On Mondays through Thursdays, the campus of the Questa Independent School District in rural Taos County, New Mexico, buzzes with activity. But on Fridays, the schools are quiet. The district, which serves around 315 students from Kindergarten to 12th grade, is one of 41 districts in New Mexico that use a four-day school week.

In 2024, the New Mexico Public Education Department (PED) passed a state-wide rule that would require students to attend school for a minimum of 180 days each year, effectively eliminating the four-day school week. Questa was one of 57 districts that sued PED to overturn this rule, which was struck down by a judge in February of this year.

“We stayed at a four-day week mainly because it makes sense for our community,” said John Maldonado, superintendent of the Questa Independent School District, in an interview with the Daily Yonder.

Stan Rounds is the executive director of the New Mexico Superintendents Association. He said the heart of the lawsuit is the school districts’ ability to determine their schedules locally, rather than accepting a top-down mandate from the state.

“Every district is slightly different than every other district,” Rounds told the Daily Yonder. “That’s a strength. If you build towards that, you get better community support and better student impact. And that’s best determined locally when you know your community.”

According to school board member Michael Cordova, the extra day off gives parents and students an opportunity to schedule medical appointments and family time without pulling kids out of school. It also gives older students a chance to get a job or help their parents with family responsibilities. And, he says it gives students and teachers some much-needed time to decompress. 

According to Rounds, the schedule is especially popular with rural communities, where students and teachers often have to travel long distances to get to school. The first New Mexico school district to go to a four-day week was Cimarron, in 1972, a district in rural Colfax County on the eastern slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Students in Cimarron sometimes spend up to two hours each way on the bus, Rounds explained.

“They made the decision to have longer days, four days a week, rather than put students on buses for that fifth day because it wasn’t practical for the students,” Rounds said. 

By the 2023-2024 school year, nearly half of the state’s 89 school districts and a handful of independent charter schools followed that schedule.

For a small district like Questa Independent Schools, going back to a five-day school week would have meant increasing the budget by around $35,000-40,000, according to Maldonado. And while some of that money would be reimbursed by the state, it would still leave the district scrambling, according to Cordova.

“There is that fear that if it does get forced down our gullets, we don’t know what we’re going to do,” he said. “It’s nice to have these ideas, but a lot of times they’re pushed through without realizing the repercussions it’s going to have on the local districts, especially small districts that don’t really see a lot of money coming in.”

Inconclusive Outcomes

This issue was brought to the forefront of New Mexico politics by a 2023 law that required New Mexico school districts to increase the minimum number of educational hours to 1140 each year. Under Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s direction, the PED created a rule interpreting the law as requiring a 180-school-day minimum, which was successfully challenged in a lawsuit. 

In the most recent legislative session, a bill that clarified the right of districts to determine their schedule locally was passed unanimously, but was vetoed by Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham.

Grisham explained her support for the 180-day rule in her 2024 State of the State address. 

“We’ve seen in New Mexico, and from states across the country, that more quality instruction makes a difference,” she said. “We’ve seen the proven effectiveness of more time in class. It’s time to do the right thing for our kids.”

New Mexico is regularly at the bottom of nationwide education rankings. Grisham and her supporters argue that increasing the number of school days can provide a much-needed boost to the state’s education system. But the growing body of research on the topic paints a more complicated picture. 

Researchers at the University of Oregon identified 133 studies about the four-day school week in districts around the country, including 11 studies about student educational outcomes. They found that the schedule is gaining popularity, with more than 2100 schools in 850 districts adopting the four-day school week. The majority of these schools are in rural districts, though an increasing number of urban districts are shortening their school weeks as well. 

But when it comes to assessing how the four-day school week affects students’ educational outcomes, the results are inconclusive. In part, this is because researchers frequently failed to report “key contextual considerations” like race and ethnicity, economic background, and what students did on the fifth day, which are all important for comparing results across districts. 

But even the best-executed studies, according to the University of Oregon reviewers, had contradictory results. In some cases, reading and math scores improved for students on a four-day schedule, while in other cases, student scores went down. Data for other benchmarks, like 5-year graduation rates and student absenteeism, were also mixed. 

Overall, researchers wrote “findings from a systematic review of 11 studies on student outcomes show little evidence for positive outcomes from a four-day school week.” 

But is there evidence that a four-day school week meaningfully lowers student outcomes? Dr. Paul Thomas is a professor of Economics and part of the Four-Day School Week Policy team at the University of Oregon. His research indicates that the number of educational hours, rather than the number of days per week that students are in school, is the most important determining factor. 

New Mexico’s new rule requiring 1,140 educational hours for all students makes it the state with the most required instructional hours aside from Maryland, regardless of the minimum number of school days, according to a 50-state comparison compiled by the Education Commission of the States in 2023.

The New Mexico Superintendents Association supported the increase of instructional hours, but helped orchestrate the lawsuit against the New Mexico PED over the 180-day rule. 

“We think clock time is clock time,” Rounds said. “And we also believe that what you do with the hours is just as important as the quantity of hours that you’re doing. And that looks different in different places.”

Rounds is skeptical that a five-day school week can solve some of the state’s most pressing problems, including high rates of chronic absenteeism.

“A student who has an attendance problem with a four-day week is not likely to fix that because you give them a five-day week,” Rounds said. “To me, it’s easier to win by attracting them into a really great four-day experience and then giving them an opportunity to have the other part of their life that they value.”

He also worries that a required switch back to a five-day schedule would make it even more difficult for rural districts to recruit and retain talented teachers, who are attracted to those posts, in part due to the benefits of a three-day weekend. 

Noelle Ellerson Ng is the chief advocacy and governance officer with the nation-wide School Superintendents Association (AASA). She says that there is more to the conversation than just which school schedule is most pedagogically advantageous.

“In many instances, we’re not making decisions to go to a four-day school week because it’s academically the most rigorous, but because school district leaders are trying to match the realities of their operating world, which could be their budget constraints or not having enough teachers,” she said.

Given these realities, Ellerson Ng emphasized the importance of letting local districts determine their own paths.

“When it comes down to decisions about calendar and scheduling, those are decisions that are best left to the local superintendent and school board,” she said. “We don’t have a one-size-fits-all approach.”

Ellerson Ng also expressed concern about the future of educational data collection and analysis, which are critical to understanding and answering pedagogical questions like the pros and cons of a four-day school week. 

After budget cuts and mass layoffs at the Department of Education, the National Center for Education Statistics, which has conducted nationwide education research since 1867, was left with only three employees. 

“You can’t disaggregate data if it’s not collected, and you can’t collect data if NCES is gutted. I think it’s really important to call a spade a spade,” she said. “We are absolutely concerned about shying away from collecting data so we can shine a bright light on what is and isn’t working in education, which could include a discussion around a four-day school week.”

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Green is not the color one expects to see in the cactus-and-yucca-dotted Chihuahuan Desert of southern New Mexico. But for more than a hundred miles along the I-25 corridor, between Truth or Consequences and the Texas border, a rich vein of greenery runs through the endless sea of beige.

It’s a cultivated woodland made up almost entirely of a single species — Carya illinoinensis, the pecan. Native to the lower Mississippi Valley, the trees were imported here, to the Mesilla Valley, in the early 1900s. In those early years, they were planted sparingly; the average precipitation is a scant 9 inches per year, hardly enough to sustain this Eastern hardwood. It wasn’t until after 1916, when the Rio Grande Project and its centerpiece, Elephant Butte Dam, were completed, that the trees began to flourish.

Below the dam, the river is hemmed into a narrow channel between levees, and nearly all of its flow is shunted into a vast network of irrigation canals. The transformation has been staggering: In 2018, just over a hundred years after the completion of the Rio Grande Project, New Mexico surpassed Georgia as the nation’s leading pecan producer, a title it has retained off and on to the present day. Much of that agricultural production comes from this dry basin in Doña Ana County, near the Texas border.

