Can a Groundwater Recharge Program Save Teton Valley's Farmers?
In Teton Valley, Idaho, where water is as precious as its native trout, irrigators and environmental groups have teamed up to recharge the area’s diminishing aquifer
Facing increasing development, diminishing farmland and pressure from the state, the water users association hopes its work uniting the at-times disparate interests of fish and farmers is enough to show that Teton Valley knows best how to handle its precious resources. Here, wetlands outside of Tetonia, Idaho, feed the Upper Teton River. June 2022. Photo by Will Stubblefield
by Tom
Hallberg
Wyatt
Penfold’s basement is a place you’d like to hang out. The potato and grain
grower’s pool table, foosball table and projection TV invite leisure time, but
on a wet February afternoon, the farmers, hydrologists and environmentalists assembled
here were not playing games.
Seated on a
semicircle of couches, members of the nonprofit Teton Basin Water Users
Association, a rare blend of environmental organizations and farmers, listened
to Rankin Holmes, a water guru the group hired to run data analysis on its
six-year-old groundwater recharge program. “We had
our biggest year ever,” said Holmes, senior water resources scientist with Watercourse
Engineering, a California-based water planning and management company. “We put
more than 14,000 acre-feet of water back into the aquifer.”
That is
good news because U.S. Geological Service data shows Teton Valley’s aquifer steadily
declined in recent decades as development increased and crop watering systems became
more efficient, reducing infiltration by replacing flood irrigation with pivots
and sprinklers. In addition, the area’s transition from agricultural valley to
recreation hub has meant less acreage being watered: farms replaced by
subdivisions full of houses with domestic wells, each one a straw guzzling from
the valley’s all-important aquifer.
“Without water, Teton Valley isn't going to be growing anything but houses.” – Wyatt Penfold, Teton Valley farmer, COO, Teton Mills/Penfold Farms
Those
gathered in Penfold’s basement worry diminishing groundwater and subsequent
lower surface water levels in the Teton River will mean less irrigation water
and have negative impacts on critical aquatic organisms like the Yellowstone
cutthroat trout.
Recharge
has benefited farmers and fish in western communities like Idaho’s Eastern
Snake River Plain and California’s Central Valley, and the group believes the
data shows it can work in the Teton Basin. They hope it can. In addition to
providing a bulwark against future water shortages or legislative changes to
water rights laws, they want to do something groundbreaking: create a
market-based system to pay farmers for incidental recharge.
Groundwater
recharge involves putting water into underground aquifers, either with
injection wells or seepage of surface water through porous ground such as
unlined canals, gravel pits or fallow fields. Doing so has a range of benefits,
from increasing streamflow later in the year to bolstering domestic well
levels.
For
seepage recharge, farmers or other water rights holders open irrigation headgates
once water is available but before crops need it or a senior water right
holder’s call takes precedence. In Teton Valley, that window is from April 15 through
the beginning of June, when downstream users’ water rights often become
priority.
“There's a
huge move around the world to do more of this as groundwater supplies dry up,”
said Dave Tuthill, former director of the Idaho Department of Water Resources. Tuthill
now runs Idaho Water Engineering, a hydrological services company, and Recharge
Development Corporation, which sets up recharge programs. He’s not associated
with the Teton Basin Water Users program.
Bryce Contor and Wyatt Penfold measure flows in an irrigation canal that contributes to incidental recharge. Photo by Camrin Dengel
In managed
systems, farmers with recharge water rights replenish aquifers in the spring. Then
they can either draw the amount of water they’ve put back in the aquifer or
sell it using a credit system by volume. Rob Van Kirk, science and technology
director at the Henry’s Fork Foundation in Ashton, Idaho, calls that a “storage
and recovery” model in which the aquifer is used like a reservoir. The Teton
Basin group’s goal is different, says Van Kirk, who has done the group’s
mathematical modeling.
“In most
groundwater-surface water settings, people want the water to stay in the ground
and the whole goal is to change the amount of water that's in the aquifer,” he
said. “Our goal is to change streamflow response.” The theory here is that more
water in the aquifer in early spring translates to increased streamflow in the height
of summer when demand for irrigation water from storage sources like reservoirs
is highest.
Teton
Valley’s program is considered incidental, meaning it isn’t part of the state
of Idaho’s water rights program. It also means a state-approved credit system
like Tuthill oversees can’t be created to pay for inputs and outputs. That
could pose a problem for the program’s longevity because of the lack of a
distinct financial incentive. Right now, two nonprofits—Friends of the Teton
River and Legacy Works Group—cut farmers checks from grant money they collect.
