Imperial Valley farmers are paying a trivial $20/acre-foot of water and are primarily growing hay to feed domestic and foreign livestock. Looks like 685K acre-feet per year to feed livestock out of a total water extraction of 1188K acre-feet (had to add up the totals from their graph to get that). So that means ~58% of the water is for cows.

Given how politically impossible it seems to be to increase rates or re-litigate water rights, I think I have to agree with the conclusion of the article: we got to stop eating the meat they're producing.

The health of the Colorado River Basin affects tons of people very directly in the U.S. and Mexico. We have been over-extracting it for ages. I am in favor of wise water usage in non-agricultural settings, but it's time we took action to mitigate the increasingly detrimental impacts of legacy water users from a legacy social and environmental climate.