On a 95 degree day in late May, I met Rafael Rovirosa, whose family has been growing pecans in New Mexico since 1932. Today, the Stahmann family has 3,200 acres of pecan trees in some of the richest farmland along the Rio Grande River. We met in the parking lot of one of Stahmann Farms’ pecan-processing plants south of the town of Mesilla.

Rovirosa threw open the door of his pickup. “Let’s go for a ride,” he said, and we set out for the pecan groves.

Rovirosa is lean, with deep-set eyes and dark stubble. He looked more like an academic than the operations chief of an agricultural outfit the size of a small city. He piloted his truck through a maze of roads leading into one of the oldest groves in the valley. Some of the pecans were 45 feet tall and close to a century old, planted in perfect rows spaced 30 feet apart to maximize yield. A luxuriant carpet of grasses below the lush canopy gave the orchard the feel of an East Coast hardwood forest.

“Some people might say this isn’t the most efficient way to grow pecans, that they ought to be trimmed back,” said Rovirosa. The lower limbs scraped the top of his pickup. “I don’t care. I think it’s beautiful.”

The region has paid a steep ecological price for this agricultural abundance. Beside us as we drove, I could see a shallow, concrete-lined irrigation canal carrying a steady flow of water, clear as a mountain stream. In many places, water pooled around the bases of the trees; flood irrigation is still standard practice here. Pecans are prodigious water guzzlers. A single mature tree — which can produce 50 or more pounds of nuts in a season — requires around 30,000 gallons of water per year. In southern New Mexico, over 50,000 acres are currently in production. New Mexico pecan farmers have become the state’s largest single agricultural water user, slurping up an estimated 93 billion gallons per year — enough to supply a city of around 3 million —according to a 2023 report by Food and Water Watch.

Some of the farm’s soils, Rovirosa noted, are sandy, and water is absorbed very quickly, meaning that it must be applied frequently. “This actually isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” he said. “We want the water to percolate down, because that’s how we recharge the aquifer. Agriculture is the number-one recharger of the aquifer when times are good.”

But times aren’t good. Mired in a nearly 25-year-long drought, the Rio Grande, one of the great rivers of the West, wends its way through pale desert just beyond the western edge of these verdant groves. And for the last nine months, it has run completely dry.

DESPITE ITS NAME, the Rio Grande is not a large river; its average annual flow, which derives mostly from distant snowpack in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, is less than one-sixth that of the Southwest’s other great river, the Colorado. But more than 13 million people in Colorado, New Mexico and Texas — and across the border in Mexico — depend on it for drinking water and other uses. It also irrigates over 2 million acres of farmland. For centuries, small-scale subsistence agriculture was the only kind of farming practiced in this dry and unforgiving region. Spanish settlers created communal water systems called acequias that sustained a patchwork of small farms throughout Nueva Mexico.

Before the Rio Grande Project, the river sometimes ran dry, though seldom for extended periods. Today, however, during the few months when there is water in the riverbed, it has been released from upstream dams. Most of it is sent downstream to Texas to meet New Mexico’s obligations under the Rio Grande Compact, a water-sharing agreement between the two states and Colorado that was signed into law in 1939. Under this agreement, New Mexico is obligated to send 47% of the water it receives at Elephant Butte Reservoir to Texas. In 2013, Texas sued New Mexico, alleging that groundwater pumping by the state’s farmers had compromised the flow of the river. (Groundwater pumping near a river can draw water away from it.)

The Rio Grande’s flow, when it exists, is not nearly enough to supply the Mesilla Valley’s commercial farmers. To make up for the surface water deficit, pecan (and alfalfa) growers pump groundwater at a ferocious clip, dredging up millions of gallons last year alone — vastly exceeding nature’s ability to replenish it.

That water use is a stark display of economic power. Last year, the growers generated an estimated $167 million in revenue, making pecans the largest food crop in New Mexico. In the mid-2000s, local farmers mounted an aggressive campaign to export the nuts internationally, including to China, which at the time still lacked a word for this uniquely American tree-fruit. Today, China remains a key destination, but most of the nuts go to Mexico, where they’re de-shelled, packaged and then shipped back to the United States for export or domestic sale. (Rovirosa’s family orchard does its own shelling.) The harvesting is done almost entirely with machines, and few laborers are required. Little of the profit goes to benefit the local economy.

There are also biodiversity costs. By the start of the 21st century, several species of fish, including the shovelnose sturgeon, longnose gar, American eel, speckled chub and Rio Grande shiner, had become rare in the river below Elephant Butte Dam, or been extirpated altogether. The bosques, vast willow and cottonwood forests in the river’s wide floodplain, once provided tens of thousands of acres of habitat for birds, reptiles, insects and fish. The wetlands and riparian woodlands also offered flood protection and a buffer against drought. Today, several endangered animals — including the southwestern willow flycatcher, western yellow-billed cuckoo and New Mexico meadow jumping mouse— cling to existence in the few remaining pockets of native forest and grassland.

As of May 1, snowpack in the river’s headwaters was projected to provide only 12% of the water it normally does. Elephant Butte Reservoir was only 14% full on April 18, and water managers at the Elephant Butte Irrigation District, or EBID, announced that allocations would be cut by 83%. Instead of a full allotment of 3 acre-feet, farmers received a mere 6 inches. At the end of May, roughly 5,000 acres of farmland had been fallowed across the district under the state’s Groundwater Conservation Plan. Throughout the valley, dry fields with pale soil and withered stalks of chile, onion, alfalfa and cotton hinted at the row crops that have been lost. (Perennial tree crops like pecans cannot be fallowed; without water, the trees perish.) In April, the USDA’s Farm Service Agency declared a state of emergency for 15 New Mexico counties and announced that it would offer emergency loans to local farmers, ranchers, and dairies.

The river’s condition when it reaches Elephant Butte Reservoir is the byproduct of environmental, infrastructural, managerial and political factors largely beyond the irrigation district’s control. For example, under the Rio Grande Compact, Colorado farmers — many of them alfalfa growers in the San Luis Valley — are allowed to divert between 30% and 70% of the river’s flow, depending on snowpack, before it crosses the state line. Today, the river carries a much smaller volume of water on average than it did before European settlement.

Downstream, Texas is not only embroiled in a legal battle with New Mexico, it’s also fighting with Mexico over its failure to meet the terms of an 81-year-old treaty requiring Mexico to deliver an average of 350,000 acre-feet of water to the U.S. annually over a five-year period. Mexico, facing the same extreme drought as New Mexico, hasn’t delivered its share to Texas via the Rio Conchos, the Rio Grande’s largest Mexican tributary, and is now nearly 400 billion gallons in arrears. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, R, has echoed the Trump administration’s confrontational posture, declaring in a press release last November that “Mexico’s blatant abuse and disregard of water obligations … must not be allowed to continue.”

The Bureau of Reclamation predicts that the Rio Grande watershed will continue to warm and dry, losing as much as one-half of its hydroelectric capacity by the end of the century. Many climatologists say that “drought” is no longer the right word for the situation: “Aridification” more accurately describes the massive ecological shift afoot in the Southwest. Dust storms, once infrequent, now turn the sky an eerie ruddy brown, blotting out the sun. Several times this spring, blowing dust scoured from desiccated, overgrazed desert soil closed highways across the region. “We are starting to see a shift in the weather patterns,” said Ryan Serrano, the Rio Grande manager of the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission, which oversees the state’s water resources. More troubling, the monsoonal rainstorms, which once came reliably between mid-June and late September, delivering the bulk of the region’s annual rainfall, are not materializing as they once did. “We’re either not seeing the monsoon rains, or they come later and later in the season, when it’s not the most ideal time for that to happen.”

And there are larger questions about the sustainability and equity of a system that has all but erased a major river while delivering the lions’ share of its water and profits to a handful of wealthy and influential farmers. “They’re still flood irrigating, but they’re not feeding us anymore, and they’re not employing us,” said Israel Chávez, an activist and attorney whose family has lived in the Mesilla Valley for generations. “The state heralds it as a boost to the economy. But when no one can be employed, and when no one can eat any of this, then it begs the question: Who is this for?”

