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When the Colorado River is in crisis, as it is now, people in Arizona are first in line to see their water cut off. And now Arizona is volunteering to temporarily give up some of the river water it has a right to in order to buy time to negotiate a more favorable deal. In the meantime, the state's farmers are trying to figure out how to survive. Arizona Public Media's Katya Mendoza reports.
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KATYA MENDOZA, BYLINE: In a wide-open Sonoran Desert valley, 12 rusted motors pulled from old Chevys pump cloudy blue water out of a cement canal. It's from the Colorado River, irrigating bright green fields of wheat and barley.
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BRIAN WONG: Each pump is capable of delivering about 9- to 10,000 gallons per minute.
MENDOZA: Brian Wong is a fourth-generation farmer. Here, farmers are always thinking about water.
WONG: Where is it going to come from in the future? And you can always just try to do your best with planning and, you know, projecting out into the future, but things are always going to be volatile that you could never plan on.
MENDOZA: For decades, farmers like Wong have been able to plan on getting water from this canal, part of the Central Arizona Project, or CAP. But Patrick Dent, a manager with CAP, says in order to get this water, Arizona had to make concessions to another state that uses it - California.
PATRICK DENT: That does put some of Arizona's water uses - CAP's water uses - in a junior position from a priority perspective.
MENDOZA: That means when the river is in crisis like now, the CAP is first in line to be cut off from the Colorado. The seven states that share the river have been trying to come up with a new agreement before the current one expires at the end of this year. If they can't, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum will have to decide how to divide up the river.
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DOUG BURGUM: It'll be numbers that no one will be satisfied with 'cause there's not enough water in the system, and certainly this year, not enough water.
MENDOZA: Last week, Arizona and two other states volunteered to take some short-term water reductions to give states more time to negotiate without federal intervention, apparently taking advice Burgum gave while visiting Tucson last month.
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BURGUM: I would just ask everybody that's involved to keep coming with their best ideas on new source of supply, on conservation, on trade-offs.
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MENDOZA: Farmer Brian Wong is hopeful the negotiations will result in a deal that keeps the federal government from imposing a solution. For now, though, he's looking a few miles to the south, where he can see a former state prison.
WONG: So they closed up two to three years ago, and, you know, since then, there's been really minimal use.
MENDOZA: Wong used to be able to use wastewater from the prison for irrigation. He says now the Federal Department of Homeland Security is talking about opening the prison again.
WONG: So we're hoping that they, you know, have some use for the facility so that they can continue treating that wastewater and feeding our farm with it.
MENDOZA: Wong, like Interior Secretary Burgum, is asking people to pray for success.
For NPR News, I'm Katya Mendoza in Tucson.
(SOUNDBITE OF SAM TOMPKINS SONG, "SEE ME") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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