. 

But as development occurred, competition from new homes put pressure on the aquifer. Private wells failed and more homes turned to water hauling. Then came the megadrought, which eliminated most of the natural aquifer recharge, and dried up hundreds more private wells. 

At least a quarter of Rio Verde’s 2,100 homes, Nabity said, are supplied with water by tanker trucks filled at Scottsdale’s water fill station, about 10 miles away. It’s enough water in a water-scarce era for Scottsdale to pay attention — 38 million gallons or 117 acre-feet annually and increasing. City authorities last year told Rio Verde residents their access to the depot would  stop at the end of this year.

Water shortage emergencies like the one occurring north of Phoenix were not supposed to happen in Arizona. The 1980 groundwater law, plus provisions put in place in 1995, required home builders to prove that a 100-year supply of water was available before construction could start. But the 1995 rules exempted construction projects with fewer than six homes, and the 1980 law exempted wells that pump less than 35 gallons per minute. Both decisions enabled builders and buyers to avoid regulatory constraints and accelerate development. 

Homes and property in the community are now valued at $1.3 billion, according to Maricopa County records. Rio Verde residents are encountering a new truth about vulnerability that less fortunate people already knew: wealth and stature are no match for water scarcity. 

Nabity and Simpson, real estate professionals, propose a difficult legal and logistical solution that also has encountered some local opposition. The proposed community water district, a unit of government enabled by state law, gives homeowners the legal authority to collaborate and secure a new source of water. 

The steps to formally establish the district and then acquire the new source are intricate and formidable without a deadline. Nabity and Simpson formed a non-profit, RVF Water Resources, Inc., to raise money and collect signatures on the petition to meet the legal requirements for establishing the water district. If the district is approved members will pay $1,000 per home to become district members and get the project started.  

In its most basic outline, the community needs Maricopa County to approve the water district’s formation. It hasn’t yet due to opposition from some Rio Verde homeowners. Following that step, the district’s leaders, among them Nabity and Simpson, need to find a source of water. They are talking with water developers in the Harquahala groundwater basin to buy land with water rights to 200 acre-feet annually. That would mean piping it under Interstate 10 and into the CAP for transport. Both steps require intensive federal review. The total cost of the water lease, legal counsel, engineering, construction, and transportation could well exceed $4 million, plus the monthly cost of administration and hauling water to their homes. The Rio Verde Foothills homeowners also need to build a new community water depot where trucks can fill their tanks. The earliest all of this could occur, Nabity says, is 2026.

So she and Simpson opened a second path to end the water emergency – negotiating one-year water leases for 170 acre-feet from the Gila River Indian Community or another tribe that already is delivering water to Phoenix-area communities through the CAP. The one-year lease of tribal water, plus transportation and treatment to drinking water standards will be roughly $250,000. 

It’s a full-time job without pay. “Did we ever think we’d be leading this charge?” remarked Nabity. “Never. Not even close.”

One more significant impediment. In order to meet Scottsdale’s December 31 deadline, the Rio Verde Foothills residents have until June 30 to negotiate and sign separate contracts for water supply with a tribe, and with Scottsdale to receive and treat the new supply. If those steps are completed the city told Nabity it will suspend the December 31 shutoff deadline and allow tanker trucks to use the fill station. 

“It’s such a critical time crunch. I can’t even tell you,” Nabity said.

Mid-Century outlook

What’s happening in the Rio Verde Foothills — the causes of the emergency, the arduous path to solutions — is a small act in the mammoth, momentous, water shortage epic unfolding in Arizona. The state’s powerful resolve to keep growing is confronting much more potent limits on its water supply, the essential resource for attracting and supporting a civilization that is now at the peak of its human appeal and economic influence. 

Extreme heat and deeper drought are forcing a reckoning. Over the next generation governments, farms, residents, and businesses will have to adjust to the new conditions. The challenge is immense. The bar for measuring success is high and terrifically difficult, especially viewed in this era of disruption, diversion, and dissent. 

 What will Arizona be like in 2060? 

A reasonable projection is a state of active farm regions — Yuma, Pinal County, and Native American reservations — that cultivate half the number of irrigated acres that they do now. 

The Tucson and Phoenix metro areas are smaller in order to better balance demand and available water supply. Homeowners and small businesses pay more for water than they do for electricity, a factor in diminishing the region’s economic competitiveness and residential allure.

Native American tribes that hold 2 million acre-feet of secure water rights will have built impressive desert economies and elevated to the top tier of policy influence and economic wealth.

Beaten by heat and drought, Arizona’s rural regions are a scorched landscape of expanding desert and empty towns where farmers and residents once lived in more hospitable conditions.

This project was made possible by a fellowship awarded by Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for The American West.

The post Arizona’s future water shock appeared first on The Counter.

In order to develop acceptable responses, Judd finds herself surveying the region’s rugged political terrain of private interest, anti-government, free market zeal. Confrontations over water don’t always fit neatly into these spaces. Her assessment, swayed by conversations with constituents, is a more nuanced view of science, the public interest, and government’s role in brokering solutions. 

She’s been active in organizing support for a new water district to supply piped water to over 1,000 homeowners south of Willcox, where water levels are falling and more than 100 drinking water wells are useless. 

Reversing an earlier stance, she has also expressed interest in exerting some measure of local authority to oversee water use. “Six years ago I was kind of against it,” Judd said in an interview. “I have friends who farm, though. They convinced me that I needed to keep my mind open.”

Last year Judd joined her Democratic colleague on the Cochise board in aligning the county with the Department of the Interior and the Department of Defense – which manages an Army garrison at Fort Huachuca – to secure water supplies and improve the condition of the depleted San Pedro River near the border with Mexico. 

In approving the formal memorandum of understanding, Judd defied the other Republican supervisor, the county’s Republican leadership, and many of her friends who are suspicious of big government. “I’ve really been rubbed and rolled over the coals for voting to do things that are beneficial to the environment or beneficial to the people,” Judd said. “I’m told it’s not the government’s business. We shouldn’t be doing it. We shouldn’t be at the table on these things. I say we should.”

That the needle on Cochise County’s water supply meter is drifting away from full — actually slipping steadily closer to empty — is not in doubt. A 2018 study by the Arizona Department of Water Resources found that groundwater levels dropped 300 feet since 1950 in one basin. In other places it is declining 10 feet annually. According to the state, irrigation wells that cost millions of dollars are starting to be drilled to a depth of 2,500 feet. 

Exactly what to do, whatever path is taken, is a journey across a desert of policy and practice that is getting steadily harsher as options become more expensive and political divisions widen. “Nothing happens without consensus, you know,” Judd said. “That’s what I’m trying to build on these water issues.”

Though they make life in the Arizona desert more comfortable, air conditioning, private vehicles, and concrete highways are not the primary equipment that enabled one of history’s greatest desert civilizations. That distinction goes to the dams, reservoirs, and powerful pumps that secured access to the state’s surface and groundwater supplies. And to the aqueducts and irrigation canals that transported water to where it was needed.

Arizona’s impressive water infrastructure, most importantly, is the result of the disputes resolved and the consensus built on public policy, public investment, and oversight that unfolded in three overlapping policy-making eras in the 20^th century.

A fourth era dominated by extreme heat and drought is underway to save what’s been built. 

