Elephant Butte Reservoir at 1.4 Percent Leaves Farmers Short

Elephant Butte Reservoir held 1.4 percent of its conservation pool on July 27, 2026, the lowest mark since 1971. NASA’s Landsat images from July 27, 2026 show a brown bathtub in the desert northwest of El Paso, with boat ramps at Elephant Butte Lake State Park coated in sediment.

The people who take that water had already done the math. In March, the Elephant Butte Irrigation District set a 4-inch allotment for the year, then blew through it and shut the gates after July 28.

Four Inches for 90,640 Acres

Phil King, the district’s engineering consultant, walked growers through the 2026 supply on May 1. Carryover from 2025 plus new Project water gave EBID a total allocation of 63,855 acre-feet. A full supply for the district would be 495,000 acre-feet.

THE 2026 EBID ALLOTMENT

• River share: 63,855 acre-feet against a full district supply of 495,000 acre-feet.
• Farm acres: That water was spread over 90,640 acres in the district.
• Order book: The board set the farmer allotment at 4 inches for the season.
• King’s rounding: He called the share 15 percent of a full supply, a round number on a 12.9 percent ratio.

A full year lets district farmers claim three acre-feet per acre, which is 36 inches of water on each field. Four inches is about 11 percent of that share. Pecan orchards, the biggest crop in the district, need 4 to 5 acre-feet a year, roughly 12 times the river water they could order in 2026.

So we are so far below full supply, it’s pathetic. 15%, call it.

Phil King, engineering consultant, Elephant Butte Irrigation District growers meeting, May 1, 2026

King told the room to figure on 4 inches and no more. He did not expect a late bump until after the canals had already closed. The board had already voted that allotment on March 11, with a release date of May 29.

The Last Releases Went South to Texas

Elephant Butte is a New Mexico lake with a two-state job. The Bureau of Reclamation stores Rio Grande Project water there for farms below the dam, for a Mexican treaty delivery, and, when the Project has extra, for a slice of El Paso’s city supply. John Irizarry, acting manager of Reclamation’s Albuquerque Area Office, said irrigation releases started at the end of May, when the lake held 208,000 acre-feet. The first water went to farmers in New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico.

WHO DRAWS ON THE RIO GRANDE PROJECT

• EBID: 63,855 acre-feet on 90,640 acres in southern New Mexico, including the Hatch Valley.
• El Paso County Water Improvement District No. 1: 69,234 acre-feet, the Texas irrigation district below the state line.
• Mexico: 9,239 acre-feet under the treaty allocation for the year.
• City of El Paso: A portion of municipal supply when Project water is available, tracked on the Texas water board’s Elephant Butte page.
• The state park: Recreation on a shoreline that spent the summer as mud and debris.

By late July the remaining outflow was filling a call from the El Paso district, Irizarry said, and those requests were due to end with the month. Hatch and Las Cruces had already seen the muddy first pulse on May 30. After that, the account ran in one direction until the gates closed.

Snow Left the Rockies in March

The 2026 runoff was early and thin. NASA’s Earth Observatory tied the July low to years of drought plus the earliest snowmelt on record at the Rio Grande headwaters in the southern Rockies. A NIDIS snow-drought update dated April 9, 2026, put New Mexico and Colorado among the western states that set a record-low April 1 snow water equivalent in the SNOTEL record that begins in the 1980s.

Peak snow water across the West arrived 21 to 34 days earlier than normal. Colorado’s March was the warmest on record. New Mexico had just come through its warmest December-through-February in that same 1895-to-present temperature record. On April 1, 1,012 of 1,570 SNOTEL and snow-course sites in the West, 64 percent, tied or set a record-low SWE. Western snow cover at the end of March was 81,000 square miles, the lowest in a 26-year satellite record, and 46 percent below the 149,000 square miles still white at the end of February.

Irizarry put the empty pool in a longer drought. “The amount of stored water at Bureau of Reclamation-managed reservoirs across New Mexico is at a record low due to the ongoing megadrought across the southwestern United States which is now in its third decade,” he said. He also said Elephant Butte Dam is built to run at low levels and that monitoring showed no safety problem.

What the Supreme Court Decree Requires of New Mexico

The empty reservoir is the same reach of river Texas sued over in January 2013. On May 26, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a journal entry adopting a final decree in that original action and discharging the special master. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality said the court approved a comprehensive settlement agreement in the 13-year Rio Grande Compact case.

The 1938 compact among Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas already made Elephant Butte the delivery point for water New Mexico owes downstream. The new decree fills in what the compact left vague below the dam. Releases are split 57 percent to New Mexico and 43 percent to Texas. New Mexico also agreed to cut groundwater pumping that depletes the river by 18,200 acre-feet a year, because those wells were the core of Texas’s complaint.