IN MAY, I attended EBID’s monthly board meeting in Las Cruces. The conference room was decorated with black-and-white photos showing Elephant Butte Dam’s construction. The proceedings opened with the Pledge of Allegiance and a prayer led by Gary Esslinger, EBID’s treasurer-manager from 1988 to 2024.

“Father God,” he said. “Please send the rains.”

Few people know the inner workings of the district’s sprawling, complicated plumbing system, which delivers water to close to 7,000 farmers across roughly 90,000 acres via 357 miles of canals, as intimately as Esslinger does. The next day, he drove me south along Highway 28, past Mesilla’s adobe square and into the verdant heart of pecan country.

The orchards were a beehive of activity. White pickups bearing EBID’s insignia swarmed; the “ditch riders,” as Esslinger called them, were preparing the canals to receive an upcoming release of water from Caballo Dam into the Rio Grande and its system of canals. Esslinger doesn’t believe the doomsday climate talk. Drought is part of a cycle, he said, and the wet years will return. He sees the current situation as a temporary setback — a management problem to be solved.

The first order of business, he said, was to make the irrigation system more efficient, mainly by replacing the old dirt-lined canals with large underground pipes to reduce seepage and evaporative losses. “We’re, like, only 55% efficient, and that’s not good when you’re in a drought scenario,” he said, gesturing to the groundwater gushing into a dirt ditch from a candy cane-shaped pipe. Along its edges grew Equisetum arvense, a weed better known as horsetail, which, he said, can quickly overwhelm a canal.

Much of the water loss in the Mesilla Valley happens even before water reaches the ditches. Several studies have found that Elephant Butte Reservoir loses around 140,000 acre-feet per year — roughly 6% of its maximum capacity — to evaporation. The loss would be staggering in any agricultural region, but in one suffering through a 25-year drought, it is existential.

“The state heralds it as a boost to the economy. But when no one can be employed, and when no one can eat any of this, then it begs the question: Who is this for?”

Esslinger said there was a larger strategy here beyond repairing leaky canals. The updates, he said, will make the system less reliant on Rocky Mountain snowpack and better able to capture water from monsoonal storms and the remnants of the tropical storms and hurricanes that sporadically hit the valley. “We have 300 miles of drainage canals here, and they’re cut 30 feet deep,” said Esslinger. “That’s a lot of storage, if you think about it. It’s just a matter of trying to adapt the canal to receive flood water instead of irrigation water.”

By strategically installing a series of pumps, Esslinger believes that the district can capture the stormwater that, in the past, was simply shunted into the river channel. “Our drains are connected to the groundwater table, and so it’s a great way to recharge the aquifer,” he said.

Doing so effectively, however, requires being able to predict where and when the storms will hit and then quickly evacuating water from the canals to prevent flooding. “We need to modernize our systems, to know when these storms are going to be able to hit in advance,” he said. Despite Esslinger’s technocratic optimism, the unspoken message was one of desperation. As snowpack fades in the Southern Rockies, the irrigation district will become increasingly reliant on the summer storms that, in the drying climate, have become less dependable.

Paying for these kinds of large-scale fixes has also become far more uncertain under the Trump administration. Federal allocations authorized under President Joe Biden have halted, and DOGE-led firings and resignations have paralyzed federal agencies, leaving the district’s funding in bureaucratic limbo. A $15 million infrastructure improvement allocation awarded to the district by the USDA in 2024 has yet to be dispersed. “I just don’t know what happened to that money.”

Esslinger showed me a centerpiece of the district’s infrastructure improvement plan: a network of canals around the antiquated Mesilla Dam, which sprawls like a concrete battleship across the Rio Grande’s dry riverbed. The scheme utilizes a series of small channels called spillways that are cut perpendicularly into the riverbed and designed to return water to the river in emergencies. “In a flood event, ditch break, a car in a canal, any event where you’ve got to evacuate water, you have to have these spillways available,” he said.

Esslinger says these safety valves have a unique feature: When there’s water in the river, it backs up at Mesilla Dam and fills the spillways. “It just sits there,” he said. “And so, I was thinking, what if I put pumps in these spillways and lifted the water out of the river and into the canals? That would save 40 miles on the delivery of water.”

Esslinger has done just that, installing two large submersible pumps in the canal. When they’re operational, he said, the district will be able to pull water from the spillway and fast-track it to local farms. The design, I thought, seemed to show that EBID’s leaky, antiquated irrigation system could be vastly improved simply by allowing water back in the river.

But Esslinger balked at this assertion. Allowing any “extra” water to flow downriver out of the district toward Texas, was, to his mind, unimaginable. “People moving here from places where there’s water — Idaho, Ohio, Iowa — ask, ‘Where the hell’s the river? It’s a public good, isn’t it?’ And I say, ‘No, it’s not public water. It’s paid for by the farmers.’” (EBID members pay $100 for 2 acre-feet, according to Esslinger.)

It seems that decisions about whether the Rio Grande is a river or a sand trap are not left to scientists, the public or even politicians, but to the Elephant Butte Irrigation District and its largest agricultural clients.

“I DON’T CONSIDER them farmers at all,” Israel Chávez, the Las Cruces attorney and activist, told me. “Farmers feed people. Pecans aren’t feeding anyone (here). They’re a luxury crop that are non-native to this area.”

We climbed into his cluttered Prius, driving 20 minutes north to the small town of Doña Ana, where Chávez grew up. On the town’s outskirts, we merged onto the El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, which once connected Mexico City and Santa Fe. An old weed-filled ditch, completely dry, paralleled the road. Chávez said this canal was part of the town’s original acequia system, which carried water from the Rio Grande to small local farms.

Founded in 1843, the village was named for Doña Ana Robledo, a Mexican colonist who died fleeing the 1680 Pueblo Revolt in northern New Mexico. The small, dusty community sits atop a small bluff. One- and two-story adobe buildings, many in disrepair, radiate outward from a central square. We walked past a bronze statue of the town’s namesake pouring water from a bucket into two clay vessels.

He remembered running through nearby green fields as a child. “Any type of vegetable you can imagine was planted across the street from my house,” he said. He gestured to the floodplain and what was once a bosque, where a sprawling orchard now sidled up to the edge of the hill. “All those fields have been replaced with pecans.”

Chávez said his paternal grandfather came to the Mesilla Valley from Mexico in the Bracero Program in the 1950s. “He was able to work for a farmer who was growing all sorts of things, and that farmer ended up giving him some land and letting him grow on his own parcel,” he said. That kind of arrangement is rare in the era of industrial-scale pecan farming, Chávez said. “We have seen a major downturn in labor. I don’t think that that’s happening in a vacuum.”

“People moving here from places where there’s water — Idaho, Ohio, Iowa — ask, ‘Where the hell’s the river? It’s a public good, isn’t it?’ ‘No, it’s not public water. It’s paid for by the farmers.’”

The high cost of farmland coupled with the scarcity of water rights — and water itself — has not only kept new pecan farmers from entering the arena, Chávez said. It has also crowded out smaller farmers growing seasonal row crops — onions, beans, corn, squash and chiles, the most famous of which come from the nearby town of Hatch — on smaller plots of land.

Yet some farmers are still trying to gain a foothold and redefine agriculture in the valley. Ryan Duran works with her partner and his family on Big Moon Farms, their 13-acre plot near the town of Berino, 30 minutes south of Las Cruces. Their list of crops is extensive: collard greens, Swiss chard, broccoli, carrots, radishes, onions, garlic, okra, corn, calabash gourds, melons, beans and several different types of chiles. “It’s hard work because things are coming up at different times,” she said. “Some things don’t make it. Some crops fail because it’s too hot.”

Big Moon, she explained, gets a little surface water from EBID, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what commercial-scale pecan farmers receive. Unlike the region’s pecans, Duran said the crops grown on her farm are consumed locally. “The government is trying to pay farmers not to farm, to conserve water, which is concerning,” she said. “We should be protected. We shouldn’t have these giant orchards taking all the water.”

