Big Ag is threatening New Mexico’s water supply

Green is not the color one expects to see in the cactus-and-yucca-dotted Chihuahuan Desert of southern New Mexico. But for more than a hundred miles along the I-25 corridor, between Truth or Consequences and the Texas border, a rich vein of greenery runs through the endless sea of beige.

It’s a cultivated woodland made up almost entirely of a single species — Carya illinoinensis, the pecan. Native to the lower Mississippi Valley, the trees were imported here, to the Mesilla Valley, in the early 1900s. In those early years, they were planted sparingly; the average precipitation is a scant 9 inches per year, hardly enough to sustain this Eastern hardwood. It wasn’t until after 1916, when the Rio Grande Project and its centerpiece, Elephant Butte Dam, were completed, that the trees began to flourish. 

Below the dam, the river is hemmed into a narrow channel between levees, and nearly all of its flow is shunted into a vast network of irrigation canals. The transformation has been staggering: In 2018, just over a hundred years after the completion of the Rio Grande Project, New Mexico surpassed Georgia as the nation’s leading pecan producer, a title it has retained off and on to the present day. Much of that agricultural production comes from this dry basin in Doña Ana County, near the Texas border.

On a 95 degree day in late May, I met Rafael Rovirosa, whose family has been growing pecans in New Mexico since 1932. Today, the Stahmann family has 3,200 acres of pecan trees in some of the richest farmland along the Rio Grande River. We met in the parking lot of one of Stahmann Farms’ pecan-processing plants south of the town of Mesilla. 

Rovirosa threw open the door of his pickup. “Let’s go for a ride,” he said, and we set out for the pecan groves. 

Rafael Rovirosa, whose family owns Stahmanns Farms, stands over an irrigation canal in one of the family’s pecan groves near Mesilla, New Mexico.

Rovirosa is lean, with deep-set eyes and dark stubble. He looked more like an academic than the operations chief of an agricultural outfit the size of a small city. He piloted his truck through a maze of roads leading into one of the oldest groves in the valley. Some of the pecans were 45 feet tall and close to a century old, planted in perfect rows spaced 30 feet apart to maximize yield. A luxuriant carpet of grasses below the lush canopy gave the orchard the feel of an East Coast hardwood forest.  

“Some people might say this isn’t the most efficient way to grow pecans, that they ought to be trimmed back,” said Rovirosa. The lower limbs scraped the top of his pickup. “I don’t care. I think it’s beautiful.”

The region has paid a steep ecological price for this agricultural abundance. Beside us as we drove, I could see a shallow, concrete-lined irrigation canal carrying a steady flow of water, clear as a mountain stream. In many places, water pooled around the bases of the trees; flood irrigation is still standard practice here. Pecans are prodigious water guzzlers. A single mature tree — which can produce 50 or more pounds of nuts in a season — requires around 30,000 gallons of water per year. In southern New Mexico, over 50,000 acres are currently in production. New Mexico pecan farmers have become the state’s largest single agricultural water user, slurping up an estimated 93 billion gallons per year — enough to supply a city of around 3 million —according to a 2023 report by Food and Water Watch.

Some of the farm’s soils, Rovirosa noted, are sandy, and water is absorbed very quickly, meaning that it must be applied frequently. “This actually isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” he said. “We want the water to percolate down, because that’s how we recharge the aquifer. Agriculture is the number-one recharger of the aquifer when times are good.”

But times aren’t good. Mired in a nearly 25-year-long drought, the Rio Grande, one of the great rivers of the West, wends its way through pale desert just beyond the western edge of these verdant groves. And for the last nine months, it has run completely dry.

Despite its name, the Rio Grande is not a large river; its average annual flow, which derives mostly from distant snowpack in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, is less than one-sixth that of the Southwest’s other great river, the Colorado. But more than 13 million people in Colorado, New Mexico and Texas — and across the border in Mexico — depend on it for drinking water and other uses. It also irrigates over 2 million acres of farmland. For centuries, small-scale subsistence agriculture was the only kind of farming practiced in this dry and unforgiving region. Spanish settlers created communal water systems called acequias that sustained a patchwork of small farms throughout Nueva Mexico. 

