Water crisis in the West: It’s the farms, stupid.

The Colorado River crisis isn’t about individual consumption — it’s about agricultural water use, which accounts for nearly 74% of the river’s direct human demand. Let’s stop talking about showers and start talking about farming.

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The dominant narrative around the Colorado River crisis—repeated again in a recent article the Times—casts the problem as one of people versus scarcity, or states versus states. That framing is deeply misleading. The uncomfortable truth is that cities are not draining the river. Agriculture is.

In his Feb 2 guest essay (“These Four States Are in Denial Over a Looming Water Crisis”), Mr. Roth does not acknowledge the most important fact in this debate: irrigated agriculture accounts for roughly 74% of human water use from the Colorado River. Framing this as a human-centric or population-driven conflict between states is therefore not just incomplete — it is fundamentally wrong.

If we want an honest debate about the Colorado River’s future, coverage must stop treating this as a fight over water for people and start acknowledging what it actually is: a dispute over agricultural water allocations built for a different century. By highlighting lawn removal and “water cops,” as Mr. Roth does, the discussion shifts blame onto individual behavior while sidestepping the sector that uses most of the water. Taking a shorter shower won’t save the Colorado River; talking seriously about farming might.