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Lesson plan Grade 10 Social Studies & Civics

A Dry-Year Water Lease in the Loxley Basin: A Grade 10 Lesson

A grade 10 lesson where students analyze a dry-year water lease between the city of Loxley and basin farmers, tracing incentives, payments, and trade-offs.

Objectives

  1. Students will explain how a dry-year water lease moves water from farms to a city without a permanent sale of rights.
  2. Students will calculate lease payments and forgone farm income from stated figures.
  3. Students will identify which groups gain and which bear costs under the lease, including groups not at the table.

Vocabulary

Water right
The legal permission to take water from a river, lake, or aquifer and use it. Water rights decide who gets water when there is not enough for everyone.
Acre-foot
The amount of water it takes to cover one acre of land, about the size of a football field, one foot deep. Western states use acre-feet to measure large amounts of water.
Fallowing
Leaving a farm field unplanted for a season so it uses no irrigation water. Farmers are sometimes paid to fallow fields during droughts so cities can use the water.

Also: lease, incentive, third-party effect

Teacher overview

In much of the American West, farms hold the oldest and largest water rights, while cities hold the fastest-growing demand and the larger budgets. A dry-year lease is one policy answer: a city pays farmers to fallow fields for a season and takes the unused water, and the farmers keep their rights for the future. This lesson uses the fictional Loxley Basin, where the city of Loxley faces a dry summer, to teach how such a lease changes what each side finds worthwhile, and who outside the deal feels its effects. A common misconception this lesson addresses is that the farmer who leases water loses money; the handout math shows the lease can pay a farmer more than the fallowed crop would have.

Procedure

Hook (5 min): Pose the situation: the fictional city of Loxley expects its reservoir to run short this summer, and the basin's farms hold rights to most of the river. Ask students to suggest every way the city could get more water, and list the ideas without comment. Students commonly propose buying farms outright, building new supply, or rationing; introduce the lease as a fourth option and name it.

Direct instruction (12 min): Define a water right as a legal claim to use water, and an acre-foot as the volume that covers one acre a foot deep. Explain the lease structure: the city pays a set price per acre-foot, the farmer fallows enough acres to free that water, and the right itself never changes hands. Then frame the economics as incentives. The farmer compares the lease payment with the profit the crop would have earned; the city compares the lease price with its next-cheapest option. Note that alfalfa is a common lease target because it uses several acre-feet per acre and can skip a season without killing the operation.

Worked example (13 min): On the board, work one case slowly. Suppose a farm irrigates 300 acres of alfalfa at 4 acre-feet per acre, so it uses 1,200 acre-feet a season. If the city offers $180 per acre-foot for half that water, students should see the two sides of the farmer's ledger: money in from the lease, profit lost from fallowed acres. Build the stakeholder chart with the class: farmer, city ratepayers, farmworkers, the seed and equipment dealers in town, and the river itself. Ask which of these groups sits at the negotiating table and which do not, and mark the chart accordingly.

Handout work (12 min): Students complete the five Student Handout questions individually with calculators. Circulate and check question 3 closely; students often subtract the wrong direction or forget that only the fallowed acres lose their profit. This is the formative check for the calculation objective.

Closure (8 min): Exit ticket: each student writes two sentences naming one group that gains from the lease and one group that bears a cost without having a vote in the deal, using the stakeholder chart. Collect and use the range of answers to open the next class on third-party effects in water policy.

A Dry-Year Water Lease in the Loxley Basin: A Grade 10 Lesson — Grade 10 Social Studies & Civics
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Student Handout

The fictional city of Loxley has offered basin farmers a one-summer water lease. Answer each question using only the numbers stated in that question.

  1. A farm irrigates 300 acres of alfalfa, applying 4 acre-feet of water to each acre over the summer. How many acre-feet does the farm use in the season?
  2. The city of Loxley offers $180 per acre-foot. If the farmer leases 600 acre-feet, what is the total lease payment?
  3. To free those 600 acre-feet, the farmer fallows 150 acres that would each have earned $220 in profit. How much better off is the farmer with the lease than with farming those acres, in dollars?
  4. One acre-foot is 325,851 gallons. How many gallons do the 600 leased acre-feet supply to the city?
  5. Name one group in the basin, other than the farmer and the city, that could be affected by the lease, and state in one sentence whether the effect is a gain or a cost.

From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.

Answer Key
  1. Answer: 1,200 acre-feet. 300 acres times 4 acre-feet per acre equals 1,200 acre-feet for the season.
  2. Answer: $108,000. 600 acre-feet times $180 per acre-foot equals $108,000.
  3. Answer: $75,000 better off. The fallowed acres forgo 150 times $220, which is $33,000 of profit, and the lease pays $108,000, so the farmer nets $75,000 more than farming those acres.
  4. Answer: 195,510,600 gallons. 600 times 325,851 equals 195,510,600, or roughly 195.5 million gallons.
  5. Answer: Accept any reasonable group with a matched effect, such as farmworkers who lose seasonal wages on fallowed acres, local suppliers who sell less seed and fuel, or downstream users and the river, which may carry the effect of changed flows. The sentence must state whether the named effect is a gain or a cost.

Differentiation

Support

Provide the multiplication for questions 1 and 2 set up with labeled blanks, and let students complete only the final step. Give a two-row ledger for question 3, with "money in from the lease" and "profit given up" as printed labels.

Extension

Ask students to write the terms they would add to protect third parties, such as a cap on the share of any farm's water that can be leased or a fund for farmworker wages, and to explain which side of the deal would resist each term and why.

ELL supports

Pre-teach "lease," "fallow," and "acre-foot" with a sketch of a field, a water column one foot deep, and a signed agreement. Allow question 5 to be answered with a labeled phrase instead of a full sentence.