Drinking Water, Taxpayers, Pecans, and the Lower Rio Grande Settlement

A landmark court settlement will force dramatic reductions in New Mexico groundwater pumping — and reshape who pays for water in the desert Southwest.

By Beth Bardwell and Norm Gaume

A Settlement That Changes Everything

For generations, Southern New Mexico residents and farmers have enjoyed cheap, seemingly unlimited water. That era is ending. A complex legal settlement between New Mexico, Texas, the United States, and the two major irrigation districts is expected to receive U.S. Supreme Court approval before this summer. If approved, it will become immediately effective. The consequences will be felt in every water bill, every farming operation, and every municipal water plan across the region.

The settlement resolves a lawsuit Texas filed in 2013, claiming that New Mexico groundwater users were pumping so aggressively that they depleted surface water flows legally owed to Texas. The United States joined Texas. The case wound through the courts for over a decade. New Mexico has agreed to substantially reduce groundwater pumping in the Lower Rio Grande basin — a region that has, for years, been drawing far more water than is sustainable.

The years of cheap water are over.

The Hidden Aquifer Problem: Why Most Residents Don’t See It Coming

Freshwater has always been something of an illusion in the Chihuahuan Desert. The sole source of water for drinking, cooking, bathing, and daily life is underground. Unlike a reservoir, you can’t look at an aquifer and see how much is left, or how quickly it is dropping. Water flows from the tap. It is relatively cheap. The population is growing. Outwardly, everything appears fine.

Meanwhile, the Rio Grande — New Mexico’s major river — runs dry through most of southern New Mexico’s cities and towns. Over the last 25 years (2000–2025), the Bureau of Reclamation and farmers have released streamflow into the river below Caballo Reservoir for less than six months on average each year. The 2026 irrigation season will be worse, with EBID farmers expecting just a four-inch allotment of surface water due to very low storage in Elephant Butte Reservoir and extremely low snowpack in the Rio Grande headwaters.

Many Southern New Mexicans do not realize that Lower Rio Grande streamflow and the Rincon and Mesilla valleys’ underground aquifers are directly connected. When too much groundwater is pumped, it intercepts water that would otherwise flow downstream. That is precisely what Texas argued and what the scientific and litigation record demonstrates.

How We Got Here: The Pecan Boom and a Policy Decision That Shaped the Crisis

To understand the depth of the problem, you have to understand what grows in the valley — and why.

Historically, Lower Rio Grande farmers grew hay, vegetables, and row crops. These are seasonal crops with moderate water demands that could be fully satisfied by a full Rio Grande Project surface water supply of about three acre-feet of water per acre. Over the past several decades, that changed dramatically. Today, more than half of the acreage within Elephant Butte Irrigation District (EBID) — approximately 40,000 acres — is planted in pecans. Pecans are a permanent, high-water-use crop. Unlike seasonal crops, they cannot be fallowed during drought years. They require full irrigation every single year.

Pecan orchard irrigation requirements are staggering. Growing a single pecan requires more than eight gallons of water. A mature pecan orchard produces roughly 187,900 pecans per acre and consumes almost five feet of water annually — nearly twice the allotment of surface water EBID farmers can expect in a full supply year.

It takes more than eight gallons of water to grow a single pecan.

Pecan acreage had been climbing for years, but it took a dramatic leap in the early 2000s following a specific policy decision. The late Governor Bill Richardson[1] directed then-State Engineer John D’Antonio to recognize a special water right for pecan orchards — nearly five feet per acre per year. That administrative determination was subsequently affirmed in the State District Court’s ongoing Lower Rio Grande water rights adjudication, locking it in. This crop-specific water right is unique due to its political origin and because it departs from New Mexico’s previously uniform practice of adjudicating a single water right amount for all farmers in an irrigated region, based on the total crop mix.