Before the Rio Grande Project, the river sometimes ran dry, though seldom for extended periods. Today, however, during the few months when there is water in the riverbed, it has been released from upstream dams. Most of it is sent downstream to Texas to meet New Mexico’s obligations under the Rio Grande Compact, a water-sharing agreement between the two states and Colorado that was signed into law in 1939. Under this agreement, New Mexico is obligated to send 47% of the water it receives at Elephant Butte Reservoir to Texas. In 2013, Texas sued New Mexico, alleging that groundwater pumping by the state’s farmers had compromised the flow of the river. (Groundwater pumping near a river can draw water away from it.) 

The Rio Grande’s flow, when it exists, is not nearly enough to supply the Mesilla Valley’s commercial farmers. To make up for the surface water deficit, pecan (and alfalfa) growers pump groundwater at a ferocious clip, dredging up millions of gallons last year alone — vastly exceeding nature’s ability to replenish it. 

That water use is a stark display of economic power. Last year, the growers generated an estimated $167 million in revenue, making pecans the largest food crop in New Mexico. In the mid-2000s, local farmers mounted an aggressive campaign to export the nuts internationally, including to China, which at the time still lacked a word for this uniquely American tree-fruit. Today, China remains a key destination, but most of the nuts go to Mexico, where they’re de-shelled, packaged and then shipped back to the United States for export or domestic sale. (Rovirosa’s family orchard does its own shelling.) The harvesting is done almost entirely with machines, and few laborers are required. Little of the profit goes to benefit the local economy. 

There are also biodiversity costs. By the start of the 21st century, several species of fish, including the shovelnose sturgeon, longnose gar, American eel, speckled chub and Rio Grande shiner, had become rare in the river below Elephant Butte Dam, or been extirpated altogether. The bosques, vast willow and cottonwood forests in the river’s wide floodplain, once provided tens of thousands of acres of habitat for birds, reptiles, insects and fish. The wetlands and riparian woodlands also offered flood protection and a buffer against drought. Today, several endangered animals — including the southwestern willow flycatcher, western yellow-billed cuckoo and New Mexico meadow jumping mouse — cling to existence in the few remaining pockets of native forest and grassland.

Fallow fields await rain from an incoming storm in Doña Ana County, New Mexico.

As of May 1, snowpack in the river’s headwaters was projected to provide only 12% of the water it normally does. Elephant Butte Reservoir was only 14% full on April 18, and water managers at the Elephant Butte Irrigation District, or EBID, announced that allocations would be cut by 83%. Instead of a full allotment of 3 acre-feet, farmers received a mere 6 inches. At the end of May, roughly 5,000 acres of farmland had been fallowed across the district under the state’s Groundwater Conservation Plan. Throughout the valley, dry fields with pale soil and withered stalks of chile, onion, alfalfa and cotton hinted at the row crops that have been lost. (Perennial tree crops like pecans cannot be fallowed; without water, the trees perish.) In April, the USDA’s Farm Service Agency declared a state of emergency for 15 New Mexico counties and announced that it would offer emergency loans to local farmers, ranchers, and dairies. 

The river’s condition when it reaches Elephant Butte Reservoir is the byproduct of environmental, infrastructural, managerial and political factors largely beyond the irrigation district’s control. For example, under the Rio Grande Compact, Colorado farmers — many of them alfalfa growers in the San Luis Valley — are allowed to divert between 30% and 70% of the river’s flow, depending on snowpack, before it crosses the state line. Today, the river carries a much smaller volume of water on average than it did before European settlement. 

Downstream, Texas is not only embroiled in a legal battle with New Mexico, it’s also fighting with Mexico over its failure to meet the terms of an 81-year-old treaty requiring Mexico to deliver an average of 350,000 acre-feet of water to the U.S. annually over a five-year period. Mexico, facing the same extreme drought as New Mexico, hasn’t delivered its share to Texas via the Rio Conchos, the Rio Grande’s largest Mexican tributary, and is now nearly 400 billion gallons in arrears. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, R, has echoed the Trump administration’s confrontational posture, declaring in a press release last November that “Mexico’s blatant abuse and disregard of water obligations … must not be allowed to continue.”