SPRING RELEASES OF WATER from Elephant Butte Dam are used to meet New Mexico’s water-delivery obligations under the Rio Grande Compact. Rather than a single sustained release, said Tricia Snyder, rivers and waters program director for the environmental group New Mexico Wild, regulators should allow more consistent water releases throughout the year to mimic the natural cycles the large dams have erased.

These “environmental flows”— most of which occur in the upper and middle reaches of the river above Elephant Butte and the Rio Grande Project — are meant to emulate the spring snowmelt and summer monsoon runoff before the infrastructure was built. “The plant and wildlife communities that have evolved around this river depend on that timing,” she said. “So how do we approach that, given the realities of climate change?”

The river below Elephant Butte, Snyder said, needs to be managed with its many shareholders, both human and non-human, in mind. “We might say, OK, agriculture needs this much water at this time, and this species may need a pulse flow at this specific time of year. There are different needs. So how do we tie those all together to meet as many of those needs as possible?”

Others hope to restore the river’s lost bosques and wetlands. Not only do riparian zones provide critical wildlife habitat, they also aid with water storage and floods, like the one that struck this stretch of the Rio Grande in 2006, devastating cities across southern New Mexico and West Texas. After storms dumped up to 30 inches of rain, floodwaters overwhelmed man-made drainage systems, washing away roads and buildings. Restored riparian zones could act as buffers, slowing down water and spreading it more evenly across the floodplain. Vegetated areas also improve a river’s “baseline” flow, releasing water into the channel slowly throughout the year, even during the dry season.

One such riparian restoration project is underway 20 minutes northwest of downtown Las Cruces on a 30-acre experimental plot known as the Leasburg Extension Lateral Wasteway #8 Restoration site. Here, a small forest of willows, cottonwoods and native shrubs is taking shape. The project is overseen by the International Boundary and Water Commission, or IBWC, the agency within the U.S. State Department that oversees waterways shared by the U.S. and Mexico.

The Leasburg site, one of 22 being managed by the IBWC, is the product of a 16-year collaboration between the federal government, local water managers and conservationists to enhance habitat along the Lower Rio Grande. Between 2009 and 2021, IBWC planted over 122,000 native trees and shrubs and removed thousands of invasive saltcedars across its sites. “At first there was some pushback among farmers,” said David Casares, general operations supervisor with the IBWC, who is overseeing the restoration. “They didn’t understand what we were doing here. But once they saw it, they learned to accept it. The way EBID sees it, we’re farmers, too — farmers of native trees.”

Though the Leasburg plot is small, the birdsong and the rustle of leaves are potent reminders of a lost Rio Grande. Indeed, this is as close as one can come to the verdant bosques that once lined the river for hundreds of miles. These small islands of restored native biodiversity, most of which are off-limits to the public, comprise roughly 500 acres, and a dozen of them have been managed to create habitat for a species that has come to epitomize the destruction of the lower river’s riparian ecosystems: the endangered southwestern willow flycatcher, a small songbird that once thrived in the riverside wetlands and forests. Surveys by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation have found the birds at or near several of IBWC’s sites.

Can assisted migration save the Rio Grande’s cutthroat?

When I visited, two IBWC workers were hacking at vegetation with rakes and hoes in several small canals, preparing for the release of water from Caballo Dam and wanting to ensure that nothing would impede its flow to the trees. (The IBWC, like the surrounding farms, bought water rights from the Elephant Butte Irrigation District and was waiting for the upcoming agricultural releases.)

The water couldn’t come soon enough. A closer look revealed that the small cottonwoods, no more than 15 or 20 feet tall, showed signs of water stress. Their leaves, which should have been a vivid green, were a pallid greenish yellow. Mature cottonwoods with their extensive root systems can withstand successive dry years, but young cottonwoods need a steady water supply. But Casares was confident that the trees and grasses would survive, even with this year’s limited water allotment. “Once we start irrigating, the water tables go up,” said Casares. “These are small areas, but they are having a big impact.”

RAFAEL ROVIROSA, whose family has profited from pecans for generations, said he is also seeking solutions. As we drove through his family’s pecan grove, he told me that the current situation, in which surface water deficits are covered by water pulled from shrinking aquifers, is clearly unsustainable. “If the wet years don’t come for another decade, we might be OK,” he told me. “If the wet years never come again, then there needs to be drastic changes in the way that we use water here.”

We left the green grove and drove into the desert. In the hazy distance, the Organ Mountains jutted into the ruddy sky. We passed a small fallowed plot and reached a field covered in tightly spaced rows of tiny trees. They were pistachios, not pecans, something Rovirosa is just beginning to experiment with. Some of the leaves were dry and brown around the edges. But he thought it was only cosmetic, an unsightly but ultimately harmless drying caused by the winds that rake the valley. The trees, he said, were taking hold.

Pistachios require less water and are more salt-tolerant than pecans. Rovirosa also said that he thought they were more popular with U.S. consumers than pecans.

In this plot and another one a few miles down the road, Rovirosa was experimenting with two other varieties of trees — a species of Spanish oak and an Italian pine. Their bounty is not found aboveground but in their roots: Both species are hosts for truffles, which Rovirosa says can bring more than $300 per pound. If Rovirosa can fine-tune these higher-value crops to grow in the desert, he can bring in more money per acre with less water. “I don’t know if it’s going to work,” he said. “It’s been a challenge to keep the trees going. They love the summer. They’re fine in the winter. But they die in the spring.” He cracked a little smile: “But this time it seems like we got it right.”

He said he’s taken some heat from older farmers for branching out and searching for crops that might thrive better in a drier, hotter climate. “People get used to doing things a certain way,” he said. “It’s on me to figure out how to do it so that I can show everyone else how.”

Rovirosa’s main insurance policy, however, involved looking for farmland elsewhere. “One of my long-term goals has been to start to diversify geographically,” he told me. “It’s hard to pick a good place. They say the Southeast is going to get destroyed by hurricanes and the Southern Appalachians are going to get devastated by floods.”

But he thought he’d found the place, located in another besieged agricultural region: California’s Salinas Valley, the Steinbeckian refuge of Dust Bowl refugees in decades past. “I think the Salinas Valley gets a little bit more water than what they get in Spain,” he said. “The temperatures are about the same. So I don’t think that they would need that much water there, just a little bit of supplemental irrigation in the summer, and that’s it.”

Rovirosa added: “It’s absolutely beautiful there,” he said. “We’ll see.” 

Funding for this story was provided by the University of Colorado’s Water Desk. 

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

This article appeared in the September 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The Pecan Problem.”

The post The Rio Grande’s pecan problem appeared first on High Country News.

Many communities have foods that define them: Los Angeles has tacos, Green River, Utah, has melons, while New Mexico’s Hatch Valley is famous for its green chiles. Historic power dynamics — from colonization to migration — have always influenced how and why people began growing, cooking and consuming these symbolic dishes and crops. Today, these foods and those who prepare, raise and sell them carry cultural power; people travel hundreds of miles to buy a juicy Crenshaw or sweet canary melon from a family-run stand in Green River. And yet the farmers themselves often struggle to stay afloat. They lose access to markets as large companies buy up smaller, locally run grocery stores. 

Most grocery stores across the West trace back to a few major corporations. Whether you’re visiting King Soopers in Colorado, Smith’s in Utah or Fred Meyer in Oregon, you’ll find the same Kroger-brand products. The original names of the once-locally owned grocers might remain, but the shops are now just part of one of the nation’s largest grocery corporations.

A handful of companies control the production and distribution of most of our food, and the West plays a leading role in that system. The U.S. headquarters for the world’s largest meatpacker, JBS S.A., is in Greeley, Colorado, while Driscoll’s, the largest berry producer, is headquartered in Watsonville, California. These companies rarely confront the riskiest parts of agribusiness, raising the cows and growing the berries. Instead, they produce, brand and ship them. 

This global food system has profound impacts on the West’s farmers, workers and consumers. It’s getting harder for family farms to turn a profit, and those who seek alternatives to the consolidated corporate market must navigate complicated policies and finances in order to sell directly to consumers. Berry-pickers and meatpacking workers — often immigrants — face exploitation and unsafe conditions, with workplace protections varying from state to state. 