The short course goes like this. The first era, opening at the start of the 20^th century and continuing until World War Two, secured surface water, which provides nearly 60 percent of Arizona’s water supply. Roosevelt Dam (1911), Coolidge Dam (1930), Bartlett Dam (1939), and four others were completed to store the waters of three rivers to serve Phoenix and surrounding farms. Hoover Dam was completed in 1935 to store the waters of the Colorado River in Lake Mead, the country’s largest reservoir. And in 1944 Arizona signed the seven state compact, initially negotiated 22 years before, to share the waters of the Colorado River and gain 2.8 million acre-feet annually of its flow.

The second era — call it the groundwater alert years — started in 1938 when Arizona appointed its first commission to study the increasing reliance on water stored in the state’s aquifers, a 1.2 billion acre-feet reserve, comparable to what Lake Ontario holds. Groundwater supplies 40 percent of Arizona’s water. But many desert aquifers are essentially a finite water source, and differ in depth and distribution. A great deal of Arizona’s groundwater is unusable because it contains high concentrations of salts and other impurities. And when it is pumped the land above often sinks, causing big cracks and deep trenches on the surface.

In 1945, two years after the Legislature funded a U.S. Geological Survey investigation of serious depletion, Arizona approved the first Groundwater Code that required irrigation wells to be registered. Three years later Arizona prohibited drilling new irrigation wells in ten designated Critical Groundwater Areas. 

The third water supply era merged the surface water supply goals of the first era with the groundwater protection goals of the second. It opened in 1968 when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Colorado River Basin Project Act authorizing construction of the Central Arizona Project (CAP) by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation. The 336-mile aqueduct would eventually transport 1.5 million acre-feet of Colorado River water to Phoenix, Tucson, and Pinal County, the agricultural region that lies between them. Its primary purpose: supply the Phoenix-Tucson corridor and replace the groundwater being drained there with Colorado River water.

In 1979, six years into its construction, the aqueduct project came under scrutiny by the Carter administration, and not only because of its multi-billion dollar cost. Unconvinced that the project would actually lead to less groundwater pumping, the Interior Department threatened to shut down construction of the aqueduct unless Arizona adopted a more stringent groundwater code. The warning galvanized then Gov. Bruce Babbitt and the Arizona Legislature to enact the 1980 Groundwater Management Act, a regulatory regime to reduce groundwater pumping. It also established a new state agency, the Arizona Department of Water Resources, to administer the law. 

Essentially, the statute had three primary objectives. First, it halted expansion of irrigated farmland in Pinal County and regulated groundwater use in three other designated “active management areas” (AMAs) – Phoenix, Tucson, and Prescott. A fifth AMA in Santa Cruz, south of Tucson, was established in 1994.

Second, it set a 2025 goal for the Phoenix, Tucson, and Prescott AMAs to put as much water back into aquifers through artificial and natural recharge as was being withdrawn, a groundwater supply balance that lawmakers called “safe yield.” 

Third, it required developers to prove they had a 100-year assured supply of water before they c0uld sell subdivision lots. The law set a 1995 deadline for the Arizona Department of Water Resources to promulgate rules to meet the requirement. 

As that deadline approached and demand for new housing mounted, the Legislature jumped in to help a powerful constituency. Subdivision builders in undeveloped parts of the Phoenix and Tucson AMAs had no access to water from the Central Arizona Project and were having trouble meeting the 100-year assured water supply requirement. They pressed the Legislature to make it easier to get the water they needed. 

In 1993, the Legislature responded by establishing the Central Arizona Groundwater Replenishment District, a project administered by the operators of the Central Arizona Project that is required to replenish water in regional aquifers comparable to the amount of groundwater being pumped out for new developments. In most cases the replenishment source is the Colorado River.

With surface and groundwater supplies more secure than ever before, Arizona raced to the head of the national pack in economic growth, housing starts, and new jobs. In 2000, Arizona counted 4.8 million residents, 70 percent more than in 1980. The state has added 2.3 million more residents in the two decades since.

Phoenix and Tucson became magnets for sun seekers. Yuma, along the banks of the Colorado River in southwest Arizona, developed into the country’s winter leafy green capital. Sedona, near the Grand Canyon, surfaced as a nationally known retreat for spiritual healing and red rock adventure. Groundwater levels, particularly in Pinal County, actually started rising. 

Earth pushes back

That momentum carried into the first decades of the 21^st century even as a new era of water supply and demand opened. Call it the years of survival, when Earth’s power to heat and dry the state began to overwhelm the achievements of the first three eras, draining surface water supplies, increasing reliance on finite groundwater reserves, and causing water supply stress in almost every region. 

No consensus has yet developed for its opening date, though several are candidates. 

It could be 2000, the year the Southwest’s megadrought started and Lake Mead began its bathtub ring decline. It could be 2007, the year the Interior Department set guidelines on cutting Colorado River water supplies to Arizona if Lake Mead water levels continued to drop. 

Or it could be August 16, 2021, the day the U.S. Department of the Interior issued the first-ever water shortage declaration on the Colorado River. Arizona’s 2022 supply of Colorado River water was cut 512,000 acre-feet — a third of the water typically transported in the CAP canal — causing farmers in Pinal County to fallow 30 to 40 percent of their land and sustain $100 million in lost income.

To calm public anxiety, governments and water authorities stressed that the shortage declaration came as “no surprise.” It nevertheless produced an ominous mark on the graph of Arizona’s water supply and use. This was the year that the lines for rising municipal and industrial demand for water and falling supplies crossed, confirming the extent of water stress across Arizona.

In northern Arizona’s Mohave County, two studies found that at current rates of use the region’s aquifer would be empty before the end of the century. According to water hauling companies, groundwater pumping dropped aquifers so low in the Chino Valley (near Prescott) that thousands of residential wells have gone dry. 

Flagstaff, close to the Grand Canyon, has proposed building a 40-mile-long, $200 million-plus pipeline to tap a distant aquifer beneath a ranch. Authorities in Scottsdale, reacting to the federal water shortage declaration and requirements of its own drought contingency plan, set a December 31, 2022, deadline for shutting off access to a city-owned depot used by tanker trucks that deliver drinking water to over 500 homeowners in the Rio Verde Foothills north of the city. 

Phoenix, Tucson, and Prescott are withdrawing more groundwater than they are replacing and will not meet the 2025 “safe yield” goal, according to a 2021 study by the Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy. 

“We’ve reached that point. You can’t have it all,” said Kathleen Ferris, a senior research fellow at the Kyl Center who helped write the 1980 groundwater law and co-authored the 2021 study. “You can’t grow and grow and grow on these far-flung lands on groundwater, have agriculture just continue to be such a dominant water user, and put industries anywhere you want. You have to be smarter. We have to change how we grow.”

There is not yet consensus on that assertion in official Arizona. State water authorities point to data that shows Arizona’s water use is 7 million acre-feet annually, which is 30 percent or 3 million acre-feet less than in 1980 when the state had 4.5 million fewer people. A sizable share of that reduction, though, is the 200,000 fewer acres that Arizona farmers are no longer irrigating.

What is clear is that 2022 is the year that the limitations of Arizona’s 20^th century engineering and policy innovations are readily apparent. Groundwater withdrawals in and outside the AMAs are increasing. Water supplies from the Central Arizona Project, a paragon of design and industrial competence built to reliably substitute surface water for groundwater and solve water scarcity in one of the nation’s fastest growing states, became unreliable. 

