The Prom of the Colorado River

Photograph by Meg Bernhard.

Alfalfa smells warm and earthy and sort of sweet, like socks after a long hike, but not in a bad way. It is soft, with oblong green leaves the size of a pinkie nail. I know this because on a chilly February afternoon I drove a hundred and forty miles to the Imperial Valley, one of the state’s largest farming regions, pulled over to an unattended field, and ripped up a clump. It was a brown day; the wind turbines in Palm Springs were spinning and a dust storm was brewing. The air was more humid than normal. Alfalfa grows everywhere around the West, but it’s peculiar to see vast green fields in this place—a low, dry desert where vegetation is scarce and water even scarcer. But the Imperial Valley, home to an accidental salt lake and a mountain made of multicolored painted adobe clay, is one of California’s weirder places. The Salton Sea’s gunky shoreline takes off-road vehicles prisoner. A roving mud puddle eats at the highway. Roughly a hundred and fifty thousand acres of alfalfa grow in a place that sees fewer than three inches of rain a year.

People love to hate alfalfa. It’s become the Southwest’s boogeyman, chief offender in the megadrought. Farmers use alfalfa for cattle feed because it’s high in protein, but the crop, a perennial, requires a lot of water—by one estimate five acre-feet per acre in the Imperial Valley. By comparison, Imperial Valley lettuce uses about three acre-feet per acre, while, on average, grapes across the state use about 2.85. (An acre-foot is about enough to cover a football field in water a foot deep; alfalfa, then, requires five of those per acre.)

I think about alfalfa a lot, but only in the abstract, as a crop that uses too much water and enables the existence of more cows, which burp methane and make the climate crisis worse. I wanted to see it up close, and I also wanted to speak with one of the West’s most fervent students, and defenders, of alfalfa. His name is John Brooks Hamby, and he’s the vice chairman of the board of directors for the Colorado River’s largest single user, the Imperial Irrigation District, also called IID. Unlike alfalfa farther north, which may see a couple of harvests a year, Imperial Valley alfalfa enjoys a long season, he told me when I arrived at a sterile IID office in El Centro decorated with photos of canals and footbridges. “We can get ten-plus cuttings here,” he said. “Really thick, dense stands.” Alfalfa is not the valley’s only crop; when I was visiting, lettuce was in season, as was celery. I’d apparently just missed the carrot festival in Holtville, where sixteen-year-old Ailenna Salorio was named the 2025 carrot queen. There are dates and lemons and broccoli and spinach and onions too. But alfalfa is king.

John Brooks calls himself JB. JB grew up in the Imperial Valley town of Brawley. There, as he tells it, his great-grandfather had come from Texas to dig irrigation ditches. His grandfather worked in land leveling, and his father went away for college but returned to grow and sell produce. At his parents’ wedding, guests ate his father’s asparagus, which he had to quit growing, JB told me, after NAFTA cut into California farmers’ asparagus profits. JB grew up tagging along as his dad checked fields and irrigated crops late at night. Water shaped the political and economic landscape of the Imperial Valley, whose water district has some of the oldest, most senior rights to the Colorado River. 

JB is twenty-nine. He is bookish and talkative, fond of bolo ties and Navajo concho belt buckles, at ease with cattle ranchers and water scholars. He is also California’s lead negotiator on the Colorado River, which serves forty million people across seven Western states, thirty tribes, and two Mexican states. Each of the American states that the river feeds—including Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico, considered the “upper basin,” as well as Nevada, Arizona, and California, “the lower basin”—appoints a principal negotiator to hash out what water usage across the river ought to look like. The lower and upper basin negotiators always fight over who has to cut back on water. Alfalfa, as the symbol of California’s excess in a time of drought, is an easy target. This irritates JB. “You go into the grocery store, go into the whole dairy section. You have Fage or Yoplait, Horizon grass-fed milk, or you’re having any of the nonvegan ice creams. Beef. All of that comes from alfalfa,” he said. “It’s a foundational part of the food supply for both humans and animals.” Alfalfa earned $269.7 million for Imperial County in 2022. That year it sold for $325 a ton.

Photograph by Meg Bernhard.