Meanwhile, food insecurity has increased across the West, and yet Republican-led states, including Utah and Idaho, opted out of a federal summer grocery program for kids last year, in part because of anti-welfare politics. 

Beyond its connection to this international system, the West has deeply rooted myths and policies around water and land that create and sustain other layers of power. In the 1800s, settlers stole land from Native people and killed off bison as they drove tens of thousands of cattle westward. Ever since, the cowboy and his glorified cattle have held cultural power that politicians are rarely willing to tarnish. 

As “The Big Four” meatpackers have consolidated most of the beef industry, the economic power of ranchers has dwindled. Only 2% of U.S. beef comes from cows that graze on public lands, and yet multigenerational ranching families and large landowners continue to influence and benefit from antiquated federal grazing policies. 

Most land in the Eastern U.S. is privately owned, but the federal government owns nearly half of all land in the West. Ranchers graze cows on huge swaths of public lands, paying fees well below the actual cost of managing those lands. Over the past century, grazing policies have changed little even as cows destroyed native vegetation and degraded waterways. State and federal policies often put the health of livestock above that of the region’s arid soils or the lives of large carnivores like wolves and bears. 

Ranchers and Big Beef also intersect and overlap with those who control water in the West. Agriculture consumes nearly 80% of the water diverted from the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin, primarily to grow alfalfa and other cattle-feed crops. An investigation by ProPublica and The Desert Sun found that most of the water consumed in California’s Imperial Valley goes to just 20 farming families, with one of them using more than the entire metropolitan area of Las Vegas. Only four of those families use the majority of their water rights to grow foods people consume, like broccoli or onions. The rest use their water to grow hay for livestock. 

Many of these families have senior water rights, and that increasingly means power in the arid and rapidly growing West. Together with livestock associations, irrigation districts and their political allies, they have sought to influence food and water policy. 

Yet in some parts of the West, other interests are gaining power. In the Northwest, years of advocacy from tribes and environmental groups led federal agencies to decommission dams on rivers like the Elwha and Klamath. The farmers might worry about their ability to continue irrigating, but tribes are reclaiming their traditional foodways as salmon return. 

And the Northwest’s rivers aren’t the only places where tribes are reasserting their culture and food sovereignty: Indigenous-run restaurants, farms and cooking classes are springing up across the West. 

Farmers markets, mutual aid efforts and community gardens are creating new forms of cultural, social and economic power, often led by and benefiting those who are excluded and marginalized, including queer, immigrant and Black farmers. Their efforts encourage people to take back intrinsic food traditions while they act in resistance to the global, capitalist food system. 

Still, the corporate structures of our food system are so deeply entrenched that they can be hard to fully comprehend or even notice. In this region, food is power, and that power is not equally shared. Before that can change, however, we need to understand the complexities of this system, tracing its roots to the growth of retail giants and the consolidation of Western agricultural production. 

The grocery giants

The illusion of competition

Farmers markets — a bright spot in the grocery landscape

Get big or get out: Consolidation in agricultural production

The small family farm holds a special place in the American imagination. Today, however, a modest and diminishing portion of our nation’s food is grown on smallholder farms. Production is shifting to larger-scale factory farms in every Western state and across nearly every commodity.

Green fields and a basketball hoop line the road to Roddell Denetso’s sports apparel shop in Shiprock, a town on the Navajo Nation, in northwest New Mexico. Inside, racks of uniforms take up almost half the space, and the name of his business — Black Streak Apparel, in honor of his grandmother — is painted on the […]

Federal prosecutors in New Mexico charged 28 people on Monday for crossing into the new 170-square-mile “National Defense Area” created earlier this month by the Trump administration. The president said he was permitting U.S. troops to detain people from coming to the U.S. from Mexico.

Daniel Herrera Carbajal
ICT

In March, Gila River took out 10,000 acre-feet of their allotted water from Lake Mead after the Trump administration’s Unleashing American Energy executive order froze money for any program related to the Inflation Reduction Act. The act, which Congress passed during the Biden Administration in 2022, allocated money for tribes and states in exchange for giving up some of their shares of Colorado River water.

The Trump administration later unfroze the Inflation Reduction Act funds that would be used for water conservation projects and to build canals. The act allocated around $4 billion to compensate tribes, states and other organizations to not take water out of the Colorado River to use to generate revenue like crops.

Gila River Governor Stephen Roe Lewis wrote a letter to the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum on Feb. 11 before removing Colorado River water from Lake Mead.

“We have given the department every opportunity to avoid what could be a calamitous break in our longstanding partnership, with terrible consequences for the entire basin,” he said.

If water levels continue dropping, hydroelectric dams on the Colorado River will not be able to generate electricity. But the compensation to not take water out of the river has been seen as a short-term solution by many experts, including Mark Squillace, a professor of law at the University of Colorado Boulder who specializes in natural resource law.

“My concern is that the Biden administration seemed to be focused on short-term buyouts of water consumption,” he said. “I just don’t think that kind of approach is sustainable. What we need on the Colorado River are permanent reductions in consumption, and so spending a lot of money to temporarily buy out the rights of people to use all of their water, right, is just not something that is going to solve the problem.”

Thirty tribes have rights to the Colorado River. The river is a resource, but for the Zuni Pueblo it is the source of life.

“For the Zuni people, the Colorado River is really important because the river and the Grand Canyon are our homeland. That’s where the Zunis emerged,” said Councilman of Zuni Pueblo Edward Wemytewa.

The Colorado River has important cultural significance to each tribe that has water rights to it, but the Colorado River compact that outlined how the river would be divided was not drafted in consultation with tribes.

“Laws were created by the US governments, by the US agencies, and during those times, the federal government, in the name of public interest, they started delineating territories. They start creating laws about water usage, water compacts,” said Wemytewa. “Well, in those earlier years, when the laws were being developed and implemented, the Zuni was not at the table. Many Native peoples weren’t at the table.

“Under federal law, those tribes have the right to take their water, usually in priority over everybody else, because the date of priority for Indian water rights is the date of their reservations, which is typically within the 19th century,” said Squillace. “So those water rights tended to date back before other non-Indian users.

“Those are legal rights that they are entitled to. And so one of the things I’ve suggested in my article is that maybe we should think about closing down the river to new appropriations. Why are we continuing to appropriate new water rights when we have this crisis and we have early water rights from Native American tribes that are currently legal but not being utilized for a number of different reasons?” he said.

The current compact being used was created in 1922, and it divided the river into two basins – upper and lower.

Each basin was allotted no more than 7.5 million acre-feet of water per year, equaling 15 million acre-feet of water each year. Mexico was also allocated 1.5 million acre-feet a year. The amount of water the river produces was vastly overestimated at the time of the compact’s creation.

“At the time that they negotiated the compact, it was thought that there was maybe 18 million acre feet of water on an annual basis in the river, which turned out not to be true,” said Squillace.

Currently, the Colorado River is producing about 12.5 million acre-feet a year. A vast over-allocation of water has led to states battling over water and how to use it.

Squillace proposed a new Colorado River compact. It proposes to update states’ water usage laws and to bring tribal nations into the conversation.

“I’ve suggested that maybe we could come up with a new compact, which would look very different from the current compact, but would basically be an agreement among the states to modernize their water laws,” he said. “Right now we have a number of principles in the various state water laws that I think allow for, I don’t want to call them wasteful, but at least inefficient uses. We could increase our efficiency in terms of the amount of water that we use if we sort of refined what we call beneficial use. There’s a principle in western water law that you only get as much water as can be beneficially used.”

For the Zuni Pueblo, a history of strong-handed negotiations and a lack of knowledge of a government system that is not their own led to signing deals that did not benefit them.

“When there were any land settlements or water settlements, tribes were never provided attorneys.Tribes were never given a heads up, They were never given funding to educate ourselves as Indigenous peoples,” Wemytewa said. “We are stewards of the water. We find the corn seed central. The corn seed is central. In fact, our abstract name is Children of Corn because we’re farmers, we’re agricultural people. What agricultural people would give up their water rights? What agricultural people would give up their watershed? We didn’t have much choice.”