“Arizona has come to this moment to more deeply acknowledge that groundwater is finite. But that is happening without the comfort of a new supply,” said Amy McCoy, a research scientist and water supply consultant who’s worked in Arizona and Colorado. “On the contrary, it’s happening with dramatic decline in Colorado River supplies, and in snowpack, and in water recharge in general. 

“That is where the state is at right now,” McCoy said. “We have one cup of tea. What are we going to do with it?”

Responses

That is an acute public interest challenge, just the kind that in previous eras was answered by federal, state, and local leadership sufficiently skilled in sorting out the details, negotiating differences, and reaching consensus on responses. That capacity is weaker now as fixes become more complex. 

The lift is especially heavy due to the limitations of the state Legislature — one of the forums that Arizona has traditionally turned to for help — which is controlled by Republicans. 

Last year, the state Republican Party and many of its elected lawmakers were primarily intent on conducting an audit and overturning the results of the 2020 election, the first loss in Arizona by a Republican presidential nominee since 1996. This year the party’s legislative focus is to game the system. In January, Republicans introduced 100 bills devoted to making voting harder. They include measures to stop early voting, end mail-in ballots, and enact other restrictions to curb participation. 

Even without significant legislative attention, a number of water-related ideas currently command an audience. A proposal to reduce groundwater demand that is supported by city and county authorities is nonetheless experiencing turbulence in the Legislature. In Mohave County, which depends on aquifers for all of its water, and where big pecan farms are blamed for dropping groundwater levels 200 feet over the last decade, officials support changing state law to allow local oversight of groundwater withdrawals.

State Rep. Regina Cobb, Republican chair of the House Appropriations Committee and a resident of Kingman, the county seat, has introduced legislation every year since 2017 to accomplish that objective. She’s been rebuffed four years in a row. This year, her last in the House, she’s asked Republican House Speaker Rusty Bowers for help. The prospects for passage are uncertain. 

“I’ve been told water is a private property right and leave it alone,” Cobb said. “My thought is it’s a private property right until it affects everyone in the county, and everyone in the state. Then it’s no longer private. It’s a resource all of us need.”

Another group of responses to water scarcity in Arizona is aspirational. Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, reflecting the popular views of industry, real estate, and the farm community, wants to develop new water supplies. Ducey budgeted $160 million last year to study the potential for what he and others call “augmentation.” That term reflects a number of approaches like building desalination plants, designing homes, streets, and parks to capture and store stormwater, and increase supplies from recycled wastewater. 

The latter already accounts for over 500,000 acre-feet of water available for landscaping, irrigating golf courses, and cooling Palo Verde, the state’s lone nuclear generating station. Ducey wants more. It could come from California.

Arizona and CAP are investing $6 million in a $30 million, three-year feasibility study by the Metropolitan Water District in Los Angeles that could lead to construction of a $3.4 billion wastewater recycling plant capable of producing 168,000 acre-feet annually. Instead of being flushed into the Pacific, the water would be available for the dryland metropolises. The new supply would offset some of the 4.4 million acre-feet that California is entitled to withdraw annually from the Colorado River. 

The new recycled supply also could provide more water for Arizona and other Colorado basin states, or it could be used to keep water levels in Lake Mead high enough to prevent more emergency shortage declarations that come with even larger cuts in the state’s surface water supply.

This year Ducey proposed establishing a new state agency, the Arizona Water Authority, to find new sources of water and called on the Legislature to approve $1 billion for it to spend. Ducey is particularly intent on building a desalination plant capable of delivering 250,000 acre-feet of water annually. The proposed location is the Gulf of California in Mexico. A plant of comparable size in Saudi Arabia took three years to build and opened in 2014 at a cost of $7 billion. 

Given the 10-year to 20-year timeline to plan, design, finance, and build major infrastructure projects, including the necessary pumping stations and pipelines for a Mexico-based plant, the price would be much greater. The cost of an acre-foot of water would be thousands of dollars. 

Nor is it clear where the new supply will go. Given the location, the new supply could go to Mexico to offset the 1.5 million acre-feet of Colorado River water that Mexico has been entitled to since 1944. In that case it would be a cross-boundary trade. Mexico’s allotment of Colorado River water would drop by the same amount that Arizona supply increases. 

Whatever occurs, if the plant is built, Arizonans will almost certainly spend considerably more for water than they do today. 

An even more frantic and fanciful idea, offered by Tim Dunn, a Republican House member from Yuma, is making its way around the state Capitol: somehow capturing water from the Mississippi River for use in Arizona. Such a project would rival China’s South-North Water Transfer Project — the construction of three immense water pipelines for siphoning water from the Yangtze River and transporting it 890 miles north to Beijing. 

The federal government contemplated a similar and ultimately unsuccessful diversion from out-of-state basins in the 1960s when it proposed diverting water from rivers in the Pacific Northwest to supply the Colorado River. 

And in 1968, following a deep drought and two comprehensive federal and state studies that projected severe deficits in water supply, Texas water authorities proposed withdrawing 12 million acre-feet of water each year from the Mississippi River near New Orleans. The proposal called for the new supply to be transported through a modern day Roman Empire-scale network that crossed Louisiana, spanned much of Texas, and encompassed 1,000 miles of concrete-lined canals, 67 new reservoirs, and electricity-generating stations to power hundreds of pumps. Voters rejected the idea principally due to the cost — $74 billion in current dollars.

A third group of proposed water supply solutions in Arizona is changing how existing supplies are allocated and transported around the state, which essentially means reducing agriculture’s share of available water. “The economic reality is that irrigated agriculture uses 70 percent of Arizona’s total water use for 2 percent of the state’s total G.D.P.,” said Bruce Babbitt, the former governor. “What we ought to be doing is setting up a regulatory system which provides incentives to move a small proportion of that irrigated agricultural use into urban industrial use. If you reduce the agriculture footprint in the state by 10 percent, that would free up nearly a million acre-feet of water, which would easily be enough for the entire foreseeable future for urban industrial use.”

Babbitt’s idea is gaining traction. The Colorado River Indian Tribes, who farm 80,000 irrigated acres, have rights to more than 600,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water. The tribe is seeking federal legislation to allow it to market some of its allocation to users outside of reservation lands, located on the banks of the river. 

South of Phoenix, the Gila River Indian Community farms 35,000 acres and is already marketing some of its water entitlement, which is more than 650,000 acre-feet annually. Since 2016, the tribe has kept 370,000 acre-feet in Lake Mead to help slow the reservoir’s decline. And though the August 2021 shortage declaration cut its Colorado River water supply by 41,000 acre-feet, the tribe agreed to leave almost 130,000 more acre-feet in Lake Mead this year, receiving nearly $36 million dollars from the state and federal government. 

Arizona’s groundwater law allows for water from several aquifers in rural farming counties west of Phoenix to be tapped and moved into the metropolitan area. But moving water from a rural region to the Phoenix metro area also has ignited fierce opposition. Queen Creek, a fast-growing Phoenix suburb, purchased a small farm in Cibola, along the Colorado River, to gain access to 2,000 acre-feet of water annually to serve residents and businesses. The transfer, supported by the state Department of Water Resources, was protested by citizens and elected leaders from Colorado River counties, among them Rep. Cobb, who has introduced the groundwater oversight bills. 

The regulatory process also is an impediment. Most basin-to-basin water transfers would require transport in the Central Arizona Project canal, requiring approval by the Department of the Interior. The department is reviewing the Queen Creek transfer. 