 ***

I first met JB during the Colorado River Water Users Association conference—affectionately called CRWUA (pronounced “crew-uh”)—at the Paris Casino in Las Vegas last December. It was, at first glance, like any other Vegas conference: morning registration a few feet away from people who’d been up all night playing slot machines, panels held in windowless ballrooms, attendees milling around in lanyards, with a few casino-specific details like fake French boulevards, not to mention “toilettes” instead of restrooms. The Colorado River folks wore their western wear: cowboy boots, turquoise. Some wore cowboy hats, though the national finals rodeo was also happening in Vegas that week and it was hard to differentiate the cattle people from water people.

CRWUA, as JB put it to me later, “is the prom of the Colorado River.” “Everybody shows up. You’ve got the exhibit hall where you can do whatever. There’s the drinks” he said. The panels. “It’s the only time the entire basin comes together in one place.” By the entire basin, he meant negotiators, lawyers, scholars, water managers, conservationists, tribal chairpeople, consultants, engineers, hydrologists, cloud seeders, solar panel marketers, Bureau of Reclamation bureaucrats, and people with job titles like Colorado River Basin Salinity Control Forum director and Irrigation and Electrical Districts director.

I didn’t really meet JB; he was venting about the upper basin to a reporter friend of mine who was somehow still on good terms with him even though he’d investigated the Imperial Irrigation District’s water usage. My friend and his colleagues had found that, in 2022, one farming family used more Colorado River water than all of southern Nevada. JB argues that California, which has half the Colorado River basin’s population and the bulk of its agricultural activity, has been doing its part to be efficient with water, and other states need to follow its example. Last summer, Imperial Valley farmers agreed to leave their alfalfa fields fallow during the hottest part of the year, to conserve Colorado River water, in exchange for federal payment. “California gets it done,” JB said, on a public panel at the conference. He and the other lower basin states want the upper basin to cut their water usage if need be. He wants to avoid litigation over the river, which, if historical lawsuits foretell anything, could last the rest of his life.

I kept a mental list of terms I’d never heard before. Water masters and CRSP units and water-storage accounts and water credits. Water was bought and sold and saved, claimed and reclaimed. There was beneficial use to water, and abandonment of water, the doctrine of prior appropriation, otherwise known as “first in time, first in right.” The doctrine of public trust. The “virgin flow” was what happened when a river was allowed to run naturally. There was even water court.

The Colorado River starts as snowmelt in the Rocky Mountains and winds 1,450 miles through the Southwest. Centuries ago, it was a wild and muddy and biodiverse river, but as settlers came to the arid west, they dammed and diverted it. It turned blue. In 1922, the federal government apportioned the seven states (not Mexico or tribal nations) fifteen million acre-feet of water to divide among themselves annually; they believed the river carried as much as twenty million acre-feet of water. That year had been unusually wet, and normally, the river averaged only fourteen million acre-feet of water a year. Today it’s more like twelve million, and that initial water flow miscalculation is at the root of the Colorado River’s crisis. The river should flow into the Gulf of Mexico, but drought—plus a series of aqueducts, dams, and reservoirs meant to divert water for agricultural and urban use—have prevented the river from reaching its terminus. Now by the time it gets within a hundred miles of the ocean, it’s reduced to a trickle.

A century after the original Colorado River Compact was signed, Lake Mead, the country’s largest man-made reservoir, reached its lowest level ever. Vegas didn’t see rain for two hundred and forty days. Bodies, some decades old, starting surfacing in the reservoir. Observers blamed the Mob. Lake Mead got within two hundred feet of “deadpool”—the level at which the reservoir can no longer release water downstream. In 2023, it finally rained. Lake Mead was no longer in critical condition, but the West is still dry.

At the time of CRWUA last December, Las Vegas hadn’t seen rain since July and the negotiators were getting emotional. Normally, the seven of them hold a public panel together, but river talks were so tense that they held two separate panels, one for the lower basin and another for the upper. They still couldn’t come to an agreement on what river operations would look like when a number of rules and regulations expired in 2026. The upper basin claimed that their states suffered more from climate change; the lower basin disagreed. They all wanted to grow their cities and farm, and they thought the other side should do less. JB used the word propaganda to describe the upper basin’s handouts. Brandon Gebhart, Wyoming’s negotiator, implored the lower basin to stop “saber-rattling.” Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s negotiator, called the upper basin’s experience of the river “the Hunger Games.” She teared up.

Photograph by Meg Bernhard.

Apparently, some people called the negotiators “water buffaloes.” “It’s an older phrase,” JB told me, “historically used for these big players who were titanic figures on big water projects or moving water around the Colorado.” “I’ve been deemed one,” he said, “but I don’t self-identify.”

***

In a conference room for vendors, JB’s IID booth stood near a conservation group passing out Swedish fish to warn about invasive species on the Virgin River and a United States Geological Survey booth presenting the agency’s latest drone technology. The exhibition hall was where people went to drink coffee and eat pastries, sip wine in the evening, take phone calls, and talk around the watercooler, which only sometimes had water. (More than one person made a drought joke.) To decorate, JB had asked a farmer/water district colleague for two of her “biggest, most beautiful bales” of Imperial Valley alfalfa. He set them on the carpet alongside a placard that read “Amazing Alfalfa,” with the subtitle: “More Than Just Hay—This Bale Powers Your Everyday!” He listed forty-four different cow products in alphabetical order. Anti-aging cream. Beef bourguignon. Chewing gum. Crayons. Feta cheese. Footballs. Hot chocolate. Lattes. Shoes. Short ribs. Steak frites. Smash burgers. Soft serve. Whipped cream.

Farmers feed the need that exists, JB told me. People want their lattes. Their burgers. If they wanted rainbow chard, we’d be growing more rainbow chard. Instead, we grow alfalfa to feed the cows that people want to eat. Moreover, alfalfa fixes nitrogen, he said. It’s essential for crop rotation. Healthy soil.

Photograph by Luke Runyon.

After JB created the IID booth, he was inspired to make beef bourguignon, which he’d included on his list of products to prove that beef could be elegant. It took him eight hours to make the dish, and he was pleased with the result, but he ate it for too many days in a row. “I was sort of put off by beef for a little bit, even though I did an amazing job making it,” he told me later, in the IID office in El Centro. “Since then, I’ve been healthy. I’ve been eating a lot of fish and greens. And so I feel better.” He continued. “Despite the fact that it’s not the most healthy thing,” he said, “people consume it.”

It was possible to cut down on consumption, he told me. Look at his own beef pause.

There were more panels. An HDR-sponsored wine tasting. A retirement party in someone’s hotel room. A rumor about star-crossed lovers across the basin divide (unfounded). Invocations of drought as enemy. Opaque references to climate change. (CRWUA president and Utah negotiator: “The hydrology of the river is uncertain.”) A Colorado-based consultant told me he once hung out with the writer Edward Abbey on a boat. The upper basin held a last-minute press conference asking the lower states to acknowledge their pain. Which was more painful: the upper basin’s low snowpack or the lower basin’s high evaporation? A Colorado State University water scholar tried to use an extended metaphor about Alice in Wonderland to explain the river. No one followed. “Way too long,” the man sitting next to me texted someone. “Horrible,” his correspondent replied.

I took a bus with several dozen conferencegoers to see the Hoover Dam, which holds back Lake Mead. We put on hard hats and descended into a diversion tunnel. There were gasps. Exclamations. “This is an amazing amount of concrete,” said one person. “I teach an architecture class,” said another. “I want to teach them how to do this, build a dam like this.” A former U.S. representative from Colorado leaned over to me. “Apparently,” he said, “the first person to die building the Hoover Dam was the father of the last person to die.”

***

Within two months, river talks would improve. The negotiators had changed their seating arrangements for in-person meetings and were discussing the ideal table shape to facilitate dialogue. In January, JB reached out to other basin states to have free-flowing, informal conversations without the pressure of everyone being in the same room. By early February they still hadn’t arrived at a deal, but they were meeting every other week in a different state and appeared to be getting closer. “Things were really bad in 2024. Twenty-five is off to a good start,” JB told me in El Centro. “But things are still fragile and sensitive.” No one, he said, wants to go to court over the river. Arizona’s proposed state budget, however, now includes several million for Colorado River litigation. (One of Trump’s early executive orders has halted payments to users who conserve Colorado River water, making the river’s status even more uncertain.)

Driving through the Imperial Valley, I made a pit stop at the roving mud puddle, which was even more interesting to me than alfalfa. Scientists do not know why the puddle, called the Niland Geyser, propels forward; it’s moved sixty feet over the last few years. The puddle is bubbling and smells like sulfur. It dissolves all rock and road that stands in its way. The California Department of Transportation had to divert a highway around it, and now it’s inching toward the Union Pacific train tracks. When I saw the pile of rocks surrounding the puddle, I laughed. Railroad officials built a seventy-five-foot underground wall to trap it. Engineers dug wells. But nothing can stop the water.