Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

Twice since then, Martin has repeated the analysis, and his results confirm his earlier conclusions—only far more emphatically. By 1977, the projected canalside price of CAP water had reached $16.67 per acre-foot. Add the cost of a distribution network, and farmers growing any kind of low-value crops—alfalfa, small grains, perhaps even the state’s main crop, cotton—could not afford it. In 1980, he and another colleague from the University of Arizona, Helen Ingram, did a detailed study, region by region, of the likely cost of distribution systems, and were amazed by what they found out. In one irrigation district, Maricopa-Stansfield, the price of the distribution system—hundreds of miles of canals and laterals, headgates, and people to operate them—would likely come to $160 million, leaving each farmer a bill of $100 per acre-foot of water per year just for distribution. The Bureau’s canalside estimate for CAP water had, by then, risen to around $30 per acre-foot, per year. The price of pumped groundwater was nearly $100 less per acre-foot at Maricopa-Stansfield—around $39. It was an extreme case, but Ingram and Martin couldn’t find a single irrigation district where CAP water promised to be cheaper than groundwater. In most of them, it would cost half again or twice as much, sometimes more. One of the main arguments the farmers had always made for the CAP was that they couldn’t all switch to high-value crops as the groundwater table went lower and pumping costs became int...