Tribes have priority over everyone else when it comes to their water rights pertaining to the Colorado River, which means they must have a voice in the conversation.

“There are 30 Native American tribes with water rights along the Colorado River. And it may be impractical to basically have all 30 tribes represented during negotiations. We’ve got seven states, two countries, 30 tribes. That would be a very difficult kind of negotiation,” he said.

“But you could certainly have some representatives. The reason it’s tricky is that not all tribes agree on the best approach here. And so it’s important that we treat individual Native American tribes as people who can have their own views that might be different from other tribes. And so how do you ensure fair representation of all the tribal views without actually putting all those tribes at the table during negotiation?”

For Wemytewa, a new compact with tribes involved is necessary.

“Today, as a tribal leader, I submit comments to federal agencies, whether it’s the National Park Service or the Bureau of Land Management or (U.S. Geological Survey). We submit our comments trying to provide guidance to the federal agencies that you have to consider that you can’t continue to open up the lands. You cannot continue to give away water, because by doing so, you continue to remove Indigenous peoples from their aboriginal lands to make room for other people, other cultures.” 

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After weeks of uncertainty, two tribal colleges have been told they can hire back all employees who were laid off as part of the Trump administration’s deep cuts across the federal workforce in February, part of a judge’s order restoring some federal employees whose positions were terminated.

Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute, widely known as SIPI, in New Mexico lost about 70 employees in mid-February amid widespread staffing cuts to federal agencies. While most of the nation’s 37 tribal colleges and universities are chartered by American Indian tribes, Haskell and SIPI are not associated with individual tribes and are run by the federal government.

About 55 employees were laid off and 15 accepted offers to resign, according to a lawsuit filed last month by tribes and students. The colleges were forced to cancel or reconfigure a wide range of services, from sports and food service to financial aid and classes. In some cases, instructors were hired by other universities as adjuncts and then sent back to the tribal colleges to keep teaching.

Related: Interested in more news about colleges and universities? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.

It was not clear this week when and if the workers would return, whether the employees who resigned would also be offered their jobs back, or if the government would allow colleges to fill vacancies. Both colleges said some employees had turned down the offers.

The Bureau of Indian Education, which runs the colleges, declined to answer questions except to confirm the laid-off workers would be offered jobs with back pay to comply with a judge’s order that the government reverse course on thousands of layoffs of probationary employees. But the agency also noted the jobs would be available “as the White House pursues its appeals process,” indicating possible turmoil if an appeals court reinstates the layoffs.

Both colleges said the bureau also has refused to answer most of their questions.

SIPI leaders were told last week that the positions were being restored, said Adam Begaye, chairman of the SIPI Board of Regents. The 270-student college lost 21 employees, he said, four of whom decided to take early retirement. All but one of the remaining 17 agreed to return, Begaye said.

The chaos has been difficult for those employees, he said, and the college is providing counseling.

“We want to make sure they have an easy adjustment, no matter what they’ve endured,” Begaye said.

Related: How a tribe won a legal battle against the federal Bureau of Indian Education and still lost

The chairman of Haskell’s Board of Regents, Dalton Henry, said he was unsure how many of the 50 lost employees were returning. Like SIPI, Haskell was forced after the layoffs to shift job responsibilities and increase the workload for instructors and others.

Haskell was reviewed by accreditors in December, and Henry said he was worried how the turmoil would affect the process. Colleges and universities must be accredited to offer federal and state financial aid and participate in most other publicly funded programs.

Henry declined to discuss his thoughts on the chaos, saying there was nothing the college could do about it.

“Whatever guidance is provided, that’s what we have to adhere to,” he said. “It’s a concern. But at this point, it’s the federal government’s decision.”

The Bureau of Indian Affairs declined to make the presidents of the two colleges available for interviews.

Tribal colleges and universities were established to comply with treaties and the federal trust responsibility, legally binding agreements in which the United States promised to fund Indigenous education and other needs. But college leaders argue the country has violated those contracts by consistently failing to fund the schools adequately.

In the federal lawsuit claiming the Haskell and SIPI cuts were illegal, students and tribes argued the Bureau of Indian Education has long understaffed the colleges. The agency’s “well-documented and persistent inadequacies in operating its schools range from fiscal mismanagement to failure to provide adequate education to inhospitable buildings,” plaintiffs claimed.

Related: Tribal college campuses are falling apart. The U.S. hasn’t fulfilled its promise to fund the schools

Sen. Jerry Moran and Rep. Tracey Mann, both Kansas Republicans, said before Trump took office that they plan to introduce a bill shifting Haskell from federal control to a congressional charter, which would protect the university from cuts across federal agencies such as the Bureau of Indian Education.

“[F]or the last few years the university has been neglected and mismanaged by the Bureau of Indian Education,” Moran said in a written statement in December. “The bureau has failed to protect students, respond to my congressional inquiries or meet the basic infrastructure needs of the school.”

The February cuts brought rare public visibility to tribal colleges, most of which are in remote locations. Trump’s executive orders spurred outrage from Indigenous communities and a flurry of national news attention.

“We’re using this chaos as a blessing in disguise to make sure our family and friends in the community know what SIPI provides,” said Begaye, the SIPI board president.

The uncertainty surrounding the colleges’ funding has left a lasting mark, said Ahniwake Rose, president and CEO of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which advocates for tribal colleges. But she added she was proud of how the schools have weathered the cuts.

“Indian country is always one of the most resourceful and creative populations,” she said. “We’ve always made do with less. I think you saw resilience and creativity from Haskell and SIPI.”

Contact editor Christina A. Samuels at 212-678-3635 or samuels@hechingereport.org.

This story about tribal colleges was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post Tribal colleges win reprieve from federal staff cuts appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Stewart Huntington
ICT

New Mexico officials are hoping that Native high school students celebrate their identity in upcoming graduation ceremonies under a new law securing their right to wear culturally significant clothing, accessories and objects during school events.

And spread the joy.

“We’re hoping to kind of run a campaign to some extent … to showcase native students,” Josett Monette, the state’s cabinet secretary for the Indian Affairs Department, told ICT. “We’re hoping we get some selfies or photos of students in their regalia as they do their different events towards the end of the year, and that we’re able to kind of highlight those” on official State of New Mexico social media feeds.

On March 19, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed the legislation into law, ensuring students across New Mexico can freely express their cultural identity at school ceremonies.

“This legislation represents our commitment to honoring and respecting the rich cultural heritage of New Mexico’s Native communities,” said Lujan Grisham. “Every student deserves to celebrate their academic achievements in a way that honors their identity and traditions.”

The legislation passed unanimously through both chambers of the Legislature and took effect immediately after the governor signed it. New Mexico joins at least 18 other states that have enacted laws that enshrine Native students’ rights to express their cultural identities sartorially.

Education officials praised the new statute.

“(The bill) SB 163 is a significant step forward in honoring and respecting the cultural heritage of Native American students across New Mexico,” said Sec. Mariana Padilla of the New Mexico Public Education Department. “By ensuring their right to wear traditional regalia at school ceremonies, this bill affirms the importance of identity, culture, and self-expression of the nearly 40,000 Native American students enrolled in a public school across the state. Education should uplift and celebrate the rich traditions that make our communities stronger.”

Monette, a Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians citizen, said the bill was the first one she had initiated in her year as secretary of the Indian Affairs Department that went through to become law – and that seeing it in the formal legal registry gave her a boost.

“Very excited to have gotten the bill through,” she said. “We felt it was appropriate to put this into law to ensure that the right (to wear culturally significant clothing) remained intact, and that there was no question as to whether or not students would be allowed to do that. … I’m hopeful that this just makes one of those steps a little bit easier for students to not have to worry about it.”

Students have often had to worry about it. Across the country and in New Mexico.

