The Season
On April 2, 2026, a barley field at BKW Farms in Marana, Arizona was pulling 3,500 to 4,000 gallons of water per minute through siphon tubes. The pour would run eight to twelve hours. The water came from the Central Arizona Project canal alongside the property, pushed by converted natural-gas Chevy 454 engines. Twelve of them. Each one capable of moving 9,000 to 10,000 gallons per minute.
Brian Wong, fourth-generation farmer and president of BKW Farms, has watched water move across this land for most of his life. The negotiation that will determine how much of it he keeps is happening somewhere he'll never sit.
BKW Farms is 100% reliant on Colorado River water. The farm hasn't pumped groundwater since the late 1990s, when it converted to a groundwater savings facility under an arrangement with the Arizona Department of Water Resources. Wong partners with Tucson Water, Metro Water, and Marana Water to use their CAP allocations. In exchange, the cities get credit for groundwater accumulating beneath his acreage. Mutual dependency built on a resource whose governing rules expire in December.
The Bureau of Reclamation's post-2026 operating guidelines determine how Colorado River water gets divided across the Lower Basin. The current framework, combining the 2007 Interim Guidelines and 2019 Drought Contingency Plans, sunsets at the end of this year. A Draft Environmental Impact Statement released in January laid out five alternatives. A final decision is expected before October 1, the start of the 2027 water year.
Wong told AZPM he can't determine future irrigation-water availability until he has firmer numbers. The barley doesn't wait for firmer numbers.
Four Generations of Adaptation
Wong's great-grandfather came from China in the late 1800s to work on Arizona's early railroad system. He opened a grocery store in downtown Tucson in the 1920s. Wong's grandfather saved enough to buy cropland in Red Rock, north of Marana, in 1935 and put his first crop in the ground in 1939. When he planted cotton late in 1941, he couldn't have known Pearl Harbor would send cotton prices from eight cents to more than a dollar a pound.
By the 1970s, the operation peaked at roughly 25,000 acres spread across Red Rock, Marana, Casa Grande, Wilcox, and into California. Then it contracted. The family recentralized to Marana in the 1990s, shifted toward managing water rights and regulatory relationships, and started growing heritage wheat varieties, organic grains, and 800 pounds per week of specialty mushrooms from 294 acres. BKW's website notes the farm has cut water use per acre by nearly 50% since 1939.
That trajectory tells a story of intensification and adaptation: fewer acres, higher-value crops, tighter water management. It also tells a story of concentrated risk. Twenty-five thousand acres of cotton spread across five regions can absorb a localized water cut. Two hundred ninety-four acres of organic grain on a single canal cannot. The family's adaptation was real and hard-won. It also made them more exposed to exactly the kind of basin-wide renegotiation happening now.
Who Else Wants the Water
The five alternatives in Reclamation's Draft EIS range from a No Action scenario imposing up to 600,000 acre-feet per year of Lower Basin reductions to a Maximum Operational Flexibility alternative that could reach 4 million acre-feet. These aren't incremental variations. They represent fundamentally different visions of how shortage gets distributed: by water-rights seniority, by pro-rata sharing, by combined reservoir storage triggers, by some hybrid nobody's fully described yet. CAP officials have said Arizona's water users have already been giving up about 30% of CAP's water supply. The Lower Basin has offered additional post-2026 cuts of 27% for Arizona, 17% for Nevada, and 10% for California.
And then there are the claims that haven't fully materialized. Thirty federally recognized tribes hold water rights in the Colorado River Basin. Reclamation's Ten Tribes Partnership study documented diversion rights to nearly 2.8 million acre-feet per year for partnership tribes alone. A broader CRS estimate puts total tribal diversion rights at about 3.4 million acre-feet basinwide. Tribes are currently using roughly half their quantified rights. Most anticipate full use by 2040.
These are among the most senior rights in the basin, legally the most protected from shortage. For a farmer whose water arrives through municipal partners with junior priority, the math is plain: the water tribes haven't yet put to use currently flows to other users. When tribes exercise those rights fully, that surplus disappears, and every arrangement downstream adjusts. This isn't a hypothetical. It's a timeline.
Agricultural water is already moving. In May 2026, the Imperial Irrigation District approved an amendment creating up to 100,000 additional acre-feet of Colorado River conservation through its voluntary Deficit Irrigation Program, compensating growers for reduced yields from temporarily cutting irrigation during peak summer months. IID's separate on-farm efficiency program set a base payment of $347 per acre-foot for 2026, plus a $128 federal supplement. Voluntary and locally driven, IID says. Also a preview of how agricultural water gets reallocated when a basin is overcommitted: through compensation, through fallowing, through the slow conversion of farmland into a water bank that serves someone else's needs.
The Insulation That Isn't Permanent
Wong's GSF arrangement gives him a peculiar kind of protection. His water technically belongs to cities with more senior rights than typical agricultural users. A 2022 Washington Post profile noted that this structure meant Wong and tenant farmers on BKW land wouldn't face the first round of agricultural cuts.
But that insulation depends on the municipal partners continuing to find the arrangement worthwhile. It depends on those cities not needing the water themselves as the Phoenix metro area grows. It depends on the post-2026 rules not restructuring the priority system in ways that make the GSF model less attractive to everyone involved. "Allocated" describes a legal entitlement. It does not describe water in a ditch.
Wong told AZPM he personally does not want to return to groundwater. That preference carries the weight of a generation's infrastructure decisions: the conversion to GSF, 50 miles of concrete-lined irrigation ditches, the organic certification that requires consistent water quality. Going back to groundwater wouldn't just mean drilling wells. It would mean rebuilding a system the farm deliberately dismantled over decades.
The final EIS is expected by fall. The Bureau of Reclamation is reviewing 18,127 public comments and selecting among five alternatives that range from manageable to transformative. The barley has already been harvested. The wheat is in the ground or coming out. The mushrooms fruit on their own schedule.
Wong cannot pause the farm while the federal government decides. He plants into uncertainty because stopping a fourth-generation organic operation is its own irreversible act. The grocery store in 1920s Tucson. The cropland purchased in 1935. The first harvest in 1939. The conversion from groundwater in the 1990s. The mushroom operation. The heritage grains. Each decision made the next departure harder and the water less certain. The one-way door for a farmer on a negotiated river isn't a single dramatic moment of choosing. It's the accumulated weight of seasons, each one deepening a commitment to land and water that may or may not hold.