A reckoning in Cochise County

On a temperate January day, as the sun began to set on the dark peaks west of Willcox, Peggy Judd explained the intricacies and difficulties of securing Cochise County’s groundwater supplies. 

The dropping water table, which appears to be principally due to aggressive pumping for irrigation, is causing subsidence and opening deep fissures in the earth, some of which are damaging highways. But in a county that has been losing population for most of the century, and where old downtowns are a collection of empty and ragged structures, agriculture is attracting new jobs and tens of millions of dollars in investment. 

“It’s hard. We all just need to stop arguing,” Judd said. Then she grabbed her phone and started dialing. “I need you talk to this guy,” she said. “Get his thoughts.”

“This guy” is Calvin Allred who, at age 75, has spent most of his adult life as a lawyer in Willcox, where he moved in 1978 and represented many of the county’s farmers and ranchers. Raised on a farm, Allred returned to active agriculture production in 2003 when he started growing 800 acres of pecans. Two instincts guided his farming principles. First, Allred recognized that pecans were poised for growth in Arizona’s productive farm sector. Cochise County, with 1,100 farms and nearly a million acres of farmland, was a sensible place to settle. 

His second instinct was the certainty that in the hard work of drilling wells, planting trees, and raising food, regulation was not needed since Cochise County seemed to have water and land in abundance. “The agricultural footprint then was sustainable,” he said.

Though Allred did not know it at the time, starting his farm in Cochise at the dawn of this century coincided with a boom in the county’s farm sector. Cochise is now one of the largest producers of pecans and pistachios in Arizona, which is a $52 million crop for the state. The same virtues that lured Allred — land and groundwater — also attracted other big water-thirsty farms, including a Minnesota-based dairy company that built one of the largest agriculture operations in the Southwest. Riverview LLP’s two dairies in Cochise manage a herd of 120,000 animals, and grow feed on 39,000 irrigated acres. The dairies and the irrigated fields, according to a company spokesman, draw 110,000 acre-feet of water annually from the Willcox aquifer, which is close to what Tucson’s residents use.

Not surprisingly, drinking water wells have gone dry for homes closest to the dairy. Vance Williams, a disabled Air Force veteran who lives on $1,200 a month, owns one of the wells. It dried up a year ago, forcing him to spend $1,600 he could ill afford on a 2,500-gallon water tank and pump. He pays $100 a month for 1,500 gallons hauled to his tank by truck. His life, never easy, has become much more turbulent.

“We’re really careful about what we use,” he explained while standing in front of the home where he lives with his girlfriend. “A few gallons for cooking. Quick shower every three days. I really can’t afford $100 for water. It’s a saga, man. It’s kind of horrific.”

Hundreds more Cochise County homeowners are contending with dropping water levels in their wells, which could result in huge costs — $50,000 or more — to deepen them or drill new ones. Steve Kiesel and Mark Spencer are neighbors who own handsome desert homes southwest of Willcox. Their homes are close enough to share a well that has a finite life. 

Water levels are dropping 5 feet a year. “I would say right now it’s not an immediate emergency,” Kiesel said. “I also would say with where we are right now with water levels, we have 20 years tops before it goes dry. Do we pay for a new one at that point? Don’t know.”

That’s not the only threat from dropping aquifers. Three times in the last five years land subsidence split apart two highways and rangeland just up the road. “It’s not just the water,” Spencer said. “Earth fissures are showing up all over the county. You’re thinking, ‘What do we do if one shows up in our driveway?’ The thought of moving is always around. But who’s going to buy?”

More than 50 miles north, Calvin Allred confronts similar risks. He says his wells also are dropping over 5 feet a year. Keeping the farm operating likely means reworking existing wells to reach water 1,000 feet below the surface, or drilling new irrigation wells that could cost $500,000 each. 

He’s come to accept that the solution is some sort of local oversight program that prevents excessive pumping from Cochise aquifers. In other words, a rebalancing of priorities to give more weight to the public interest. 

Williams, Kiesel, and Spencer are actively participating in a new local campaign, similar to the one being organized in Mohave County, to establish a rural water management area in Cochise County. Allred won’t get involved. In 2015 he participated in a local effort to bar new irrigation wells in the county and prevent any expansion of irrigated farmland. That plan would have required state approval. The Cochise campaign got rough and divided the farm community. 

As a grower, Allred has real-world knowledge of water and economics. As a lawyer, he knows the outlines of water law. And as a longtime Cochise County resident, he’s intimately aware of differing opinions, clashing private and public interests, and the unforgiving politics that determine water supply, demand, and use. 

How does Allred assess which way the balance should tilt? He put it this way: “My neighbor says he has the right to pump as much water as he wants to raise his crop. But what about my right to have enough water to raise mine?” 

This project was made possible by a fellowship awarded by Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for The American West.

The post Unsafe yield: Severe drought, dead wells, political division are pushing Arizona steadily closer to water supply peril appeared first on The Counter.

River water lost

It’s a lot of water on paper, amounting to 8 percent of the 7 million acre-feet of water that Arizona uses annually. And it’s almost 20 percent of the 2.8 million acre-feet that Arizona is legally entitled to receive each year from the Colorado River. 

Arizona was already using less Colorado River water in the years before the declaration, and there is wiggle room in the math for how much the state will actually go without. Nevertheless, the federal declaration was a body blow. It formalized what the state has managed to avoid for a century. Arizona’s demand for water in metropolitan regions and industry has crossed the line delineating diminishing water supply. The consequence is a slow motion collision that puts Arizona’s desert economy and way of life, along with its governing capacity to adjust and evolve, in the direct path of nature’s power to drive out and dry up much of what was built. 

State lawmakers and business executives have anticipated the confrontation for nearly a decade and insist that there is no immediate crisis. More than 13 million acre-feet of water — a nearly two-year supply — has been purposefully stored in underground reserves specifically for use in emergencies. Republican Gov. Doug Ducey has convened expert committees. He’s also urging the Legislature to establish a new state agency, the Arizona Water Authority, and commit over $1 billion to a new strategy for securing additional sources of water, like building desalination plants and harvesting flood waters from the Mississippi River. Arizona and the six other Colorado River Basin states have a 2026 deadline to reach a new agreement on sharing the river’s water. 

Invoking words of assurance principally designed to quell anxiety in the markets for housing and new business starts, state leaders display determined allegiance to the message that Arizona has sufficient supply and know-how to continue to thrive. As Gov. Ducey likes to say: “Arizona is open for business.”

That’s true, for the time being, for the more than 5 million people in Phoenix and its suburbs, and the 1 million residents of metropolitan Tucson. Both cities have developed secure sources of water, and applied effective techniques of water conservation, recycling, and reuse. 

But both cities also are served by the Colorado River. Phoenix receives 40 percent, and Tucson 60 percent of their water from the river. Climatologists project the worst is yet to come and the river could lose 3 million more acre-feet from its flow by mid-century, or another 20 to 30 percent. If that occurs, water supplies for Phoenix and Tucson would be substantially cut. Residents and businesses will contend with dramatic shifts in lifestyle and water consumption. Green grass, swimming pools, golf course water hazards, even golf courses would be amenities of the past. The price of water could rise well above the cost of electricity and thereby influence all sorts of economic outcomes like changes in housing values, residential construction, and business starts.

