The Palo Verde Irrigation District, headquartered in Blythe, “has become an increasingly important factor in California’s struggle to overcome a four-year drought,” says the Los Angeles Times. More than 90 percent of landowners in the district participate in a voluntary program to idle cropland in exchange for a payment from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, a cooperative of 26 cities and water agencies. The Palo Verde district will send an additional 120,000 acre-feet of water to MWD next year, enough for 240,000 families. The additional water “may also allow MWD to leave water in Lake Mead, helping slow the lake’s decline,” says the story by reporter Tony Perry. The water sales are made through an agreement reached in 2005.
The 35-year agreement says that a maximum of 35 percent, or 26,000 acres, can be fallowed each year. More than 25,000 acres were set aside this year. The MWD bought 12,000 acres of farmland in the Palo Verde Valley last month, bringing its holdings to 20,000 acres and making it the largest landowner in the valley. MWD officials plan to meet Palo Verde board members later this week to assure them there will be no harm to the agricultural economy of the valley. The president of the irrigation district told the Times that the fallowing program provides growers with an assured income separate from fluctuating crop prices.
“Despite some hard bargaining over money,” relations are relatively congenial between the MWD and the Palo Verde district. In the Imperial Valley, just to the south, “The federal government had to threaten to take the water without compensation to get the Imperial Irrigation District to agree in 2003 to sell water to San Diego.”