The question that now hangs over the settlement is an uncomfortable one: farmers on the Lower Rio Grande dramatically expanded production of a permanent, high-water-use crop during a period of documented drought, declining reservoirs, and growing interstate water obligations. Was that a poor investment decision — or a calculated bet that, at the end of the day, public taxpayers would absorb the cost? See Jeremy Miller’s “The Rio Grande’s Pecan Problem: How Big Ag Is Threatening New Mexico’s Water Supply,” High Country News, September 2025.

By the Numbers: How Much Has Been Pumped

The scale of groundwater extraction in the Lower Rio Grande basin is significant. During the three years ending in 2024, groundwater users pumped an average of 281,000 acre-feet per year from the basin’s shallow alluvial aquifer and the deeper Santa Fe Group basin-fill sediments. EBID farmers account for 83% of that total — approximately 235,000 acre-feet per year. Municipal, domestic, commercial, and industrial (MDCI) users represent the second-largest share at 14%, or roughly 40,000 acre-feet per year. Dairy farms account for 2.3%. These figures come from this table in the State Engineer’s Lower Rio Grande Water Master Report for 2024.

Lower Rio Grande groundwater pumping by user category, averaged over the three-year period ending in 2024. Source: NM State Engineer’s Lower Rio Grande Water Master Report, 2024. Almost all pumping is metered.

The cumulative impact of this extraction is substantial. State Engineer experts estimate that approximately 250,000 acre-feet have been drained from the shallow alluvial aquifer that underlies the valley floor. Another 1,000,000 acre-feet have been removed from the deeper Santa Fe Group aquifer system. The voids left by this pumping are being partially refilled by gravity flow from the Rio Grande itself — meaning the river is being pulled underground rather than flowing to Texas.

To offset the drawdown’s effect on Rio Grande streamflow, estimates suggest New Mexico would need to replenish approximately 750,000 acre-feet into its combined aquifers. That is roughly equivalent to three full years of current total groundwater diversions across the entire Lower Rio Grande basin.

On the municipal side, proactive conservation programs have kept MDCI pumping relatively stable despite population growth — a meaningful achievement that stands in notable contrast to the dramatic expansion of agricultural pumping. The State Engineer chart below illustrates the divergence between agricultural and municipal pumping trends over time.

Aquifer conditions and groundwater pumping levels, 1951–2021. Green lines reflects irrigation pumping; black lines reflects municipal, domestic, commercial, and industrial (MDCI) pumping. The lowest irrigation pumping was in 1985, less than 25,000 acre-feet. 2021 irrigation pumping was 280,000 acre-feet. Source: NM State Engineer. 

What the Settlement Requires: Four Consequences for Southern New Mexico

The settlement is nearly finalized. When the Supreme Court approves it, four major changes will follow.

1. New Mexico Must Retire Groundwater Rights

The Settlement requires New Mexico to purchase and retire 18,200 acre-feet of actively used groundwater rights from willing sellers. The State must acquire half of those rights by 2030; the remainder by 2035. This represents approximately 5–7% of current total groundwater pumping in the Lower Rio Grande — the equivalent of retiring roughly 9,240 groundwater-irrigated acres within EBID, or 83% of the City of Las Cruces’s annual groundwater pumping.

These retirements are a starting point, not a finish line. Achieving full compact compliance will ultimately require groundwater pumping reductions well beyond this to meet other specific settlement requirements.

2. New Mexico Taxpayers Will Foot a $150 Million Bill

The State Engineer estimates that implementing the settlement will cost New Mexico taxpayers more than $150 million. Approximately $27 million in additional public funds is being spent this year and the following two years paying EBID farmers to fallow their fields — leaving irrigated land unplanted to reduce pumping.

There are legitimate arguments on both sides of using public funds to compensate private agricultural operations for adjusting their water use. What is harder to defend is that the conditions requiring this expenditure — a pecan-dominated landscape in a water-constrained desert, during a documented period of drought and compact obligation — were foreseeable, and in some respects policy-enabled.

3. Water Will Cost More — for Everyone

Southern New Mexico residents are facing higher water bills regardless of whether they live in a city or run a business. Farmers will suffer shortages. The reason is rooted in water rights priority.

