Who Runs Short in a Drought? Water Rights and Canal Delivery in Arizona
Presented by:
Anton Liutin
Practice Job Talk
Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
12:00 pm-1:30 pm
Taylor-Hibbard Seminar Room (Rm103)
In Arizona, water rights and irrigation district rules set how much water each farm may use, while the water reaches farms through canals shared with other farms. Along a canal, water reaches upstream farms first, so whatever they use is no longer available to farms farther down. I use recent droughts to ask whether farms with the same rights share water shortages equally. I map 54,946 plots onto a directed canal network and track their crops each year from 2016 to 2023. In drought years, plots with more farmed land upstream show larger declines in a satellite yield proxy and crop moisture. Outside drought, the difference is near zero. The gap is clearest in junior-rights districts, which lose surface water first. Under an assumed conversion from the satellite proxy, the gap is equivalent to about 1–3 percent of crop revenue, or 14–28 percent of net returns in representative farm budgets. In the two largest senior districts with delivery records, the downstream disadvantage is smaller when canals carry more water. An earlier, drier drought, when major deliveries largely held, shows no such gap. In 2022, deliveries from the Central Arizona Project’s Agricultural Settlement Pool fell by about 88 percent. Fields still farming had a lower yield proxy when more land upstream stayed in crop. In 2023, with no project water, tail fields without groundwater were more likely to stop farming. Farms with the same rights do not share the costs of delivery cuts equally.