Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [293]
Is it possible that the 1982 report’s conclusions are overly optimistic? “It’s possible,” says Herbert Grubb, the planning director of the Texas Water Development Board. “When I saw the rate of increase they used for energy costs, I thought it was much too low. In the late seventies, I’d been hearing estimates of oil costing as much as $295 a barrel by the end of the century. It turns out now that they were pretty much on target, at least so far. A lot of us didn’t expect an oil glut to materialize in the early 1980s. But no one can say how long it will last. If in ten years we get another series of price jolts like we did in the seventies, I don’t see how the irrigators can keep pumping.”
From a national perspective—forgetting about the farmers’ plight—whether irrigation on the southern plains ends in thirty years, or in seven, or even in fifty years does not matter; the fact is, it will mostly end. The more important issue, from that same perspective, is what will happen then—not just to the farmers and the cost of food and the balance of payments deficits, but to the land.
When thousand of farmers on millions of irrigated acres can no longer afford to pump vanishing water, the dilemma they face will be universal: how to survive on a finite amount of acreage that has suddenly become one-fifth to one-eighth as productive as it was. The answer is foreordained: they cannot. Many of them, therefore, will sell out to more stubborn neighbors and head for the cities for work or relief. Those who remain on enough acreage to offer them a glimmer of hope will ponder their brief list of choices: they can try to raise dryland cotton or wheat or some desert crop—jojoba or guayule, perhaps—or they can try to revert their plowed fields to shortgrass prairie, and raise cattle.
Raising cattle, pehaps even buffalo—which outperform cattle in arid country—might seem the thing to do. However, it is hard to see how it will happen without billions of dollars’ worth of federal support. To convert from, say, wheat to grassland, a farmer first needs to plant some fast-growing annual, such as rye, to develop a litter cover for the soil and build up its organic content; it will cost him perhaps $15 an acre and require a year. Then he has to seed gama grass; this costs him even more and takes another year. Finally, if the grass manages to take hold—a lot of it won’t—he can begin grazing a few cattle and reseeding those areas that failed to propagate. If he owns a thousand acres, he will probably have spent $30,000 to $50,000 (valued circa 1984); it has taken him three years, and he hasn’t earned a dime. He still has his living expenses to cover, and, unless he is a well-established farmer, a small mountain of unpaid debts. Once his grass is growing, he may still have to wait years for his cattle to mature. After seven years or so, he will finally begin to earn some income. But by then he will have fallen into a bottomless hole.
Farmers may therefore resist the temptation to raise cattle and do the economically sensible thing: raise a dryland crop. As Paul Sears wrote in Deserts on the March, “So long as there remains the most remote possibility that the drier grasslands, whose sod has been destroyed by the plow, can be made to yield crops under cultivation, we may count upon human stubbornness to return again and again to the attack....” And in that effort lurks the likelihood of a recurrence of the catastrophe that inspired Sears’s book: the Dust Bowl.
When a $1 million home perched on a fifty-degree slope above Malibu is clobbered by a mudslide after three weeks of rain—as thousands of houses throughout California were during the El Niño winters of 1982 and 1983—their owners tend to think of themselves as the victims of a “natural” disaster. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s is commonly regarded as such a “natural” disaster, because seven dry years in a row were accompanied by fierce winds, which scoured up the