Drier conditions projected

If those meteorological projections are accurate, and if decades can be described as a race for time, Arizona has about a generation to figure out, finance, and execute a new resilience strategy. The state appears to have two paths, and just two, to pursue. One that rallies federal, state, tribal, and local governments to unify opposing forces and bring water supply and demand into balance in the era of accelerating climate change. The second path is more perilous, strewn with impediments of politics, civic disagreement, financing, litigation, and inaction that yields a catastrophe where everything goes wrong.  

“Most of the press, it’s the second one not the first one,” said Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources. “There’s hard policy choices to be made. For instance, how much farming do we need? Where will you get your farm products? Are we going to rely on another country for our food? There’s that kind of debate that’s going on.

“Part of our mission statement actually has the words ‘lifestyle.’ So what lifestyle do you want? Do you want not one green thing in the city? City environments to the point where use is 18 gallons per capita? We need a different, more holistic look at how everything fits together. It’s conservation. It’s about augmentation. It’s about a whole bunch of things.”

 “We’ve got 20 or 30 years,” added Grady Gammage Jr., an attorney who’s written extensively about water and is a distinguished fellow at Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy. “We’re still so addicted to growth as the solution to everything. But where’s the water going to come from? I used to tell people, ‘Relax. We don’t need to worry about that for a long time.’ Not anymore. Now is the time that we need to worry about that.”

Outside metro areas the new sound of alarm

That message is starting to penetrate more deeply. There’s a reason. A dress rehearsal for contending with serious water shortage is in process for 1 million residents who don’t live in Arizona’s two big metro regions. During a month of frontline reporting in Arizona, Circle of Blue encountered unmistakable signals of extreme water stress: 

• Wells have run dry for thousands of residents who rely on groundwater for drinking, from Cochise County in the southeast, to Maricopa County north of Phoenix, to the Chino Valley north of Prescott.

• Industrial livestock and nut farms have settled in Cochise County, and in Mohave County in the north. Because demand has increased, and moisture to recharge groundwater reserves has diminished, aquifers are dropping 5 feet a year. Irrigation wells on existing farms already have gone dry and more are in jeopardy of going dry. 

• Water scarcity is driving two of Arizona’s fastest growing business sectors. Water hauling companies are adding trucks and drivers to keep pace with demand. And water well drilling companies, prompted by customer lists so long that orders are filled six or more months after they are made, are buying new equipment and hiring more staff. 

• The San Carlos Reservoir, formed by 91-year-old Coolidge Dam, is designed to store 1 million acre-feet of water from the Gila River to irrigate 100,000 acres of farmland between Phoenix and Tucson. Rain and snow melt in the high desert where the reservoir is located have been so altered by climate change that it’s filled only once since 1980 and now holds a mere 37,000 acre-feet.
  
• Though 40 of its 140 miles are protected in a national conservation area famed for wildlife and migrating birds, the San Pedro River in southeast Arizona is hardly a river at all. The aquifers that sustained its flow have been drawn down by extreme heat, drought, and hundreds of wells drilled for housing. Once promoted as one of the state’s last “free flowing” rivers, the San Pedro is now but a trickle, and altogether dry along much of its path.

• The dollar value of water is climbing to heights never before seen in the state or hardly anticipated. Arizona last year approved the sale of 2,083 acre-feet of Colorado River water annually to Queen Creek, a Phoenix suburb. The cost of the deal: $21 million or $10,000 per acre-foot. Queen Creek is anxious to pay. It needs the water. The city’s population — 60,000 — is 15 times higher than in 2000. Its water demand is 10 times higher. 

The tightening supply of water, in effect, is testing Arizona’s growth-focused operating system, and producing losers and winners. That is especially true in Pinal County, a Connecticut-size expanse of mountains, desert, farmland, copper mines, Native American reservations, and growing cities set between Phoenix and Tucson. One other feature distinguishes Pinal: about 100 miles of the 336-mile-long Central Arizona Project, one of the country’s longest aqueducts that transports Colorado River water from Lake Havasu to south of Tucson. At its peak in the early 1990s the project delivered 550,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water annually to irrigate a $2.3 billion dairy-alfalfa-cotton-melon farm sector, one of the most prosperous in the country. 

Because of agreements that Arizona reached from 2004 to 2019 as the river waned, the federal shortage declaration last August cut the water supply to Pinal County’s four irrigation districts from more than 200,000 acre-feet in the 2000s to 31,000 acre-feet in 2022. The state has promised $40 million to drill or rehabilitate groundwater wells to make up a portion of the loss. 

Pinal’s pain

On a crisp January morning, Atanacio “Nacho” Gonzalez returned from a distant field to his Pinal County farm headquarters, within sight of the treeless Table Top mountains, and described what drought and water shortage are doing to 1,500 acres of Bermuda grass and alfalfa that he raises for horses and livestock. 

“I’ll give you an idea of where we are,” said Gonzalez, who is 62 years old and has farmed this piece of ground since 2002. “Before the cuts I order 18 CFS for 1,000 acres.” (That’s 18 cubic feet per second or 36 acre-feet per day.) “I apply that nonstop for about two weeks at a time, then alfalfa grows or grass grows. We do that, usually, nine times out of a year. 

“What am I going to get this year?” he continues. “Very little, according to what my water companies tell me.”

A University of Arizona analysis published last year projected that because of the federal water declaration Pinal farm income would drop $100 million annually. It’s not a killing blow. It is, however, the latest of the economic hits steadily driving the Pinal farm community to threatened status. Between 2012 and 2017, according to the U.S. Agricultural Census, almost 180 Pinal farms went out of business, a nearly 20 percent reduction. Some 100,000 fewer acres were farmed, an 8 percent decline. 

Gonzalez is one of 176 farmers who receive water from the San Carlos Irrigation and Drainage District, all of whom are contending with a double dose of water shortage. First is the loss of all Colorado River water delivered by the Central Arizona Project. Second is what’s happening with the San Carlos Reservoir, which is 97 percent empty. Turning on wells to supply groundwater will not make up the difference.

“Our wells don’t put out so much water,” Gonzalez said. “I’m thinking that I’ll grow on 600 acres, not 1,000. How many cuttings can we do on 600? I’m hoping to do seven to nine. But that’s yet to be seen. We’ll have a 40 percent reduction in the crop.”

Tribal water abundance

The federal shortage declaration also produced winners, especially the Gila River Indian Community. Most of the tribe’s 372,000-acre reservation is spread across the northern section of Pinal County. In 2004 Congress approved a huge water settlement that confirmed the tribe’s right to more than 650,000 acre-feet of water, about half from the Colorado River. The long-term goal of the tribe, whose ancestors date back to the people who inhabited the region 8,000 years ago, is to restore its ancestral farming ground to about 75,000 acres. It currently farms about 35,000 acres. A $92 million appropriation from the Interior Department is funding the expansion of the tribe’s irrigation network. 

In the meantime, the nearly 23,000-member tribe is marketing some of the 311,800 acre-feet of Colorado River water it is entitled to each year. It agreed to lease 33,000 acre-feet annually for 25 years, starting this year, to operators of the Central Arizona Project to support residential development. As a requirement of the 2004 settlement, it leases 41,000 more acre-feet annually to supply drinking water to cities in the Phoenix region.