HOW THE ACCOUNT EMPTIED

1. January 6, 1915: Storage begins behind Elephant Butte Dam on the Rio Grande Project.
2. 1938: Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas sign the Rio Grande Compact, with deliveries measured at the reservoir.
3. 1954: The lake hits its all-time low of about 9,900 acre-feet, roughly 0.5 percent of capacity.
4. June 2, 1994: Landsat shows the reservoir nearly full, in a wet stretch that ran from 1985 through 2000.
5. January 2013: Texas files the Supreme Court case over groundwater pumping between the dam and the state line.
6. July 8, 2013: The lake’s annual low that drought year is 2.9 percent of capacity.
7. March 11, 2026: EBID sets a 4-inch allotment and a May 29 release.
8. May 26, 2026: The Supreme Court adopts the consent decree.
9. July 27, 2026: Landsat records 1.4 percent. Agricultural releases stop after July 28.

Article VII of the compact already binds upstream storage when usable Project water in Elephant Butte and Caballo together sits below 400,000 acre-feet. Elephant Butte alone is far under that line, so the Middle Rio Grande cannot stack native river water in post-1929 reservoirs the way it can in a wet year. The decree does not put water in the dam. It changes who may pump around it.

Elephant Butte Is Still at 1.4 Percent

State officials said the lake had likely bottomed for the year once the irrigation releases stopped. The Texas Water Development Board, which NASA used for its volume chart, still listed the reservoir at 1.4 percent on September 9, 2026. Storage was 27,781 acre-feet in a conservation pool of 1,960,900 acre-feet of conservation capacity. The water surface covered 2,297 acres at elevation 4,275.59 feet.

ELEPHANT BUTTE STORAGE THROUGH 2026

Reclamation’s own daily log put storage at 26,755 acre-feet on July 31, with outflow already at zero, then 27,827 acre-feet on September 8. The gain from that July 31 reading to the Texas board’s September 9 figure is 1,026 acre-feet. A year earlier the same board showed 62,814 acre-feet, more than twice the 2026 September volume. The 1971 low, 30,600 acre-feet, still sits above this summer’s floor. The 1954 hole remains the record.

A Near-Real-Time Tool for a 4-Inch Season

NASA’s Western Water Action Office is building tools for the same managers who just ran a 4-inch year. One project feeds satellite soil moisture and the water that plants and soil send into the air into a near-real-time model meant to sit beside EBID’s existing allocation system. Another pairs satellite water-surface heights with drone and ground readings to see how groundwater pumping changes flow in the Rio Grande, which is the exact dispute the decree now polices. NASA scientists are also on a federal study of the Upper Rio Grande that tries to project how much water the basin will have.

Reclamation’s own July 30 note put the reservoir at about 1.3 percent at the end of summer releases and repeated that the dam can run dry without a safety failure. The video under that note is a sunrise over a thin blue line at the dam on July 10.

New Mexico’s long-term drought and record-low 2026 snowpack have brought Elephant Butte Reservoir on the Rio Grande to levels not seen since the early 1970s. The reservoir is now at about 1.3% of capacity at the conclusion of summer releases. Elephant Butte Dam is designed to… pic.twitter.com/MSAeqeDpNP

— Bureau of Reclamation (@usbr) July 30, 2026

Better maps do not lengthen a 4-inch ticket. They tell the district, and now the compact accountants, how fast the leftover water is leaving through crop canopies, canal seepage, and wells.

Wells Keep Hatch Green After the Canals Go Dry

Hatch still shipped green chile this summer, and some Albuquerque shops even saw pods early, from farms that run drip lines and can meter well water. New Mexico State University’s chile guide puts drip fields at 1.8 to 2.8 acre-feet and furrow fields at 2.5 to 4 acre-feet, a demand the 4-inch river share does not cover. A Hatch Valley grower said well water supplied as much as 95 percent of his crop this year, the worst stretch he had seen in 44 years.

That is the second-order bind the decree now meets. Pecan trees cannot be fallowed for a season without losing the orchard. Chile and onions can shift acres year to year, which is why Hatch’s Main Street feels a short river year faster than a mature pecan block south of Las Cruces. The Hatch Chile Store, which has farmed in the valley since 1917, told customers in September that every heat level was behind and that orders placed then might not ship until late September or early October.

On September 9, the Texas water board still listed Elephant Butte at 1.4 percent full. The chile harvest was running late on well water, in the first summer after the court told New Mexico to start pumping less of it.