Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

My emphasis on moisture-conserving practices for growing comes from living
in this high desert climate. Western water wars go back before the Spanish
and Anglo, and are even intensifying today. We lived in that area southwest
of Abq. If they go through with it they'll need an army because Catron
County is armed to the teeth. The county code requires every household to
own a least one rifle.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
------------------

URL: http://www.abqjournal.com/news/state/268260nm12-09-07.htm

Sunday, December 9, 2007
Concerns Overflow in Datil as Residents Confront Ranch's Bid to Pump Up
to 17 Billion Gallons
By Rene Romo
Copyright © 2007 Albuquerque Journal; Journal Southern Bureau

DATIL— Usually only weddings and funerals bring out crowds in this rural
community on the western New Mexico plains, said Datil postmaster and
lifelong resident Mavis Perdue.
But a sizable chunk of the region's sparse population— about 300
people—
packed the Datil Elementary School gym on Tuesday night because of an
application to drill deep for a stunning amount of water and possibly
pipe it 60 miles west to the Rio Grande.
''We're all just horrified by this,'' Datil resident Cheryl Hastings
said before the meeting, word of which was spread through an
old-fashioned phone tree. ''We are doing everything we can to mobilize.''
The cause of the anxiety is the application by the owner of the
18,000-acre Augustin Plains Ranch for a state permit to appropriate
54,000 acre-feet of water per year in Catron County.
The water would be obtained by drilling 37 wells on the ranch, each as
deep as 2,000 feet, with the proposed diversion amounting to about about
17.6 billion gallons per year— more than half the annual consumption by
the city of Albuquerque.
Augustin Plains Ranch is owned by Italian businessman Bruno Modena, who
ranch representative Everett Shaw said is principal of a New York-based
firm called S Management. The company's New York City address is the
same as that of a general contracting outfit called PM Contracting.
Shaw acknowledged in a telephone interview that the project's magnitude
makes it ''unique,'' but he said it is aimed at promoting economic
development around the state without harming locals. At the same time,
specific uses for the water are addressed in only broad terms by Shaw
and the ranch's application.
Given the pressure to meet the water needs of varied interests, from
farmers to growing cities to the environment, in an arid state with
stressed supplies, Shaw said there is a big market for the water.
''If there are development projects that the state assigned a high
priority to, we'd be anxious to look at that opportunity in the
market,'' Shaw said.
The ranch company proposes a variety of standard uses for the water,
such as for livestock, irrigation, real estate development and municipal
needs. But another proposed use— again only broadly referred to— was
really what caught local attention: providing water to the state to help
New Mexico meet its delivery obligations to Texas under the Rio Grande
Compact.
If the state needed to find more water to meet its compact obligations,
''We'd be able to explore the market for other large users," Shaw said.
As any longtime New Mexican knows, the mere mention of water and Texas
in the same sentence is enough to make the ground shake— let alone an
application for water rights sufficient to supply a small city.
The major concern, voiced by a number of residents, is that such a huge
appropriation will dry up other wells in the area, lower groundwater
levels and dash the local economy.
''The local economy around our communities is very fragile; any action
that affected something as basic as water availability could have
catastrophic effects," Bill Green, superintendent of the Quemado-based
Independent School District No. 2, said in a letter to state Engineer
John D'Antonio last week.
"It is not worth the risk to allow such a venture when we are unable to
predict the actual consequences," Green wrote.
'Rude awakening'

The big water rights application is likely to take several years to
resolve, said D'Antonio, whose office is in charge of state water permits.
"Obviously, there are a whole lot of protesters who will want assurances
that it's not affecting their water supply," he said. ''What comes into
question is the feasibility of the plan itself and if it's do-able— is
the water there?
''I can't stop anyone from filing an application," D'Antonio said.
"We'll see how this plays out.''
At the Tuesday night meeting, local opponents of the water rights
application gave residents detailed instructions on how to file protests.
Protests or objections to the Augustin Plains Ranch application have to
be filed by Dec. 16. D'Antonio said a ''slew of protests'' already have
been filed.
''It's been a rude awakening,'' said Nichole Sanders, an instructional
assistant and part of a long-time ranching family, who helped organize
the community meeting last week. ''We've never had something like this
come up before.''
Augustin Plains Ranch LLC is proposing to access the water by drilling
the 37 wells north and south of U.S. 60 between the Catron-Socorro
county line to the east and Datil on the west.
With water rights in the Middle Rio Grande area selling for between
$15,000 and $25,000 per acre-foot, the proposed appropriation would be
worth about $1 billion, said Suzanne Smith, a Socorro-based water rights
consultant.
''It's huge money, just based on that,'' Smith said.
The cost of building 60 miles of pipeline to get the water downslope to
the Rio Grande could also carry a price tag of hundreds of millions of
dollars, said Socorro Rep. Don Tripp, who based his estimate on similar
projects.
''The only market for this water would be the state of New Mexico,''
Tripp said, ''and I'm not sure we have that much (money).''
Shaw said his group will address every ''valid concern'' and that he
expects meetings will be held with individuals and perhaps the community
starting in January after all protests have been filed.
''We are trying to do a project that meets our interests, obviously, but
also the needs of the state,'' Shaw said. Later, he added: ''We want it
to be a project that works for everybody.''
Not a closed basin

The project's developers must show that the diversion of 54,000
acre-feet of water per year will not have any effect on underground
water flowing west as part of the Gila-San Francisco watershed, a
fully-appropriated basin.
The application to the state Engineer Office says that, based on initial
modeling, hydrologists have concluded the Augustin Plains basin
''contains an extraordinary amount of potable groundwater in storage
that could sustain diversions of 54,000 acre-feet per annum for a period
of 300 years.''
The application says the ranch ''believes that the State Engineer could
impose conditions on the use of water under a permit to avoid impairment
to all other existing users.''
The Augustin Plains Ranch has retained the engineering firm of
Bohannon-Houston Inc. to evaluate the cost of a pipeline from Datil to
the Rio Grande.
That and other information will be made available to the public as the
application moves forward, the application says.
D'Antonio said the Augustin Plains basin is not a closed basin, meaning
applications for new water diversions still can be made.
''But the question is the connectivity between it and the Rio Grande or
the Gila Basin, and that's not well understood,'' D'Antonio said.
Catron County manager Bill Aymar called the application a ''ridiculous
request'' and said the County Commission would file a protest.
Tripp said the scale of the request, and how long it would take to put
the water to beneficial use, made him ''a little dubious about what they
are trying to do.''
Bob Myers, a 66-year-old Datil electrician, said he was upset enough by
the application to call the FBI and file a report.
''This is a new form of terrorism,'' Myers said. ''I've got a 100-foot
well. Mine will be the first to go dry.''