The settlement formally recognizes a 1903 priority date for EBID’s surface and groundwater rights of 3.024 acre-feet per acre. That portion of EBID farmers’ total diversion rights is senior to almost all others. Under New Mexico’s constitution and water law, junior groundwater rights — including those held by the City of Las Cruces and New Mexico State University — cannot legally impair senior rights.

The settlement requires New Mexico, EBID, and the United States to negotiate with the City of Las Cruces and New Mexico State University — the affected water users participating as amici — to develop an alternative administration plan that would replace strict priority administration. That deadline is October 2026.[2] If those negotiations fail, strict priority water law prevails: junior municipal users get cut before a single senior agricultural right is touched. The negotiations are not open to the public.

In dry years such as 2021, 2022, and 2025, fully satisfying EBID’s senior rights would require more water than New Mexico’s total share of Caballo Dam releases, meaning agricultural groundwater pumping may need to be partially curtailed. In better years, EBID rights will claim all the water. As a consequence, cities may need to pay EBID farmers to reduce their pumping or develop alternative water supplies — none of which are inexpensive.

Possible alternatives include more aggressive municipal conservation, importing groundwater from outside the basin, reuse of treated wastewater effluent, and desalination of brackish water. All of these approaches are in active use in El Paso. All of them cost significantly more than the groundwater Southern New Mexico currently relies on.

4. More Rio Grande Streamflow — But Perhaps Not for Wildlife

One potential benefit of the settlement is that Southern New Mexico residents and wildlife may see more water flowing in the Rio Grande as New Mexico works to meet its delivery obligations to Texas. The 105-mile stretch of river that has run bone-dry for six months of most recent years could see more sustained flows.

However, even this outcome may be more limited than it appears. The Bureau of Reclamation and the NM Interstate Stream Commission are investing millions of dollars helping EBID improve operational efficiency and capture “surplus” stormwater — the wild  water once allowed to flow freely in the Lower Rio Grande. This water, which once supported riparian habitat and downstream ecosystems, will be systematically captured for groundwater recharge. The environmental benefits of increased streamflow may be largely offset before the water ever reaches wildlife.

What This Means for You

The Lower Rio Grande Settlement is not an abstract legal proceeding. It is a turning point in how water is managed, priced, and prioritized across Southern New Mexico. The aquifer that supplies drinking water to Las Cruces, Doña Ana County, and dozens of smaller communities is connected to the same system that has been heavily drawn down for decades. The bill for that drawdown is now coming due — in court-mandated pumping reductions, in taxpayer-funded buyouts, and in the rising cost of water for every household in the region.

Southern New Mexico has long operated under the assumption that water from the ground is reliable, cheap, and essentially unlimited. The Settlement forces a reckoning with a different reality: that the desert’s water supply was never inexhaustible, that decisions made over the past two decades have accelerated its depletion, and that state taxpayers and Lower Rio Grande water users will broadly share the costs of those decisions.

 

Beth Bardwell is a water policy researcher and writer focusing on the Rio Grande basin. Her work appears in publications covering water law, environmental policy, and Southwestern water management.

Norm Gaume is a retired water engineer and former director of the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission.

[1] The State Engineer’s offers in the Lower Rio Grande water rights adjudication recognized a unique, crop-specific diversion right of nearly five acre-feet per acre for pecan orchards — a significant departure from New Mexico’s historic practice of recognizing a single water right amount for all farmers in an irrigated region based on the total crop mix. Among all adjudications statewide, the pecan offer stands as the outlier. This crop-specific right emerged during the Richardson administration. The political origins of the pecan crop water right in the Lower Rio Grande remain incompletely documented in the public record. The Salopek family, operators of one of the largest pecan farming operations in the region, were prominent stakeholders during this period. Co-author Norm Gaume has firsthand knowledge of these events from his work with the Office of the State Engineer during this time, including a contemporaneous conversation with the late Mark Salopek in which Salopek described the political origins of the water right.

[2] Undated Summary of Settlements in Principle for Multiple Rio Grande Lawsuits obtained through a February 2026 New Mexico public records request to the Office of the State Engineer.