Since 2016, it’s also kept 370,000 acre-feet in Lake Mead to help slow the reservoir’s decline. And though the August shortage declaration cut its Colorado River water supply by 41,000 acre-feet, the tribe agreed to leave nearly 130,000 more acre-feet in Lake Mead this year. That amount is most of Arizona’s share of 500,000 acre-feet that the state, California, and Nevada agreed to keep in the lake last December. The price for that water: $274 an acre-foot, or $35.6 million. In effect, water has become an annual revenue item nearly as significant as the tribe’s three casinos.

Tribal officials did not make themselves available for an interview. But Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis, the tribal leader, said in a 2019 news release that the tribe’s goal in leasing water was to “protect Lake Mead,” and “ensure that water supplies are available for an important sector of Arizona’s economy.”

By economy, Lewis principally meant real estate construction, the engine that has propelled the state’s growth for 70 years. Pinal is an example. In 1950, just as the post-war population boom started, Pinal was still a lightly settled farm and mining county with 43,000 residents, nearly 1,200 farmers, 2.5 million acres of farmland, and 13,000 homes. 

By 2020 the shrinking agriculture sector counted less than 800 farms and 1.1 million acres of farmland. But the county’s population soared to 425,000 people living in 181,000 homes, most of them built on former farmland. 

Pinal County’s long-term plan forecasts that 5 million more residents could show up. At current rates of Arizona’s growth, that means that by mid-century virtually all new state residents will settle in the county. They potentially could if there is sufficient water. 

The following data points are important. In 2020, the latest year for complete figures, Pinal’s annual water demand was 950,000 acre-feet; 40 percent from the Central Arizona Project and almost all of the balance from groundwater, according to state data. Farming used most of it, 750,000 acre-feet per year. Cities and industry used just 35,000 acre-feet.

The county anticipates that at current rates of water use serving 5 million more residents, equivalent to 1.5 million new residences, would require 840,000 to 1.7 million acre-feet of additional water supplies every year. 

Where’s that water coming from? The Colorado? Not likely. And the state Department of Water Resources has changed its view of how much groundwater will be available. 

In 2019 the agency took a fresh look with new groundwater models and announced it made a mistake. Its newest assessment of supply and demand showed that Pinal’s water demand over the next few decades would be 8 million acre-feet over and above the available supply.

Last year the state halted issuing water supply certificates for housing subdivisions. The announcement, though, hasn’t curtailed new construction for housing. Yet. From January 2019 to December 2021, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, Pinal’s municipal authorities issued construction permits for 161,519 new homes that already had been approved. 

This project was made possible by a fellowship awarded by Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for The American West.

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PEER obtained 78,000 records spanning three decades through Freedom of Information Act requests. The data, which covers 13 Western states from 1997 to 2019 and holds information from every BLM field office in those states, plots 21,000 allotments on one interactive map. “This map is useful for individuals to be able to see what’s going on around them, become active and really work to hold the BLM accountable in the areas that are important to them,” Rosenthal told High Country News. “It’s really empowering for people to be aware of what’s going on on their public lands.” (Disclosure: Rosenthal is a sibling of HCN’s managing digital editor.)

The data shows that vast areas of the land are degraded. Some acreage isn’t assessed at all, and of the roughly 109,000 million acres that are, half fail to meet rangeland health standards. Struggling allotments, while documented across the West, are predominantly found in cold desert ecoregions, often in the rain shadow of mountain ranges. These areas are characterized by lack of moisture and extreme temperature swings. 

In six states — California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Wyoming — more than 40% of assessed lands are failing land-health standards. In Nevada, 83% of assessed allotments do not meet standards, while data from Idaho recorded that 78% of assessed allotments failed rangeland health standards. In New Mexico, however, only 2% of assessed allotments are failing. 

High Country News reached out to the BLM with questions prior to publication, and the agency responded with a written statement after the story originally went to press: “While we disagree with some of PEER’s conclusions as the analysis was at a large scale and missed some on the ground improvements, we acknowledge there is work to be done in the face of a changing climate and other challenges,” according to the statement. “The BLM will prioritize assessments for areas where land health standards have never been evaluated or where standards are not being met and is also working to improve how it reports land health data.”

Flourishing landscapes are integral to the public and economic health of the West’s communities and Indigenous nations, particularly those whose ancestral lands are involved. Research by Headwaters Economics and the Center for Western Priorities extensively documents the tremendous value that public lands hold for nearby gateway communities. But a prolonged megadrought in the Western U.S. poses an ongoing threat to already stressed landscapes and the communities that depend on them, as do overlapping issues, including climate change, the spread of invasive species like cheatgrass, and the increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires. 

PEER’s analysis finds that livestock grazing is the primary culprit behind land degradation. The BLM leases more than half of its acreage to ranchers as grazing allotments for cattle, sheep and other livestock. Although everything from drought and wildfire to off-road vehicles can impact rangeland health, livestock grazing is a significant cause of the failing land-health standards of 72% of the public land. That’s about 40 million acres. 

This finding is consistent throughout the West, sometimes at a large scale: A massive, over 950,000-acre allotment in the Rock Springs area of Wyoming is just one of the areas that identifies livestock grazing as a significant cause for declining land health. Other stressors such as invasive species, wild horses and extreme stream degradation account for the poor health of an additional 15 million acres. 

BLM grazing lands that fail to meet standards overlap substantially with greater sage grouse breeding areas and habitat. Ecoregions like the Wyoming Basin, Northern Basin and Range and Snake River Plains owe their failure to the presence of livestock on more than 40% of the lands assessed to date. Other animal species are implicated too; for example, some allotments in the home of the threatened desert tortoise are also failing to meet standards. 

PEER shared its findings in a meeting in early January with top agency officials, including BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning and Deputy Director of Policy and Programs Nada Culver. “It was surprising to us that a lot of them didn’t even know there was grazing within wilderness areas,” Rosenthal said. “I feel like there’s a lot of unfamiliarity with the rangeland health standards data.” But Rosenthal also categorized the meeting as a “positive step” and said that she felt the leaders were “curious and interested in making change.”

The post There are millions of acres of ‘failing’ rangelands, data shows appeared first on The Counter.

Some groups that sell seeds and food-bearing plants say the option is being used. Through her work at Tilth, Cacciata says she has had a number of people purchase edible plant starts — broccoli, beets, leafy greens and beyond — with SNAP benefits at events like Tilth’s annual Edible Plant Sale and the seasonal farm stand. 

Locals like Slighte are so passionate about this option that they make instructional videos to share online as a way to expand awareness of it. Using online platforms like TikTok, Slighte — under the handle @NeurodivergentGranny — shows people how to double the value of their SNAP benefits at farmers markets, where she purchased tomato plants last year, from which she saved seeds for future harvest. Even during the winter, the foods she harvested and dehydrated from her first year of having a “major” patio garden provide about 10% of her food, she says. In the early fall, she was able to grow about 30% of her own food. 

DeLong says the process of using SNAP at farmers markets can be awkward, involving tokens and Monopoly-style money. “I want to use the state’s money at the farmers markets to support local farmers. But it’s really just like a strange belittling interaction,” they said.

Not every seed and start retailer participates in this program, let alone realizes they might, which can add to the awkwardness of trying to use SNAP benefits for gardening. Cacciata says grocery stores are more likely than nurseries or garden centers to accept SNAP, since they already handle food purchases made with SNAP, but even grocery clerks might not know it’s a viable option. 

