Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

Did Arizona’s farmers realize any of this? One of William Martin and Helen Ingram’s graduate students, Nancy Laney, traveled around the state to find out. To her astonishment, most of the farmers didn’t. One of the farms Laney visited was the Farmers’ Investment Corporation, a huge pecan-growing operation south of Tucson that is about as far from the diversion point on the Colorado River as one can be. (Why pecans, which are native to the Mississippi Delta, should be grown on subsidized water in a desert state is another matter entirely.) If it arrives, CAP water will have surmounted a lift of well over a thousand feet and traveled more than three hundred miles to get there. Meanwhile, there is still plenty of water immediately under the farm, less than two hundred feet down. Despite the huge subsidies written into the CAP—as with any Reclamation project, the farmers are excused from paying interest costs—the groundwater is certain to be much cheaper, at least until the aquifer drops several hundred more feet. (The worst areawide decline in Arizona’s water table has been around two hundred feet, and that took decades to happen.) But the farm manager at Farmers’ Investment expressed to Laney his unalterable belief that “CAP water will be cheaper than pumping.” “Water is essential,” he said with religious conviction, adding that he “would back any plan where more water would be available.” He had no idea what CAP water would cost him, but planned to sign contracts to buy it ...