Pumping Mississippi River Water West: Drought Solution Or Pipe Dream?

Feb 06, 2023

By Brittney J. Miller

Waves of torrential rainfall drenched California into the new year. Snowpacks in the Sierra Nevada Mountains have swelled to more than 200% their normal size, and snowfall across the rest of the Colorado River Basin is trending above average, too.

While the much-needed water has improved conditions in the parched West, experts warn against claiming victory. About 60% of the region remains in some form of drought, continuing a decades-long spiral into water scarcity.

"The drought is so critical that this recent rainfall is a little like finding a $20 bill when you've lost your job and you're being evicted from your house," said Rhett Larson, an Arizona State University professor of water law.

Over the years, a proposed solution has come up again and again: large-scale river diversions, including pumping Mississippi River water to the parched West.

Just this past summer, the idea caused a firestorm of letters to the editor at a California newspaper. But interest runs deeper than that. Most recently, the Arizona state legislature passed a measure in 2021 urging Congress to investigate pumping flood water from the Mississippi River to the Colorado River to bolster its flow.

Studies and modern-day engineering have proven that such projects are possible but would require decades of construction and billions of dollars. Politics are an even bigger obstacle for making multistate pipelines a reality. Yet their persistence in the public sphere illustrates the growing desperation of Western states to dig themselves out of droughts.

"We can move water, and we've proven our desire to do it. I think it would be foolhardy to dismiss it as not feasible," said Richard Rood, professor of climate and space sciences and engineering at the University of Michigan. "But we need to know a lot more about it than we currently do."

WHAT'S BEING PROPOSED -- AND WHO IS PROPOSING IT?

Formal large-scale water importation proposals have existed in the United States since at least the 1960s, when an American company devised the North American Water and Power Alliance to redistribute Alaskan water across the continent using reservoirs and canals. Widespread interest in the plan eventually fizzled.

Stories of similar projects often share the same ending, from proposals in Iowa and Minnesota to those between Canada and the United States. Yet some smaller-scale projects have become reality.

A Kansas groundwater management agency, for instance, received a permit last year to truck 6,000 gallons of Missouri River water into Kansas and Colorado in hopes of recharging an aquifer. In northwestern Iowa, a river has repeatedly been pumped dry by a rural water utility that sells at least a quarter of the water outside the state. And there are several approved diversions that draw water from the Great Lakes.

PHYSICALLY FEASIBLE -- BUT POLITICALLY?

In 2012, the U.S. Department of the Interior's Bureau of Reclamation completed "the most comprehensive analysis ever undertaken within the Colorado River Basin" at the time, which analyzed solutions to water supply issues -- including importing water from the Missouri and Mississippi rivers.

Under the analyzed scenario, water would be conveyed to Colorado's Front Range and areas of New Mexico to help fulfill water needs. It would cost at least $1,700 per acre-feet of water, potentially yield 600,000 acre-feet of water per year by 2060 and take 30 years to construct.

An additional analysis emerged a decade later when Roger Viadero, an environmental scientist and engineer at Western Illinois University, and his graduate students assessed proposals suggested in last summer's viral editorials.

In their technical report, which hasn't been peer-reviewed, they calculated that a pipe for moving this scale of water would need to be 88 feet in diameter -- around twice the length of a semi-trailer -- or a 100-foot-wide channel that's 61 feet deep.

Experts we spoke with agreed the feat would be astronomical. Still, it's physically possible.

"As an engineer, I can guarantee you that it is doable," Viadero said. "But there are tons of things that can be done but aren't ever done."

Viadero's team estimated the sale of the water needed to fill the Colorado River's Lake Powell and Lake Mead -- the largest reservoirs in the country -- would cost more than $134 billion at a penny a gallon. The price tag for construction would add to this hefty bill, along with the costs of powering the equipment needed to pump the water over the Western Continental Divide.

Buying land to secure water rights would cost a chunk of cash, too, which leads to an even larger obstacle for such proposals: the legal and political hoops.

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Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”