The Bureau of Reclamation predicts that the Rio Grande watershed will continue to warm and dry, losing as much as one-half of its hydroelectric capacity by the end of the century. Many climatologists say that “drought” is no longer the right word for the situation: “Aridification” more accurately describes the massive ecological shift afoot in the Southwest. Dust storms, once infrequent, now turn the sky an eerie ruddy brown, blotting out the sun. Several times this spring, blowing dust scoured from desiccated, overgrazed desert soil closed highways across the region. “We are starting to see a shift in the weather patterns,” said Ryan Serrano, the Rio Grande manager of the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission, which oversees the state’s water resources. More troubling, the monsoonal rainstorms, which once came reliably between mid-June and late September, delivering the bulk of the region’s annual rainfall, are not materializing as they once did. “We’re either not seeing the monsoon rains, or they come later and later in the season, when it’s not the most ideal time for that to happen.” 

And there are larger questions about the sustainability and equity of a system that has all but erased a major river while delivering the lions’ share of its water and profits to a handful of wealthy and influential farmers. “They’re still flood irrigating, but they’re not feeding us anymore, and they’re not employing us,” said Israel Chávez, an activist and attorney whose family has lived in the Mesilla Valley for generations. “The state heralds it as a boost to the economy. But when no one can be employed, and when no one can eat any of this, then it begs the question: Who is this for?”

In May, I attended EBID’s monthly board meeting in Las Cruces. The conference room was decorated with black-and-white photos showing Elephant Butte Dam’s construction. The proceedings opened with the Pledge of Allegiance and a prayer led by Gary Esslinger, EBID’s treasurer-manager from 1988 to 2024.

“Father God,” he said. “Please send the rains.”

Few people know the inner workings of the district’s sprawling, complicated plumbing system, which delivers water to close to 7,000 farmers across roughly 90,000 acres via 357 miles of canals, as intimately as Esslinger does. The next day, he drove me south along Highway 28, past Mesilla’s adobe square and into the verdant heart of pecan country.

The orchards were a beehive of activity. White pickups bearing EBID’s insignia swarmed; the “ditch riders,” as Esslinger called them, were preparing the canals to receive an upcoming release of water from Caballo Dam into the Rio Grande and its system of canals. Esslinger doesn’t believe the doomsday climate talk. Drought is part of a cycle, he said, and the wet years will return. He sees the current situation as a temporary setback — a management problem to be solved. 

The first order of business, he said, was to make the irrigation system more efficient, mainly by replacing the old dirt-lined canals with large underground pipes to reduce seepage and evaporative losses. “We’re, like, only 55% efficient, and that’s not good when you’re in a drought scenario,” he said, gesturing to the groundwater gushing into a dirt ditch from a candy cane-shaped pipe. Along its edges grew Equisetum arvense, a weed better known as horsetail, which, he said, can quickly overwhelm a canal. 

Much of the water loss in the Mesilla Valley happens even before water reaches the ditches. Several studies have found that Elephant Butte Reservoir loses around 140,000 acre-feet per year — roughly 6% of its maximum capacity — to evaporation. The loss would be staggering in any agricultural region, but in one suffering through a 25-year drought, it is existential. 

Esslinger said there was a larger strategy here beyond repairing leaky canals. The updates, he said, will make the system less reliant on Rocky Mountain snowpack and better able to capture water from monsoonal storms and the remnants of the tropical storms and hurricanes that sporadically hit the valley. “We have 300 miles of drainage canals here, and they’re cut 30 feet deep,” said Esslinger. “That’s a lot of storage, if you think about it. It’s just a matter of trying to adapt the canal to receive flood water instead of irrigation water.” 

By strategically installing a series of pumps, Esslinger believes that the district can capture the stormwater that, in the past, was simply shunted into the river channel. “Our drains are connected to the groundwater table, and so it’s a great way to recharge the aquifer,” he said. 