“If you’ve got cashiers that don’t understand that you can do that, then you’re met with an immediate barrier, immediate judgment. And so all your plans are completely thwarted before you even start,” Slighte says.

Aimée Damman, director of marketing and communications at Swansons Nursery, says she doesn’t know of anyone who has used SNAP to purchase seeds or plants. While the nursery donates plants to the Ballard Food Bank and seeds to the Giving Garden Network, among other organizations, it doesn’t accept SNAP. “I don’t think [the option] is very widely known,” she says. “We haven’t had any demand.” If demand arose, Swanson’s would need to adjust its sales technology, and may actually have to offer more food-related items to even become eligible to accept SNAP benefits. 

Urban Feed & Garden in Beacon Hill doesn’t accept SNAP benefits, but General Manager Risa Wolfe says she thinks using the benefits on seeds and starts sounds like a great idea. Urban Feed & Garden donates seeds to community gardens, and donated about $1,200 worth of seeds to Nurturing Roots last winter. She thinks her staff would be willing to accept SNAP benefits, but no one affiliated with SNAP has reached out to educate the staff on the business side of the program. “If somebody came to me with SNAP benefits, I wouldn’t know what to do,” she says. 

Other hurdles to growing food

Once someone has seeds in hand, they need gardening maintenance supplies, time to garden and container space or land. 

“Land access is the big one,” Matter says, stressing the importance of accessible community gardens. “Time to garden can be an impediment, but if folks have growing space at their home or nearby, this makes it more practical.” 

“You could get a pack of carrot seeds, but if you don’t have land for the carrot to grow into it, then it’s not really worth much,” adds DeLong.

People in King County have unequal access to these resources. Backyards are increasingly scarce, not all multifamily housing residents are able to grow plants in containers or on roofs, and while Seattle’s P-Patch program makes many acres of land available to the community for gardening, including food gardening, the P-Patches can have yearslong waitlists. 

People also need educational resources to be successful. In addition to distributing fresh fruits and vegetables, a number of local organizations also provide gardening education, including Tilth Alliance, The Beet Box, Solid Ground, Nurturing Roots Farm, Black Star Farmers and the Black Farmers Collective’s Yes Farm. 

The King County Seed Library system and Plant Based Food Share also share seeds and starts. 

Bill Thorness, coordinator of the seed library, says the popularity of gardening during the pandemic reduced the seed library’s seed supply. “Because the seed companies have been so busy, we haven’t had as many donations. And part of our model includes holding seed swaps where gardeners can bring seeds to share, but we haven’t done that for two years. We are talking about holding an outdoor one this spring,” he says. 

Some food banks also share seeds. Mara Bernard, the community farms and facilities manager of the White Center Food Bank, says the food bank last year distributed 4,000 seed packets and 2,000 plant starts.

In Slighte’s experience, growing any amount of food with whatever space and time people can find during a time of great anxiety is valuable for producing more than just fresh produce. 

“When you use SNAP benefits for gardening, you’re experiencing a type of self-sufficiency that you don’t get to experience when you’re low-income,” Slighte says. “And it’s that nontangible benefit that is so incredibly helpful to your mental health.”

Update: This article was updated at 12:38 p.m. on March 3, 2021, with language clarifying that many nurseries and plant stores may not currently be eligible to accept SNAP benefits. The program as it stands requires retailers to qualify based on either providing a certain number of food products, or making a certain amount of revenue from selling food products. 

The post For some families, gardening starts with SNAP benefits appeared first on The Counter.

In places like the Pacific Northwest, there are few solutions except to dramatically reduce emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases. And even then, fishers like Bailey will have to adapt to the changes already in motion—to learn, as we all must, to live in a profoundly altered world. That’s where the oxygen sensors come in. Researchers distributed them among volunteers from Oregon’s crab fleet to better understand hypoxia, and to help crabbers adjust to changing conditions.

Like many who’ve spent their lives at sea, Bailey is a keen observer of the ocean, attuned to its subtle patterns and mercurial moods. But until now, he’s had no way of knowing when oxygen levels dip low enough to kill crabs. “If we can get ahead of it, then we can get the gear out of there before they die,” he explains as we leave port and motor south over glassy swells. “That would be huge.”

Francis Chan stumbled upon Oregon’s hypoxia problem almost by accident in 2002, soon after he moved from New York to work as a postdoctoral researcher at OSU. He was planning his first cruise aboard the university’s research ship to measure ocean chemistry when he got a call from state officials about a series of strange reports: commercial fishers had pulled up pots of dead and dying crabs, and beachgoers had noticed dead fish and invertebrates washing up on shore. Underwater surveys found offshore reefs abandoned by rockfish, which divers found huddled in the shallows, laboring to breathe.

When Chan went to sea a few days later, he quickly found the culprit. Measurements revealed that coastal waters were nearly devoid of oxygen. Does this happen all the time? he recalls thinking. “I didn’t know if that was weird or not.”

In Oregon, Chan kept studying the problem after that first episode in 2002, taking a job as a professor at OSU and helping lead a West Coast science panel and task force dedicated to hypoxia and ocean acidification, which tend to go together. Still, he felt frustrated that scientists couldn’t tell crabbers where and when hypoxic events would hit, or what degree and duration of hypoxia will actually kill a crab.

Researchers do issue forecasts of oxygen levels for the northeast Pacific coast, but they don’t have the resolution and accuracy most fishers need for day-to-day operations. The forecasting models are hampered by a lack of data on a phenomenon that can change over a few days or a few kilometers. Until recently, only a handful of scientific buoys and sporadic research cruises collected oxygen measurements, leaving much of the ocean unsampled. “If we had a map, this is the perfect time to draw sea monsters,” Chan says.

So Chan and two other OSU scientists, Jack Barth and Kipp Shearman, teamed up with a former graduate student to develop small, low-cost oxygen sensors that could fit in crab pots. Crabbers cover a lot of water, and the researchers hoped they could help fill in the gaps in scientists’ knowledge. If fishers could see the data right away, Chan thought, it might also help them cope with fluctuating oxygen levels. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration agreed to fund the project, and Linus Stoltz, another OSU graduate student, began looking for partners in the crab fleet.

Dave Bailey was eager to help.

After three hours of cruising along steep, forested shore, we arrive at a long line of buoys marking Bailey’s first string of crab pots. His two crew members, who spent the trip playing cribbage and dozing in cramped bunks, snap into action. Mitchell Whittier, a curly-headed rookie, pulls on rubber boots and overalls and heads out to prepare mackerel and clam for rebaiting the pots. Robert Werder, a veteran crabber of few words, steps into a pair of orange bibs, lights a cigarette, and takes his position beside a giant motorized pulley mounted on the side of the boat.

As Bailey steers past a buoy, Werder uses a wooden rod to hook the line connecting the buoy to the crab pot and slings it over the pulley. The pulley grips the rope and starts hauling it in, flinging sea gunk in every direction, including onto Werder’s impassive face, where a cigarette still dangles from his lips. When the pot surfaces, the two men hoist it onboard, open the lid, and sort the crabs, tossing back females, which are distinguishable by their beehive-shaped abdominal flaps. Small males go overboard and big males plunge into the holding tank. The rest tumble into a rectangular bin for measuring.

