Columnist Susan Snyder: Rancher: Water plan is all wet

Monday, March 21, 2005 | 8:18 a.m.

Dean Baker has presided over his family cattle-ranching business for 46 years, and has worked on ranches and farms longer than that.

In recent years, he has passed along most of the responsibility to his three sons, who now run the Baker Ranches Inc. operation in eastern Nevada's White Pine County.

They produce about 2 million pounds of beef a year and cultivate about 2,000 acres of alfalfa, some of which makes it into the feed boxes of Las Vegas Valley horses.

This ranch supports Baker, his mother, his three sons' families and dozens of people in the families who work there.

For these Nevadans, the effects of a Southern Nevada Water Authority plan to sate Las Vegas Valley development's thirst by pumping water from rural White Pine County isn't an academic, theoretical discussion.

It's their future.

"You love this life, and you work seven days a week. Your wife thinks you're crazy, but that's what you do," Baker said in a phone conversation from his home near Baker on Friday.

Baker knows what we're up against down here. He was in Las Vegas just last week as a member of the water authority's Integrated Water Planning Advisory Committee.

At that meeting, Baker told the group that water tables in his drought-ridden rural area already have dropped up to 20 feet. On Friday he said the evidence of dropping water tables is obvious to any farmer or rancher who tries to access them.

"There is no such thing as an average year," he said of the water allotments. "Virtually every ranch in this valley has tried to drill wells to supplement the mountain water."

The Bakers have drilled 30 and found water in maybe 10 of them.

"And this isn't pumping the water to Las Vegas," he said. "This is putting the water on the land right there" where the residuals return to the water tables.

Water piped down here won't do that, he said.

Most residents -- and newspaper columnists -- lack the level of sophistication required to do the math problems that support taking more water from an area already stricken by five years of drought.

Still, no matter how technical the talk becomes, it stills sounds odd that we're trying to extract up to 180,000 acre-feet of water a year from two counties that the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Farm Services Agency has listed as drought disaster areas since January 2004.

"Every time we drill, we know we are drying the water table down," he said. "There is no free lunch."

A year ago, Lincoln County residents told me of neighbors forced to sell off cattle because there wasn't enough water for the forage to feed them. They described generations of families who had worked the same land for 140 years.

When talk of taking water from White Pine County first started, Baker and his sons sat down and discussed what they would be willing to accept if the water was taken and the ranch failed.

"We asked, 'Do we want to take the money and go buy a big ranch some- place else?' But we decided we would stay where we are," he said.

"I don't think it would do my grandchildren any good to just leave them money. It's better to leave them a ranch to work on," Baker said. "It's not about the money."