Last year in Farmington, New Mexico, a Hunkpapa Lakota student had her graduation cap – that she had adorned with a traditional feather plume – removed by school administrators during her graduation ceremony. The incident, caught on video, prompted outrage and a rebuke from the Navajo Nation Council.

“No student in any school should be prohibited from wearing regalia that signifies their cultural and spiritual beliefs,” the council said. “These actions are belittling, humiliating, and demeaning to the student and her family. There is no place for this type of behavior in our educational systems. The school officials owe an apology to the student and her family.”

The Native American Rights Fund, a leading legal advocacy organization in Indian Country, has made it a priority to fight for students’ rights to wear regalia.

Last year NARF released a help sheet for students and parents – and school administrators – to navigate the issue. “Many Tribal Nations recognize leadership achievements by bestowing the person who earned the honor an eagle feather or plume,” the guidelines state. “While tribal religions and spiritual practices vary from each other, in general, a Native person who wears a plume or eagle feather at a public event has done something amazing to show that they have the maturity to pray and care for themselves and others. … This guide shares steps to help high school graduates successfully wear eagle feathers during their commencement ceremony.”

The guidelines further urge parents to seek legal advice should schools balk at allowing cultural displays at school ceremonies – a consideration that the new law in New Mexico aims to render moot.

“There’s at least 18 other states that have a similar law in place,” said Monette. “And so we thought it was time for New Mexico to be part of that as well. I always say that New Mexico should be at the forefront of what’s going on in Indian country, and across the entire country.

“I think it’s going to be really exciting. I hope the students and the parents appreciate it. I’m hoping we see lots of students wearing their regalia for graduation.”

And sending selfies to the secretary of the Department of Indian Affairs.

The 18 other states with similar laws, according to the Native American Rights Fund, are: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, and Washington.

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The billions of dollars approved by Congress to clean up abandoned oil and gas wells have been frozen as part of President Donald Trump’s sweeping cuts to government spending, creating concerns that the cleanup will be halted just as it’s getting started.

President Trump’s barrage of executive orders included a January directive called “Unleashing American Energy,” which, among other provisions, ordered that federal agencies stop distributing money appropriated by President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA).

The Trump administration titled this section of the order “Terminating the Green New Deal.” But in freezing this congressionally approved spending, the administration halted a program that paid for plugging and reclaiming so-called “orphaned” or abandoned oil and gas wells. The order stated that agencies should “immediately pause the disbursement of funds” from those two Biden laws. It set a 90-day deadline, upcoming in April, for agencies to review their spending programs and make sure that they align with the Trump administration’s goal of increasing U.S. energy production.

The orphaned well program, which was modeled on a North Dakota initiative, had been widely used by oil states, including several in the West.

The program — which set aside $4.7 billion, a historically large sum, for plugging wells — was distributed to states via grants from the Department of the Interior. In January, days before Trump took office, New Mexico announced that it would be receiving $5.5 million to clean up abandoned wells in the state. California also received a $9 million grant.

California, Colorado, Montana and New Mexico had each plugged over 100 orphaned wells using the Biden funds, according to an Interior Department report in 2024. Wyoming alone plugged 1,021 wells in just one year using federal grants.

As of last fall, the U.S. government had released over half a billion dollars in grants. Wells have been plugged in the people’s front yards, in national park areas and deep in the remote Alaskan wilderness. More than $3 billion are still left to be distributed, but previously available information about the grants appears to have been removed from the Interior Department’s website.

In response to questions from High Country News, an Interior Department spokesperson said that the grant program is “under review.”

“President Trump’s decisive actions are necessary steps to eliminate bureaucratic waste and refocus our agency on its core mission: serving the American people and managing our nation’s natural resources with integrity and efficiency,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Orphaned wells negatively impact current and future oil and gas development activities and pose significant risk to national energy security and public safety.”

In addition to supporting jobs that address oil patch pollution, these federal dollars are used on wells that lack any owner to pay for reclamation. Left unplugged, such orphaned oil and gas wells leak huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere and can contaminate local water sources with salty water and benzene.

Now the future of that work is uncertain, in legal limbo alongside many of the Trump administration’s cost-cutting policies. The funding in question had already been appropriated by Congress, making it unclear that the Trump administration can indefinitely cancel it.

On March 20, more than 30 House Democrats sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, asking him to clear up the lingering confusion surrounding orphaned well funding and restart the grant program.

The funding “protects our communities, cleans up our environment, and builds our economy.”

“We have already begun to hear from IIJA funding recipients impacted by this pause who now face an uncertain future after DOI issued a stop work order on their orphaned well remediation projects,” the letter states.

The letter goes on to say that the Interior Department has issued no guidance on the funds’ status.

“We urge you to resume distribution of this Congressionally directed funding immediately,” the letter stated. “It protects our communities, cleans up our environment, and builds our economy.”

ORPHANED WELLS represent the final stage in what ProPublica recently described as the oil industry’s “ playbook”: When oil wells are no longer productive, large companies sell them off to smaller companies and thereby shed their obligation to plug those wells.

Oil industry profits don’t pay for cleanup

The increasingly marginal wells change hands, eventually landing with operators who lack the financial means to plug them. And when these companies go bankrupt, the wells become orphaned, meaning that the plugging costs then fall on American taxpayers.

The Biden administration’s infrastructure law was the first significant federal attempt to address the growing problem of orphaned wells across the United States, although the funding it provided paled in comparison to the scale of the problem.

The Interior Department estimates that there are about 157,000 documented orphaned oil and gas wells nationwide. This figure is likely a dramatic undercount: The Environmental Protection Agency stated in an April 2021 report that there could be as many as 3.4 million abandoned wells nationally.

“Undocumented orphaned wells may emit nearly 63 million grams of methane per hour into the atmosphere,” according to a November 2024 report, “the equivalent of over 3.6 million gasoline-powered passenger cars driven per year.”

Many state regulators are aware that their financial requirements for oil and gas operators are are aware of this pattern and struggle to prevent it.

Several state oil regulators stated this explicitly in a 2024 survey conducted by the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission (IOGCC), a quasi-governmental body that represents dozens of oil states. The documents were obtained via a records request by Fieldnotes, an industry watchdog, and shared with High Country News.

“Yes, this is the common life of a well,” regulators from Louisiana said, referring to the pattern of marginal wells being passed along to smaller companies.

Utah regulators agreed: “It is definitely a problem when wells are transferred to ‘poor’ operators.”

The plugging program was supposed to address these dysfunctional state programs, primarily by providing money. The Interior Department released its first round of grants in 2023, offering up $658 million to 26 states, including most of the oil states in the West.

The subsequent grants were intended to actually push states to fix their well-plugging programs and require that operators submit more money up front — enough to ensure that the industry and not the public ends up paying for the cost of plugging.

Known as regulatory improvement grants, these pools of funding required that states demonstrate higher financial assurance standards, increase scrutiny on well transfers, improve their plugging standards or show other reforms to their orphaned well regulatory regimes.

These grants essentially became the sole tool for the federal government to incentivize tougher state regulations. But the attempt immediately ran into headwinds: Oil states pushed back on these conditions. Some of this occurred via the IOGCC, which collaborated with the federal government on the rollout of the infrastructure law. This included initiatives to reduce orphaned well numbers, program implementation and data collection. Public documents show the inter-state commission lobbied to keep the federal guidelines as weak as possible. 

“Undocumented orphaned wells may emit nearly 63 million grams of methane per hour into the atmosphere.”

In a meeting of the Texas Railroad Commission in May 2022, Commissioner Wayne Christian – also an appointee to the IOGCC – said that he was working to remove the requirements from the federal grants.

“I’m part of the negotiation with IOGCC on the dollars coming down,” Christian said. “The Interior Department kind of have slowed things down, because all of a sudden, surprise, surprise, they decided they wanted to tell us how to do our work. And so we’re kind of fighting back on that.”

Interior devotes billions to plugging old oil wells. Is it enough?

Regulatory improvement grants would have made available an additional $40 million per state. Now the future of those grants and the improvement incentives are in jeopardy, though some groups are challenging the legality of Trump’s decision to freeze funds that had already been appropriated by Congress and passed into law.

