In saga of water scarcity, she found earnest players in a crucial role
The story of water in the U.S. West and elsewhere is often one of lack, of dire predictions, and of conflict. As our writer found, it can also be a story of responsible stewardship, service, and resolve.
California’s governor recently lifted emergency water restrictions, and there has been some positive near-term news about drought in the U.S. West (though major Colorado River reservoirs remain low). Still, water issues are global climate issues, and they persist.
Entitlement to water from the imperiled Colorado River remains a pressing issue for seven basin states and Mexico. Nowhere is that truer than in California’s Imperial Valley, a major source of agricultural produce.
When writer Sarah Matusek set out to explore the issue, she found an angle that highlighted agency and good stewardship.
“I think it’s safe to say that all up and down the Colorado River there’s the shared understanding that more needs to happen to conserve more water,” she says on the Monitor’s “Why We Wrote This” podcast. Sarah drilled into the work – much of it manual and low-tech – of the “zanjeros” (or “ditch riders”) employed by the Imperial Irrigation District. Their job, getting water to farmers, is performed with a sense of responsibility.
“What mattered was that he was fulfilling his duty to customers, who are counting on him to deliver what they order without wasting a drop,” she said of a zanjero she interviewed, and whose dedication seemed to match that of many water-conserving farmers.
“I left for home thinking that water may be a scarce resource,” Sarah says, “but ingenuity is a renewable resource.”
Episode transcript
Clay Collins: The Imperial Valley in California’s southeast is America’s cornucopia, spilling its produce onto tables year in and year out. Agriculture there is water intensive. Much of that diminishing resource originates in the Colorado River, pools behind a dam on the California-Arizona border, then seeps into a system of waterways that are purpose-built to irrigate, high producing farms. Full-time water district workers called “zanjeros” – the term comes from the word “zanja” or ditch, and means ditch riders – make it happen, shunting the water to farmlands by way of canals in work that dates back more than a century in the valley.
Denver-based Sarah Matusek wrote about that work for the Monitor, and she joins us today.
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Collins: This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m Clay Collins. Welcome Sarah!
Matusek: Hi, Clay!
Collins: So there’s been some good near-term news about drought in the US West, but so much about water there – and worldwide really, because this is a climate issue – remains concerning. Your story carried a “responsibility” tag, which fits the stewardship that you described. So how did you find your angle?
Matusek: Well, I’d never heard of a zanjero before, and I wanted to meet one. I first encountered the term during research ahead of a reporting trip to California’s Imperial Valley, where I knew I wanted to write about Colorado River water. Because the Imperial Irrigation District, the IID, has the single largest entitlement to Colorado River water out of seven basin states and Mexico. And so when I heard about this zanjero job, I asked the IID if I could meet one. And that’s how I met Jeff Dollente. He’s one of 140 zanjeros, give or take, who currently work for the IID, and you can find them in Arizona as well, maybe elsewhere still in the Southwest. But their role, as you mentioned, Clay, is really important, because they are guiding that Colorado River water to the edge of farm fields through this really intricate series of canals. And given calls to conserve this precious resource that is the Colorado River, these zanjeros work really hard to not waste any drop.
Collins: Hmm. And it’s complicated work. One of your sources talks about the tremendous amount of coordination involved. There’s also dedication. Was dedication something that was evident during your reporting?
Matusek: Absolutely. I met Jeff at 5:30 in the morning, right before his eight-hour shift starts. And I should back up and say that since the Colorado River and the water runs into the Imperial Valley 24/7, zanjeros are working 24/7 as well, helping this relay race move forward to get this water to these highly productive farm fields. And when I met Jeff, he came prepared with two pages of typed notes stapled together for me. And I was just amazed that he cared that much to make sure that, kind of like not wasting any drop of water, he didn’t want to waste any time in sharing the ins and outs of his job. You know, I met Jeff in Holtville, which is also known as “the carrot capital of the world.” And he has grown up there. He has spent his entire life in the Imperial Valley, and is so dedicated to his job and his colleagues at the IID, that I actually circled a note, in his notes, that became kind of my thesis for this story. He wrote in his typed up notes: “I think the most important part of our job is to keep everyone on order and not to waste any water.”
