Western Water Woes: Dairies grapple with uncertain supplies, ever-tougher regulations

May 3, 2010

By: Catherine Merlo, Dairy Today Western and Online Editor

If he doesn't get his surface water allotment this year, California's Mel Medeiros will spend $50,000 to pump groundwater for his dairy and forage fields.

Dark clouds unleash a cold, hard rain as dairy producer Mel Medeiros heads to his freestall barn in central California.

After three years of well-publicized drought, California has received near-normal precipitation this year.

Medeiros welcomes the April rain, but he doesn't expect it to change the state's water woes one bit.

"Sometimes it looks like a battle we'll never win,” says Medeiros, who milks 1,300 registered Holsteins near Laton, 20 miles west of Fresno. "Even if we had enough water, we still have to deal with water-quality issues.”

Medeiros' concerns echo across the Western dairy industry. Whether it's California, Arizona or Utah, the story is the same, says Utah dairy producer Brad Bateman. "Water is under pressure from developers and urban encroachment, and agriculture can't compete,” he says.

Water may be the most coveted commodity in the western U.S., where some call it the oil of the 21st century. Escalating demand for this precious resource, pushed partly by the West's growing population, has boosted water's value and triggered questions about its availability and quality. That has intensified scrutiny of dairies' manure management practices and discharges to surface and groundwater.

In addition, uncertain and expensive water supplies are directly impacting forage production and the feed supply so critical to Western dairy herds.

Christina Medeiros works full-time on water-quality compliance at her father-in-law's central California dairy. Here she samples wastewater from the dairy's freestall.

That's certainly the case in California, where water cutbacks and tough new water-quality regulations vex a dairy industry that's curbed its annual milk production by half a billion pounds since 2008.

While Medeiros grows some of his own forages and purchases hay from Utah and Oregon, he—like many of the state's dairy producers—counts on California-grown alfalfa.

This year, California's alfalfa plantings have dropped to less than 900,000 acres, a 40-year low, says Dan Putnam, University of California, Davis, forage specialist. Alfalfa, among the state's biggest agricultural water users, has been hit hard by water cutbacks as well as dairy's downturn.

As a major ingredient in feed rations, alfalfa's biggest customer is the dairy industry. This year's smaller alfalfa crop will further stress the state's beleaguered dairies.

"There's going to be a shortage of hay this year,” Medeiros says. "Dairymen are broke and they're not going to buy hay to stockpile it. They'll buy a load at a time. Come October, there's not going to be enough to get us through the winter.”

In 2008, when dairy prices soared, hay prices also rose, and Medeiros paid $265/ton for delivered hay. Last year, as dairies tightened their belts, his alfalfa price fell to $165/ton to $170/ton. This year, prices could climb when dairies can least afford it.