Several environmental groups and many Democratic states have filed lawsuits against the Trump administration, seeking to release the unspent funds from the Infrastructure and Inflation Reduction acts, the Biden administration’s landmark spending bills.

“The Trump Administration has continued to block funds needed for our domestic energy security, transportation, and infrastructure provided under the IRA and IIJA,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta in a statement in February, after filing an injunction alongside 23 Democratic attorney generals, attempting to halt the administration’s funding cuts.

Bonta’s statement noted that the administration was blocking funding that “creates well-paying jobs while simultaneously reducing harmful pollution.”

The post Trump halts historic orphaned well-plugging program appeared first on High Country News.

A previous version of this article appeared on Working Class Storytelling, a Substack by the author.

Courtney McCary-Squyres was going a bit stir-crazy. It was the pandemic and she was a mom of four, including newborn twins. She had to get outside.

She set her eyes on container gardening, figuring that she could be out in the New Mexico sunshine and “put some seeds in a pot with the kids.”

What she and her children put into those first pots grew, but so did Courtney’s understanding of food, food systems and politics. Fast forward to today, this is how she and a group of neighbors ended up at New Mexico’s State Capitol building in Santa Fe with folders of policy memos under their arms.

A food desert

Courtney taught herself about gardening the way many of us now learn things: the internet. She read and researched, and as her front and back yards slowly turned into a small farm, she became familiar with terms like “soil health” and “cultivars.” She documented her progress on Instagram.

As her interest grew, she headed to her local farmer’s market in Alamogordo, a desert town of 31,000 in the Tularosa Basin and the Otero County seat. The Holloman Air Force Base had brought Courtney and her husband here, and the area was so beautiful that they decided to stay.

The farmer’s market was “smaller than expected, and consisted of more craft than food vendors,” says Courtney. She began to wonder why, in this rural area, it was so hard to find fresh, locally grown food. The next time she visited the market, she brought five bundles of bok choy from her garden to share.

Alamogordo is a working-class town. Because of its proximity to three military bases, lots of veterans live here. Like many places in New Mexico, housing costs have skyrocketed and rent is taking up a bigger portion of locals’ paychecks, making family’s food purchases—and particularly the quality of food—dwindle. As a result, 16.5% of Otero County’s population is food insecure, higher than both the state and national averages. In the county, 19% of residents live below the poverty line, including 28% of those under age 18 and 13% of those 65 or older.

Food is often the first thing a family skimps on when facing tough budgets; you can’t pay half the light bill, but you can cut back on groceries.

Courtney also saw that Alamogordo neighborhoods had a lot of empty lots. “I think a lot of people bought here when things were less expensive, and just left the houses when they moved away. Or maybe they left houses to family members who didn’t end up utilizing them,” she says, pointing out that houses frequently catch fire or fall into disrepair, leaving the city to bulldoze them.

Seeing the blight and witnessing the food insecurity around her, Courtney thought: Is there anything more our local government could do to address these needs?

Public land for food

Courtney set out to get the Alamogordo city government to respond. In late 2022, she created a petition asking the city to dedicate empty land for fresh food production and help foot the bill. She started with her friends, asking them to sign on, and then asked her growing Facebook following to do so as well. She tackled the petition drive systematically, the way you might lay out a garden bed.

“We set a goal of 500 signatures, because that feels big and representative in a small town,” she says. “I asked my friends to share it, then they asked theirs. We formed a committee and started knocking on doors and going to local events to get signatures.”

They called themselves With Many Hands and they called the campaign Public Land for Food. They set up meetings with the local government and asked for commitments to the project. By October 2023, petition in hand, she and the team were ready to ask the Alamogordo Parks & Recreation department to provide the land.

With Many Hands formed a leadership committee of people closest to the problem: Working-class people who live in the neighborhoods that were food deserts.  Courtney knew from growing a garden at home that food production—like community organizing—wasn’t something she could do alone. So she began calling the people who had signed the petition, asking them to volunteer, attend meetings and get involved.

“Through the petition, a lot of meetings, and persistent emails, we got our garden,” Courtney says. “We got our public land.”

Chihuahuita

The first garden is now growing on Maryland Avenue in the Chihuahuita neighborhood—an under-resourced, historically Black and Brown neighborhood just south of downtown Alamogordo. In January 2024, With Many Hands celebrated a ribbon cutting ceremony at the site, and a few weeks later hosted their first community planting day.

Importantly, the group secured a Memorandum of Understanding with the city, allowing them to share expenses like the water bill and other infrastructure needs. They host regular community workdays and open meetings to organize and plan. “We are not a budget line in the parks and recreation budget yet, but hopefully soon,” says Courtney. (Full disclosure: the author is employed by Addition Collective Action Fund, which supports community organizing efforts across the country, including With Many Hands.)

The project has rapidly expanded since. A church offered up an additional lot. Alamogordo MainStreet, a local downtown economic development nonprofit, contributed raised beds to garden in a downtown alleyway. They even secured a corner of a public park in Tularosa, 15 miles up U.S. Route 54. Today, they have developed three community gardens in Alamogordo and one in Tularosa, with about 100 volunteers participating in some way throughout the year.

The group refuses to lock the gardens or have limitations on who or how much someone can harvest. Volunteers also deliver produce to the homes of people unable to access the gardens. “Sometimes people ask me if they can harvest vegetables even if they haven’t volunteered,” says Courtney, “And I tell them that harvesting is volunteering, because it’s all a cycle and all the parts matter. If we don’t pick the fruit, the plant will die.”

Growing politics

“People say: I thought you all were gardening,” says Courtney, laughing, “And I say: We are!”

But tending a garden meant to address food insecurity takes more than just weeding and watering. In Alamogordo, it means organizing people and power, too.

“I never imagined myself getting involved in political work,” Courtney says. “I was really jaded, like a lot of Americans.”

In just five years, her journey from wanting to learn how to garden to drive three and a half hours to the state capital to meet with her representatives has been a whirlwind.

On February 21, with her family and other With Many Hands volunteers, Courtney joined about 150 hunger advocates from across the state for Hunger Action Day at the Roundhouse (the nickname for the state capitol building).

It was their moment to make their case to state representatives about passing H.B.229—the New Mexico Grown Approved Supplier Program—which would provide $430,000 in state funds to help working-class households in New Mexico become small-scale food producers—even allowing them to sell their harvests to the Alamogordo Public Schools or at the local farmer’s market. She wasn’t able to get meetings with her lawmakers, but she did manage to track them down in the halls of the Roundhouse. “I told them about how small-scale farmers in Otero County could be the key to reducing food insecurity and increasing fresh, local food, but that we need their help.”

Courtney has learned that all soil can be regenerated with a little work and everything needs cultivation. She started off seeing a community problem and dug around to find other people who also cared, planting the seeds for how their local government could help.

Through this organizing she has experienced both the limitations—the red tape, the bureaucracy—and the possibilities of government. Turning those blighted properties into thriving green community spaces has made her even more sure that, with persistence and elbow grease, regular people could get the government to work for them.

Last fall, With Many Hands held a Food and Housing Summit to get working-class people together to talk about food, housing and other local every-day-people needs.

The group made endorsements of candidates running for local office and U.S. Congress, and then canvassed for these candidates across their communities. Their support helped push Rep. Gabe Vasquez (D-02) and State Rep. Sarah Silva (D-53) to victories in narrow-margin races.

“We had learned that we need to have people in office who are going to support what we need and help us with the solutions,” says Courtney. She and her fellow gardeners felt that they needed to help set the agenda for what they want their elected officials to address, otherwise “they’ll never talk about food or food systems.”

When met with skepticism about mixing politics with gardening, she reminds her neighbors of the successful petition drive they held to leverage their people power and show their ability to their local government—and how they now have four overflowing gardens. “We’ve shown that with enough people, enough pressure, things can get done.”

Cucumbers, zucchini, basil, figs and nectarines. It just takes a group of people and a bit of work. Many hands.

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