Doing so effectively, however, requires being able to predict where and when the storms will hit and then quickly evacuating water from the canals to prevent flooding. “We need to modernize our systems, to know when these storms are going to be able to hit in advance,” he said. Despite Esslinger’s technocratic optimism, the unspoken message was one of desperation. As snowpack fades in the Southern Rockies, the irrigation district will become increasingly reliant on the summer storms that, in the drying climate, have become less dependable. 

Paying for these kinds of large-scale fixes has also become far more uncertain under the Trump administration. Federal allocations authorized under President Joe Biden have halted, and DOGE-led firings and resignations have paralyzed federal agencies, leaving the district’s funding in bureaucratic limbo. A $15 million infrastructure improvement allocation awarded to the district by the USDA in 2024 has yet to be dispersed. “I just don’t know what happened to that money.”

Gary Esslinger, former Elephant Butte Irrigation District manager, at a spillway on Stahmann Farms.

Esslinger showed me a centerpiece of the district’s infrastructure improvement plan: a network of canals around the antiquated Mesilla Dam, which sprawls like a concrete battleship across the Rio Grande’s dry riverbed. The scheme utilizes a series of small channels called spillways that are cut perpendicularly into the riverbed and designed to return water to the river in emergencies. “In a flood event, ditch break, a car in a canal, any event where you’ve got to evacuate water, you have to have these spillways available,” he said. 

Esslinger says these safety valves have a unique feature: When there’s water in the river, it backs up at Mesilla Dam and fills the spillways. “It just sits there,” he said. “And so, I was thinking, what if I put pumps in these spillways and lifted the water out of the river and into the canals? That would save 40 miles on the delivery of water.” 

Esslinger has done just that, installing two large submersible pumps in the canal. When they’re operational, he said, the district will be able to pull water from the spillway and fast-track it to local farms. The design, I thought, seemed to show that EBID’s leaky, antiquated irrigation system could be vastly improved simply by allowing water back in the river. 

But Esslinger balked at this assertion. Allowing any “extra” water to flow downriver out of the district toward Texas, was, to his mind, unimaginable. “People moving here from places where there’s water — Idaho, Ohio, Iowa — ask, ‘Where the hell’s the river? It’s a public good, isn’t it?’ And I say, ‘No, it’s not public water. It’s paid for by the farmers.’” (EBID members pay $100 for 2 acre-feet, according to Esslinger.)   

It seems that decisions about whether the Rio Grande is a river or a sand trap are not left to scientists, the public or even politicians, but to the Elephant Butte Irrigation District and its largest agricultural clients.

“I don’t consider them farmers at all,” Israel Chávez, the Las Cruces attorney and activist, told me. “Farmers feed people. Pecans aren’t feeding anyone (here). They’re a luxury crop that are non-native to this area.”

We climbed into his cluttered Prius, driving 20 minutes north to the small town of Doña Ana, where Chávez grew up. On the town’s outskirts, we merged onto the El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, which once connected Mexico City and Santa Fe. An old weed-filled ditch, completely dry, paralleled the road. Chávez said this canal was part of the town’s original acequia system, which carried water from the Rio Grande to small local farms. 

Founded in 1843, the village was named for Doña Ana Robledo, a Mexican colonist who died fleeing the 1680 Pueblo Revolt in northern New Mexico. The small, dusty community sits atop a small bluff. One- and two-story adobe buildings, many in disrepair, radiate outward from a central square. We walked past a bronze statue of the town’s namesake pouring water from a bucket into two clay vessels. 

Attorney Israel Chávez in his office in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

He remembered running through nearby green fields as a child. “Any type of vegetable you can imagine was planted across the street from my house,” he said. He gestured to the floodplain and what was once a bosque, where a sprawling orchard now sidled up to the edge of the hill. “All those fields have been replaced with pecans.”

