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WESLACO – The water situation in South Texas has improved dramatically in recent months. After a decade of drought, reservoirs along the Rio Grande are now near capacity due to plentiful rainfall. In addition, Mexico has recently begun repaying a water debt to the U.S. after a lingering dispute over a 1948 water-sharing treaty.
But despite the favorable turn of events for farmers along both sides of the Rio Grande, Dr. Juan Enciso, an irrigation engineer with the Texas A&M University System Agricultural Research and Extension Center at Weslaco, said this is no time to relax. The agricultural sectors of South Texas and northern Mexico must continue working together to reduce water usage in order to meet future water obligations and increasing demands.
"Using less water implies making an investment in water delivery infrastructures," Enciso said. "This means that on both sides of the Rio Grande, irrigation districts must line their larger canals, substitute small canals with pipe systems, and on-farm irrigation has to be improved by replacing ditches with flexible plastic pipes, often called poly pipe, and improve water management practices to reduce runoff and deep percolation."
Making these improvements, Enciso said, requires financial investment, organization and the sharing of knowledge between the U.S. and Mexico.
"Our role here at this research and Extension center is to share the knowledge and experiences we have in irrigation," he said. "But we also learn a lot from our neighbors in Mexico, such as the combination of different tillage practices with various irrigation methods."
In the past several months, Enciso has teamed with irrigation district managers and farmers to host their counterparts from Tamaulipas. In a recent visit to the Lower Rio Grande Valley, farmers here shared their experiences with Mexican farmers in the use of poly pipe, a practice not widely used in Mexico.
Also discussed was the use of resacas to store water that otherwise would have gone out to sea. Resacas are bodies of water that were formed before the construction of Falcon Dam when the Rio Grande frequently overflowed. Receding waters often left behind sections of small rivers, known by their Spanish name of resacas, or dry river, that can be used as small reservoirs.
"As they do here, irrigation districts in Mexico order water in bulk from Falcon Dam six days in advance," Enciso said. "Once that water arrives, districts must either use the water or let it continue flowing out into the Gulf of Mexico. A lot of water that would be lost is saved by storing it in resacas. Mexico also has resacas, but they are not yet being used to store water." Joe Barrera, the irrigation district manager at Brownsville, told the Mexican visitors how his district uses resacas to regulate water flow in canals.
Enciso and others are setting up three demonstration plots south of Reynosa to compare irrigation methods and demonstrate the use of flow meters, poly pipe and irrigation scheduling.
"There is a lot of pressure on farmers on both sides of the Rio Grande to use less water because municipalities and industry demands on water are growing, and they are willing to pay more for water than farmers do," Enciso said. "Mexican and Valley farmers are well aware of this and are willing to conserve, but conserving water means spending more on technology. Unfortunately, farmers struggle to make a profit as it is.".
With pressure to conserve water, but no economic incentive to make major investments in high-tech, water-saving technologies such as central pivot and drip irrigation, Enciso said growers must strike a balance with the technology they can afford.
"By exchanging knowledge and experiences with our counterparts in Mexico, who have the same problems and get their water from the same place we do, we can help each other get the most bang for the buck and make great progress in conserving water," said Enciso.
The cooperation, he said, has been facilitated by support from the Rio Grande Initiative, a federal grant intended to help improve water conservation in the Rio Grande Valley.
Agencies involved in these cooperative on-farm water conservation efforts include Texas A&M-Kingsville, the Texas A&M University System and Texas Cooperative Extension. In Mexico, the agencies involved include the Comision Natural del Agua (CNA), Universidad de Tamaulipas, Monterrey Tech, Union Agricola Regional del Norte de Tamaulipas, and the Asociacion Rural de Reynosa.
For more information, contact Enciso at (956) 968-5581, or e-mail mail to: