Water Worries

The Economist recently ran a piece on the Colorado River and the drying of the West.  We Westerners are generally aware of the rising bathtub ring on the reservoirs on the Colorado River as the result of a lengthy drought and a growing population.  But now our water woes are being noticed even by economic editors in London.  The fact that the river was over-allocated in the first place is interesting enough, but The Economist parses the problem into four clean dimensions of the physical, legal, political, and cultural.  The interest angle on the piece is that the problems have reached crises proportions: there's less water than generally acknowledged, and something has to be done.  By looking at the pieces dimension by dimension, solutions start to appear.  Do we really need to water so much grass they ask?

I'd mention to The Economist, if they asked me, that the grass we should be most worried about is not the residential lawns they bring up, but hay.  Some 80% of the water Westerners use is for agriculture, and in the Intermountain West, most of that water goes on hay.  There's where the cultural dimension gets interesting.  Why is the Utah hay farmer so determined to put water on his field for a subsidized $6 per acre foot when Las Vegas and Los Angeles would pay him and the state of Utah several thousands of dollars for the same water, and all the farmer has to do is turn off his sprinkler (taking care of the physical dimension)?