Chávez said his paternal grandfather came to the Mesilla Valley from Mexico in the Bracero Program in the 1950s. “He was able to work for a farmer who was growing all sorts of things, and that farmer ended up giving him some land and letting him grow on his own parcel,” he said. That kind of arrangement is rare in the era of industrial-scale pecan farming, Chávez said. “We have seen a major downturn in labor. I don’t think that that’s happening in a vacuum.”

The high cost of farmland coupled with the scarcity of water rights — and water itself — has not only kept new pecan farmers from entering the arena, Chávez said. It has also crowded out smaller farmers growing seasonal row crops — onions, beans, corn, squash and chiles, the most famous of which come from the nearby town of Hatch — on smaller plots of land. 

Yet some farmers are still trying to gain a foothold and redefine agriculture in the valley. Ryan Duran works with her partner and his family on Big Moon Farms, their 13-acre plot near the town of Berino, 30 minutes south of Las Cruces. Their list of crops is extensive: collard greens, Swiss chard, broccoli, carrots, radishes, onions, garlic, okra, corn, calabash gourds, melons, beans and several different types of chiles. “It’s hard work because things are coming up at different times,” she said. “Some things don’t make it. Some crops fail because it’s too hot.”

Big Moon, she explained, gets a little surface water from EBID, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what commercial-scale pecan farmers receive. Unlike the region’s pecans, Duran said the crops grown on her farm are consumed locally. “The government is trying to pay farmers not to farm, to conserve water, which is concerning,” she said. “We should be protected. We shouldn’t have these giant orchards taking all the water.”

Spring releases of water from Elephant Butte Dam are used to meet New Mexico’s water-delivery obligations under the Rio Grande Compact. Rather than a single sustained release, said Tricia Snyder, rivers and waters program director for the environmental group New Mexico Wild, regulators should allow more consistent water releases throughout the year to mimic the natural cycles the large dams have erased. 

These “environmental flows” — most of which occur in the upper and middle reaches of the river above Elephant Butte and the Rio Grande Project — are meant to emulate the spring snowmelt and summer monsoon runoff before the infrastructure was built. “The plant and wildlife communities that have evolved around this river depend on that timing,” she said. “So how do we approach that, given the realities of climate change?”

Native trees like cottonwoods grow densely at the Leasburg Extension Lateral Restoration Site in Doña Ana County, New Mexico.

The river below Elephant Butte, Snyder said, needs to be managed with its many shareholders, both human and non-human, in mind. “We might say, OK, agriculture needs this much water at this time, and this species may need a pulse flow at this specific time of year. There are different needs. So how do we tie those all together to meet as many of those needs as possible?”

Others hope to restore the river’s lost bosques and wetlands. Not only do riparian zones provide critical wildlife habitat, they also aid with water storage and floods, like the one that struck this stretch of the Rio Grande in 2006, devastating cities across southern New Mexico and West Texas. After storms dumped up to 30 inches of rain, floodwaters overwhelmed man-made drainage systems, washing away roads and buildings. Restored riparian zones could act as buffers, slowing down water and spreading it more evenly across the floodplain. Vegetated areas also improve a river’s “baseline” flow, releasing water into the channel slowly throughout the year, even during the dry season.

One such riparian restoration project is underway 20 minutes northwest of downtown Las Cruces on a 30-acre experimental plot known as the Leasburg Extension Lateral Wasteway #8 Restoration site. Here, a small forest of willows, cottonwoods and native shrubs is taking shape. The project is overseen by the International Boundary and Water Commission, or IBWC, the agency within the U.S. State Department that oversees waterways shared by the U.S. and Mexico. 

The Leasburg site, one of 22 being managed by the IBWC, is the product of a 16-year collaboration between the federal government, local water managers and conservationists to enhance habitat along the Lower Rio Grande. Between 2009 and 2021, IBWC planted over 122,000 native trees and shrubs and removed thousands of invasive saltcedars across its sites. “At first there was some pushback among farmers,” said David Casares, general operations supervisor with the IBWC, who is overseeing the restoration. “They didn’t understand what we were doing here. But once they saw it, they learned to accept it. The way EBID sees it, we’re farmers, too — farmers of native trees.” 