Since Jeff has grown up along these canal systems and tending to them – he’s worked for the IID since he got out of high school in 1985 – he’s seen innovation pass through this valley. He’s seen, uh – years ago, when the district started to line these huge canals with concrete to make sure that water wasn’t needlessly seeping and being wasted into the ground – he’s seen automation be added to his job. He can rely on some level of automation to help open and close gates along with some of his own manual work. And yet some of his roles as zanjero remain pretty low-tech and traditional. You know, zanjeros have been a part of this valley for at least a century. And so some of those traditional vestiges remain, like these long rulers or yard sticks, really, that he uses to measure water. He literally sticks it in the canal to measure. Or metal gate bars that he uses to crank open some gates.
Collins: What struck me as I was reading your piece, that this is an effort that serves farmers at the receiving end, but it also helps conserve water around Colorado River. And agriculture is so often seen as a major stressor of the water table.
Matusek: It is certainly a complicated issue, right? These communities that are yoked together along this huge Colorado River system all need to learn to live with less. There’s increasing calls for sacrifice and sharing. There are areas like the Imperial Valley, major water-reliant agricultural areas that take in a lot of Colorado River water. And some people are questioning whether that is the best use of water when we also have cities, we have Native American tribes who are still trying to receive their full entitlement to water. And at the same time, you know, I was struck by just how much ingenuity there is in farm regions like this, right? You have farmers in the Imperial Valley who get compensated for water conservation methods that they try. For instance, if they switch to more water-efficient systems like drip or sprinkler irrigation, if they use lasers to level their fields. And farmers have to inherently do their jobs being led by a sense of ingenuity, to know what types of crops to plant in a given year, to know how best to use the amount of water they’re allocated in a given year. And so I left for home thinking that water may be a scarce resource, but ingenuity is a renewable resource.
Collins: You yourself have lived in the West now for a couple of years. Did wading into the world of the zanjeros give you any hope about this resource, [and] in its management?
Matusek: I think it’s a patient hope. I think it’s safe to say that all up and down the Colorado River there’s the shared understanding that more needs to happen to conserve more water. Clearly there are plenty of examples, like these on-farm conservation plans, where conservation is already happening. Uh, we’re also waiting to hear the federal government weigh in on their own water-saving deal. What has also struck me [is] that, you know, the Colorado River presents us not just with a conservation challenge, but with a communication challenge. Because the river system, and who gets what amount of water, all of the interstate arguments, are all just so darn complicated.
But I think one way to elucidate these complex issues is through analogy. We want to make sure, of course, that these metaphors are apt and culturally sensitive to the communities that we’re writing about. And one way to do that, I think, is to make sure that my analogies are coming more from my sources than from my own imagination. That’s why when my zanjero source Jeff likened himself to a milkman, Clay, that was a golden moment for me. You know, I was doing this frenzied math in the corners of my notebook, like trying to add up his, you know water deliveries for the day, and I was really trying to understand how his whole delivery system works. And I do to an extent. But what really mattered to me was that he was a milkman, right? What mattered was that he was fulfilling his duty to customers, who are counting on him to deliver what they order without wasting a drop.
Collins: Hmm. I love that. It’s a remarkable story, Sarah. I loved how you characterized the sound made by water as it rushes through a ditch, and I’ll let listeners discover how you put that when they read your story. We’ll have a link to it in the show notes. Thanks so much for being here today.
Matusek: Thanks for the chat, Clay.
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Collins: Thanks for listening. You can find more, including our show notes with links to Sarah’s work, at csmonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis, or wherever you listen to podcasts. This episode was hosted by me, Clay Collins, and produced by Jingnan Peng. Tim Malone and Alyssa Britton were our engineers, with original music by Noel Flatt. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2023.