The bin reminds me of a sink full of dirty dishes that happen to have claws. Some of the crabs land right side up, their armored orange legs crouched in a defensive pose, while others flail helplessly on their bumpy, purple backs. Most seem to accept their fate and quiet after a minute or so. I watch a few plucky animals clamber over their neighbors and attempt to escape. But every time, as if guided by some sixth sense, Whittier or Werder swipes them back in with a gloved hand.

The crew races to refill the bait boxes and shove the pot overboard before the boat reaches the next buoy. The process unfolds so fast that I miss the first few oxygen sensors when they come up inside pots. That’s by design: Chan’s team took great pains to make sure the devices wouldn’t interfere with crabbing. They worked out the kinks in 2020 during a pandemic-addled pilot season; Stoltz even made YouTube videos to show fishers how to use the system, since he couldn’t visit them in person. This year, the researchers sent out 38 instruments on eight boats.

I finally get a look at a device in action when Whittier and Werder pause to install the spare sensor that Bailey showed me at the dock, strapping it deftly to the bottom of a pot. While underwater, it collects measurements every 15 minutes. During its brief return to the surface, it uploads the data to the deck box, which displays a graph of oxygen levels and water temperature. Or that’s the idea, anyway. Though I keep my eye on the screen all afternoon, nothing appears. There’s some kind of glitch and the data doesn’t transfer until Bailey’s next fishing trip.

The crew, meanwhile, has other concerns. After a late start and a pulley malfunction, it’s past 7:00 p.m. and they’re not yet a quarter of the way done. The pots bring up plenty of crabs. But Whittier and Werder can only keep males with shells larger than 16 centimeters across—about the length of a five-dollar bill. And as they measure the crabs with metal calipers, it becomes clear that most fall short. Whittier looks despondent as he throws back the majority of their catch.

Bailey has also noticed troubling changes in the water. When we reached the second string of pots, the sea turned murky and brownish-red. “This is like the setup for a dead zone,” Bailey observed. Later, a preliminary look at data from another nearby sensor will reveal that oxygen levels in the waters below us flickered close to zero.

Up close, the realities of a dead zone are hard to watch. In 2017, a camera operated by Oregon fisheries officials captured a dozen crabs suffocating inside a research pot. In the footage, the water turns cloudy and the crabs become agitated, then subdued. A few try to crawl over their companions, as if looking for an escape, but the rest lie still except to wave a wan leg every now and then. Within a week, all are dead.

When hypoxia strikes, crabs trapped in pots may be doomed, but scientists don’t know whether their free-roaming counterparts can outrun a similar fate. “That’s the million-dollar question,” says Caren Braby, marine resources program manager for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and cochair of the state’s ocean acidification and hypoxia council.

Conventional wisdom says they should have no trouble; crabs can travel a few kilometers a day. But researchers have documented crab die-offs that appear linked to hypoxic events. During a severe episode in 2006, underwater surveys showed lifeless crabs strewn across the ocean floor. There were so many, they looked “like jelly beans in a jar,” a state official told The Oregonian.

Mass stranding events also suggest that low-oxygen conditions can develop fast enough to take many animals by surprise, says Jennifer Hagen, the marine policy adviser for the Quileute Tribe in La Push, Washington, which recently established its own oxygen monitoring station to track hypoxia in tribal fishing waters. “If you look at what species wash up on the beaches, it’s fast-moving and slow-moving species,” Hagen says.

Such devastation underscores the need to shore up ecosystems against oxygen loss and other environmental changes, says Chan. “We know, as a society, how to erode resilience. We do that really, really well,” he says. “Let’s change course. Let’s think about, What are things we can do to support resilience?” That could mean expanding marine protected areas, which may help species weather environmental stressors by removing fishing pressure, or developing fishing regulations to ensure that animals can survive and reproduce.

The Dungeness crab fishery has already established size and sex requirements in an effort to support a sustainable population, and in 2018, the Quinault Indian Nation in Washington even closed crab season early because of hypoxia. Protecting adults during low-oxygen episodes may help buttress the long-term health of the population, according to a recent study.

Braby says researchers will learn more over the next decade about whether the animals are adapting or succumbing to hypoxia, and by extension, how one of the most lucrative fisheries on the west coast will fare. Already, some see worrying signs. In 2021, Oregon’s crab catch came in well below average, perhaps because of severe hypoxic events in 2017 and 2018, says Tim Novotny, the communications manager for the Oregon Dungeness Crab Commission. (On the other hand, 2022 has been a banner year.)

Bailey has no illusions about what lies ahead. As a crabber who fishes late into the season, when hypoxia peaks, he’s already lost income and struggled to keep a crew when there’s no crab to sell. The episodes also take an emotional toll, he says. “There’s nothing sadder than pulling up a pot with dead crabs in it.”

The oxygen sensors offer a glimmer of hope, however faint, for fishers inundated with bleak news about the state of the ocean. “They hear a lot about the negative things,” Braby says. “They don’t hear a lot about what they can do in response.” Perhaps, armed with better data, crabbers can stay a step ahead of changing conditions. Perhaps this is what adaptation looks like: empowering people, one by one, to navigate an uncertain future.

But that’s a concern for another day. Aboard the Morningstar II, the crew doesn’t find any dead crabs, and the holding tank finally starts to fill as darkness falls. Late into the night, Bailey steers the boat through hanging sheets of moonlit mist. “Werewolf fog,” he calls it. Seabirds explode into view as they cross the running lights and settle on the undulating sea. They look a lot like the buoys Bailey searches for in the murk; he’s spent whole nights chasing them in circles.

Flood it

One promising alternative to water intensive farmland involves simply constructing giant ponds — called groundwater recharge basins — strategically designed to capture and store floodwater underground. These are some of the most likely land-repurposing projects, said Ann Hayden, a policy expert at the Environmental Defense Fund, mainly because they would benefit people, the ecosystem and the broader agricultural industry. Birds and pollinators can always use the habitat, and storing water underground helps chronic depletion of groundwater, which, in turn, helps communities dependent on wells depleted by overpumping.

The San Joaquin Valley is a giant floodplain; before 19th century developers drained the marshes and diverted tributaries for agriculture, it was home to the largest lake in the West. Recharge basins absorb floodwater, create wetland habitat and address the impact of decades of groundwater mining, according to California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment, a report intended to guide government policy on adaptation.

The assessment also predicts longer droughts, but when wet years do come, the rainfall will be more intense, and recharge basins can play a vital role in storing the water underground.

Farm it (Yes, you read that right.)

Aidee Guzman grew up in the San Joaquin Valley and now studies soil health as an agroecologist. She sees land repurposing as an opportunity, not to take farmland out of production, but rather to invest in a different type of farming.

Guzman’s research focuses on small-scale farms run by Southeast Asian refugees in the San Joaquin Valley. Her findings suggest that their techniques, which involve planting a diverse set of crops, have a wide array of ecosystem benefits. Not only do they increase the number of mycorrhizal fungi, which help distribute nutrients and decrease the need for fertilizer, the plants and fungi also improve water retention and carbon sequestration in the soil. The farming is often less water-intensive, too.

“They are not doing this on healthy, prime farmland,” said Guzman. “They are farming on formerly industrially managed land. We have an enormous opportunity to farm this land differently, to rethink how this landscape can be designed.”

Whatever ends up happening will be up to local governments and the communities they represent, said Shabazian. An effective land-transition process cannot not be prescriptive, he added: Rural communities, landowners and governments will decide what is best.

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