Hatch Valley (NM) Irrigation In Trouble; Runoff Outlook 39%/Avg; Onion Yields Off 30% Due To Salt
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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.
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http://www.abqjournal.com/main/2013/03/24/news/drought-threatens-hatch-valley-crop.html