“There's a trend in water conservation transaction work to try to make it more market driven. The question has been who will really benefit from the activity and then how can we key into that particular market?” – Sarah Lien, flow restoration director, staff attorney, Friends of the Teton River
Independent
of funding, Van Kirk said, this type of incidental recharge program is viable
in headwaters basins across the western U.S. Anywhere with similar
geology—alluvial valleys filled with porous rock and gravel—can implement this
type of program and expect to see ecological and agricultural benefits. “We
know the physics works,” he said. “We just don’t know about the economics yet.”
Many
aquifer recharge programs are funded using philanthropic or government money.
Farmers and landowners in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, for example, agreed in 2017
to tax groundwater pumping, lowering groundwater use by 30 percent; in the
Columbia River Basin, the federal Bonneville Power Administration has paid to
recharge more than 2 million acre-feet of water, or enough to fill New York
City’s Empire State Building 2,354 times over. However, philanthropy and
government budgets can fluctuate, and if priorities change, funding could dry
up quicker than an ephemeral stream in August.
James Dewey of the Crowfoot J Ranch looks on at springs that flow with groundwater each summer season. The return of this groundwater feeds the Teton River in the center of the valley. Photo by Camrin Dengel
“There's a
trend in water conservation transaction work to try to make it more market driven,”
said Sarah Lien, flow restoration director and staff attorney at Friends of the
Teton River. “The question has been who will really benefit from the activity
and then how can we key into that particular market?”
Creating a
new market for surface water is daunting, especially in the face of Idaho’s complicated
water rights. Established by settlers who rode wagons into Idaho’s fertile
lands in the 19th century, a schedule of priority governs all
surface water flows in the state. Older, senior rights rank ahead of junior
ones, which were established later. If the amount of available water isn’t
enough to satisfy all claims, senior ones are filled first. At that point,
junior rights holders must buy storage water from reservoirs to keep farming.
The thinking
at Teton Basin Water Users Association goes that if they can prove aquifer
recharge leads to increased streamflow later in the year, junior rights holders
might be willing to instead pay for those natural flows. Yet figuring out how
that fits with Idaho’s water rights system is a wrinkle. “Based on the state
water law, I don't see how it's done,” Tuthill said. “It's complicated, and
it's not covered by the standard water rights delivery system.”
The
group’s first step was hiring Van Kirk to create a model to understand how
incidental recharge impacts flows. Replenishing 10,000 acre-feet each year is a
rough threshold for creating statistical significance, and only in the past two
years have stream gauges shown improvement over mean base flows. More would be
better, Van Kirk says, for parsing variation in the stream gauge data, which is
why the more than 14,000 acre-feet in 2023 was such a milestone.
In addition to providing a bulwark against future water shortages or legislative changes to water rights laws, they want to do something groundbreaking: create a market-based system to pay farmers for incidental recharge.
Over the
past six years and with Van Kirk’s modeling, they’ve found each 1,000 acre-feet
of recharge roughly translates to 1 cubic-foot-per-second increase in
streamflow. His model shows the Teton Basin has potential for closer to 40,000
acre-feet of recharge, were every canal company participating.
“In
theory, if you could provide 30 or 40 more cfs, you could demonstrate that
you're providing it, then those people who are still using storage in August and
September could switch from using storage and get a little bit more natural
flow,” Van Kirk said.
Teton
Valley’s program isn’t close to that stage yet, but Lien hopes the recent data
will convince more canal companies to open ditches and increase trackable
recharge, getting closer to the numbers Van Kirk cited.
For the
farmers assembled in Penfold’s basement in February, pocketing a check isn’t their
main motivation. “It’s a bonus,” Penfold said of the money. If the group can
find someone to pay for it, that’s the icing on top of Penfold’s ultimate goal:
maintaining local control of Teton Valley’s water. State legislators are
working on rules that could eventually bring Teton Valley’s groundwater into
the Eastern Snake Plain management system, which could force towns and farmers
to send more water downstream.
Facing
increasing development, diminishing farmland and pressure from the state, the
water users association hopes its work uniting the at-times disparate interests
of fish and farmers is enough to show that Teton Valley knows best how to
handle its precious resources. To Penfold, it’s a vital effort to ensure the
area’s continued existence.
“Without
water, Teton Valley isn't going to be growing anything but houses,” he said. “And
that [will] even be hard because there's not going to be enough water in the
aquifer to support them.”
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About Tom Hallberg
Tom Hallberg is the Idaho Conservation Organizer for
the Greater Yellowstone Coalition and a freelance journalist based in Victor,
Idaho, covering rural communities, environmental issues and outdoor recreation.
The former managing editor of Backcountry Magazine, his work has
also appeared in Teton Valley Magazine, Light and Seed,
and Headwaters, among other publications.
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