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W190: Water Conservation, Competition and Quality in Western Irrigated Agriculture

Statement of Issues and Justification

Statement of the Problem

The rapidly changing configuration of water use in the American West in recent years has resulted in a number of economic, environmental, and institutional problems with profound impacts on irrigated agriculture. The purpose of this project is to identify, examine, and evaluate the multiple impacts of these challenges on western irrigated agriculture, help develop viable mechanisms to effectively address them, and thus contribute toward informed water policy formulation.

Justification

As new problems associated with water management emerge, the need to devise dynamic new approaches for solving them takes on added importance and urgency. Examples of such emerging areas of concern include climate change and its impact on irrigated agriculture, increasing demand for water transfer from agriculture to environmental and urban uses, impacts of animal waste management from concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO's) on water quality, precision agriculture and the effects of site?specific management on water conservation and quality, contingent water marketing, and new approaches (e.g. game theory) to conflict resolution among competing water uses and users. The proposed revision of this regional project is a concerted effort to address these emerging concerns in innovative ways.

The consequences of water management and policy decisions are frequently difficult or impossible to predict because of the many complex interactions between technological, institutional, and economic factors. Extensive research has been done on the individual factors and their effect on economic and environmental outcomes. In addition, many models have been constructed which attempt to account for the myriad interactions that may occur that effect such outcomes. Past work by this regional project has focused on model development. Little work has been done, however, on the application of such models to evaluate and quantify the interactions, or to direct the development of sound integrated research to verify and corroborate model predictions. In addition, the difficulty in applying existing models is the lack of complete on-farm or regional data appropriate for input to them. The focus of this revision is to treat these unaddressed needs.

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