Though the Leasburg plot is small, the birdsong and the rustle of leaves are potent reminders of a lost Rio Grande. Indeed, this is as close as one can come to the verdant bosques that once lined the river for hundreds of miles. These small islands of restored native biodiversity, most of which are off-limits to the public, comprise roughly 500 acres, and a dozen of them have been managed to create habitat for a species that has come to epitomize the destruction of the lower river’s riparian ecosystems: the endangered southwestern willow flycatcher, a small songbird that once thrived in the riverside wetlands and forests. Surveys by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation have found the birds at or near several of IBWC’s sites. 

When I visited, two IBWC workers were hacking at vegetation with rakes and hoes in several small canals, preparing for the release of water from Caballo Dam and wanting to ensure that nothing would impede its flow to the trees. (The IBWC, like the surrounding farms, bought water rights from the Elephant Butte Irrigation District and was waiting for the upcoming agricultural releases.) 

The water couldn’t come soon enough. A closer look revealed that the small cottonwoods, no more than 15 or 20 feet tall, showed signs of water stress. Their leaves, which should have been a vivid green, were a pallid greenish yellow. Mature cottonwoods with their extensive root systems can withstand successive dry years, but young cottonwoods need a steady water supply. But Casares was confident that the trees and grasses would survive, even with this year’s limited water allotment. “Once we start irrigating, the water tables go up,” said Casares. “These are small areas, but they are having a big impact.”

Rafael Rovirosa, whose family has profited from pecans for generations, said he is also seeking solutions. As we drove through his family’s pecan grove, he told me that the current situation, in which surface water deficits are covered by water pulled from shrinking aquifers, is clearly unsustainable. “If the wet years don’t come for another decade, we might be OK,” he told me. “If the wet years never come again, then there needs to be drastic changes in the way that we use water here.”

We left the green grove and drove into the desert. In the hazy distance, the Organ Mountains jutted into the ruddy sky. We passed a small fallowed plot and reached a field covered in tightly spaced rows of tiny trees. They were pistachios, not pecans, something Rovirosa is just beginning to experiment with. Some of the leaves were dry and brown around the edges. But he thought it was only cosmetic, an unsightly but ultimately harmless drying caused by the winds that rake the valley. The trees, he said, were taking hold. 

Pistachios require less water and are more salt-tolerant than pecans. Rovirosa also said that he thought they were more popular with U.S. consumers than pecans. 

In this plot and another one a few miles down the road, Rovirosa was experimenting with two other varieties of trees — a species of Spanish oak and an Italian pine. Their bounty is not found aboveground but in their roots: Both species are hosts for truffles, which Rovirosa says can bring more than $300 per pound. If Rovirosa can fine-tune these higher-value crops to grow in the desert, he can bring in more money per acre with less water. “I don’t know if it’s going to work,” he said. “It’s been a challenge to keep the trees going. They love the summer. They’re fine in the winter. But they die in the spring.” He cracked a little smile: “But this time it seems like we got it right.” 

Well water is pumped into an irrigation canal in a pecan grove in Mesilla, New Mexico.

He said he’s taken some heat from older farmers for branching out and searching for crops that might thrive better in a drier, hotter climate. “People get used to doing things a certain way,” he said. “It’s on me to figure out how to do it so that I can show everyone else how.”

Rovirosa’s main insurance policy, however, involved looking for farmland elsewhere. “One of my long-term goals has been to start to diversify geographically,” he told me. “It’s hard to pick a good place. They say the Southeast is going to get destroyed by hurricanes and the Southern Appalachians are going to get devastated by floods.”

But he thought he’d found the place, located in another besieged agricultural region: California’s Salinas Valley, the Steinbeckian refuge of Dust Bowl refugees in decades past. “I think the Salinas Valley gets a little bit more water than what they get in Spain,” he said. “The temperatures are about the same. So I don’t think that they would need that much water there, just a little bit of supplemental irrigation in the summer, and that’s it.”

Rovirosa added: “It’s absolutely beautiful there,” he said. “We’ll see.”

Reporting for this story was supported by The Water Desk at University of Colorado Boulder.