Drought threatens Hatch Valley

Hatch Valley farmer Shayne Franzoy uses groundwater pumping and drip irrigation to minimize water use in pushing back against drought. But with a salty aquifer, the valley’s farmers worry how many more years of drought they can withstand. (Pat Vasquez-Cunningham/Journal)

SALEM – Shayne Franzoy, a fourth generation Hatch Valley farmer, can remember catching largemouth bass as a youngster in Elephant Butte Irrigation District canals.

“I used to fish in there when I was a kid,” Franzoy said as he piloted a big red Ford Expedition through a corner of the valley his family has farmed for nearly a century. “Now there’s no water at all.”

It is a nervous planting season.

With little Rio Grande irrigation water for the third straight year, the farming valleys that stretch across southern New Mexico from Elephant Butte Reservoir to the Texas border hum with the sound of irrigation pumps, pulling up groundwater to wet the fields. But it is a poor substitute for Rio Grande water, posing long-term problems.

“The guys that can pump will pump,” said valley farmer Dino Cervantes. “The guys that can’t pump will suffer.”

On a high field on the Hatch Valley’s eastern edge, a crew working for Franzoy is installing a drip irrigation system, something he’s done on most of his land in an effort to fight off drought. Pumps at the end of the field pull up groundwater, pushing it through the irrigation system and out beneath the crops.

In other fields nearby, crews are planting onions and chiles – the valley’s famous Hatch green chiles. But with a drought lingering for more than a decade, capped by three particularly brutal years, Franzoy is worried.

The canals that usually supply clear, clean Rio Grande water to one of New Mexico’s most storied and agriculturally productive regions remain bone dry a month into the irrigation season. With a meager snowpack in the mountains to the north, the forecast calls for just 39 percent of average runoff on the Rio Grande.

For farmers like Franzoy, pumping groundwater to keep the crops alive is the only option. But it’s not a very good one.

In the Hatch Valley (more properly called the “Rincon Valley,” but Hatch is the name that sticks) groundwater has dropped an average of 3 feet in the past three extreme drought years, according to an analysis by Erek Fuchs, groundwater resources manager for the Elephant Butte Irrigation District.

The Franzoys’ problem is not so much the dropping aquifer as the quality of the groundwater. It is laden with salt. To keep his family’s 1,000 acres alive during the drought means to slowly suffocate the land. Drip irrigation can help by pushing salts away from the root zone, but the technology doesn’t solve the problem completely.

“The salt’s what’s killing us in the Hatch Valley,” said Franzoy’s father, Jerry, an Elephant Butte Irrigation District board member and one of the grand old men of valley farming. Irrigating with high-quality river water helps flush salts from the plants’ root zones. Irrigating with the groundwater found in the shallow Hatch Valley aquifer pulls salts back up and dumps it on the farm field.

Yields are already down – 30 percent in the case of onions, one of the valley’s money crops. A drive through the valley shows tiny spring onion plants already stunted by the salt accumulating in the soil beneath them.

As for chile, Shayne Franzoy said the Hatch Valley should have a decent crop this year for the packers, like Bueno Foods in Albuquerque, that depend on their chile. But if drought conditions continue, the future is less certain. “If we don’t have surface water in the Hatch Valley,” Jerry Franzoy said, “it’s gonna die pretty quick.”

Lush farmland

A century ago, farmers turned the narrow strip of land flanking the southern New Mexico river into lush and lucrative farmland, using water from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Rio Grande Project, which dammed and diverted the Rio Grande.

Elephant Butte Reservoir, which holds water to irrigate southern New Mexico farms, is at its lowest level for this time of year since 1978. (Pat Vasquez-Cunningham/Journal)

“We took the reclamation water and made the desert bloom,” said pecan farmer Greg Daviet, standing in the shade of a grove south of Mesilla on land first farmed by his great-grandfather in 1905.

The Elephant Butte Irrigation District distributes Rio Grande Project water to what is arguably New Mexico’s richest farming region. The U.S. census of agriculture puts the value of the region’s agricultural production at $400 million per year.

In its northern stretch, the Hatch Valley is famous for its green chile. To the south, the irrigation district’s canals spread out across the Mesilla Valley, wrapping Las Cruces in a cocoon of summer green and cool and making Doña Ana County, according to the federal agricultural census, the largest pecan-producing county in the nation.

But in recent years, drought has emptied the river that feeds the project and the bloom has been coming off the dusty valleys of the lower Rio Grande. In a normal year, irrigation water starts flowing through the irrigation district’s canals in mid-February. This year, the agency may not start doling out the meager supply until July, district water supply consultant Phil King told board members at a March 13 meeting. “Still, frankly, pretty dismal,” King said.

Conversations with the current generation of valley farmers, most of whom grew up during the wet times, can turn to nostalgic discussions of fishing in the ditches or swimming in the Rio Grande. Dino Cervantes had stories like that on a recent drive down the Rio Grande levee, his family’s farmland to the east and a sand bed to the west, where in wet times the Rio Grande flowed. “It’s sad,” he said, pointing to the dry river bed, “really sad.”

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But inevitably discussions with farmers turn from nostalgia to hard-nosed business problems. Water is a key input to a farm, and managing it ends up being a lot like the other problems these business owners face – the cost of labor or the market price of their crop.

Right now, water management is the dominant variable on their spreadsheets. “Now, water’s kind of the driving force,” Cervantes said.

“The single most important thing that I do is manage water,” Daviet explained as he demonstrated the computer-based irrigation schedule for his 26 fields.

Ebbs and flows

Valley farmers, many going back generations, have deep family memories of climate’s ebbs and flows. “We’ve gone through these droughts before,” said Robert Faubion, a member of the Elephant Butte Irrigation District’s board.

The last significant drought goes by the name “the drought of the ’50s,” but river records make clear that it really began in the 1940s. Elephant Butte Reservoir, a measure of how much water is available, refilled briefly in the mid-1950s, but didn’t really recover until the 1970s.

The Butte remained mostly full through the late 1990s before the current drought began sapping its savings bank, and it’s been relatively dry in these valleys ever since.

“We’re more than a decade into this drought,” King told irrigation district board members at their March meeting. “The last one lasted 25 years. There have been droughts that lasted a century.”

The Rio Grande north of Mesilla Dam in southern New Mexico has been dry since last summer. (John Fleck/Journal)

Read More:

Groundwater ‘abundant’ in the Mesilla Valley

— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal