Aggie Almanac; 154; Filling the Need (Roadrunner Nursing) and Water Study

Drgeschmacher. Coming up on Aggie Almanac, they're on the fast track to a career in nursing. It seemed perfect for me, quick and dirty and really intense. And a new NMSU study on climate change and water in New Mexico has some sobering concerns for area farmers. In the kind of best case assumptions, we're seeing that agriculture could be taking a pretty sizeable hit, 20 percent. Hi, I'm Gary Worth, and thanks for watching Aggie Almanac. If there's one profession that's in growing demand, it's nursing.

There's more jobs than there are people to fill them, and universities can't turn out newly graduated nurses fast enough. Well, at NMSU, they're speeding up the process with a program that allows students to earn a nursing degree in just 16 months. In the full knowledge of the responsibilities I am undertaking, I promise to care for my clients with all the knowledge, skills, and understanding I possess. With this pledge, another 22 badly needed nurses are ready to go to work, many of them in New Mexico. Sparing no effort to conserve meaningful life, to alleviate suffering, and promote health. But this is no ordinary graduation, and these are not your run of the mill students either. They are members of the third graduating class of Roadrunner Accelerated Nursing Students at NMSU. The program is set up for students who already have undergraduate degrees in other fields.

It allows them to earn 62 credits in just 16 months and receive their Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree and license as a registered nurse. This speeded up program was developed to help ease a national nursing shortage. It's designed for students from diverse, multicultural, and academic backgrounds who enjoy learning in a fast-paced, challenging, and clinically comprehensive environment. One student who took the plunge is Jose Reyes, who wasn't happy with the prospects he had with his undergraduate degree in psychology. Jose Reyes was also a new graduate of NMSU when he began the Roadrunner Project last May. A psychology major, Jose Reyes has also served as a resident assistant to upward bound students, a server in restaurants, and a clerical assistant. A mediator and negotiator, Jose Reyes served as the Roadrunner representative to the nursing faculty, a very fine student, Jose Reyes compassionate attitude, has earned him

high points with patients and staff. Jose Reyes will be nursing in the intensive care area. I think like a lot of the people in the program, you've always had an interest in health care, but I pursued something different for my first bachelor's degree and I wasn't completely satisfied. So I started looking for something in a health care field and I found the Roadrunner program and I knew it was going to be intense and the qualifications to get in were high, but I gave it a shot and thankfully I got in. Sixteen months later, he was at the end of a long road with his mother presenting him with his graduation pin. The very first semester was sort of a shock for all of us, it was a way to get used to the intensity of the program and the workload we had exams, maybe two or three a week, that we had to study for together by ourselves and find study habits that worked.

There were a few times when I questioned myself, but family and friends were always there and the staff was also very supportive. Heather Henshaw. The intense pace is indeed not for everyone, but for Heather Henshaw, the Roadrunner accelerated program was the perfect solution. Heather came to us with a degree in wildlife biology from Michigan State University. No stranger to a variety of work situations, Heather has conducted a population study of birds, done soil sampling, been a deckhand, waitress, bartender and mental health technician among other vocations. An exceptional student, Heather asks the questions, follows up with the unanswered aspects is a self-directed learner and yet helps her peers whenever she can. She connects with patients, peers and faculty.

Her chosen area of nursing is intensive care in New Mexico. I have been in the environmental field. I had a previous degree in wildlife biology and I was an ornithologist for 15 years doing seasonal and temporary work. When I came to this area, I met my husband and got married and decided I was going to stay here permanently and wildlife jobs or ornithological jobs are hard to come by and environmental jobs don't pay all that great and so it was one of those steels where it was kind of like, okay, you know, mortgage, marriage, better stuff up. So it was a friend of mine who said you'd be really good nurse and I had not thought about that previously so I ended up just taking some prerequisites in anatomy and physiology and it was fascinating. So I decided that I was going to pursue nursing and then I found out about the roadrunner program and it seemed perfect for me, quick and dirty and really intense. For people who already have a previous degree, there are a lot of prerequisites that are already fulfilled.

You still have to go back to take some classes that you may not have. But then the idea is that for those people who are motivated and ready to go and know what they want to do, this gives them an opportunity to do it so it was really, really great for me because I didn't want to spend four years and I didn't want to spend all that money I knew that I could do this more quickly and with less of a financial burden too. For this summer, this summer's a ward for this accelerator program goes to Heather Henshaw. Henshaw did so well she got the award as the top student for excellence in academic and professional effort. Henshaw admits it is tough. I think it takes a lot of flexibility and I think it takes some stick to itiveness because things are always changing, the medical field and the nursing field it seems like things are always changing. So you have to be ready to kind of go with the flow and I think it just takes a great deal of compassion because you deal with a lot of tough situations in hospitals and not just with patients but just the day-to-day, the hours or your own personal life.

For all the students graduating from this program, finding work should be no problem. We've got Memorial Medical Center and we also have Mountain View Regional Medical Center and there are also hospitals in El Paso that some people in the region are going to be going to as well because they were students that came from El Paso to come to Las Cruces on a daily basis. So there are also hospitals down there that are pretty eager to get road runners on their payroll because they understand that it is a pretty demanding sort of a program and they appreciate what we might be able to bring to their organization. An unusual demanding program for some unusual, hardworking and motivated students who received strong support from family, friends and faculty and from each other. In essence, when you go into nursing, you're going to be changing people's lives and that is one of the things that you should never forget because, no matter who you encounter, you're going to make a decision for them with the patient advocate and you will always

need to remember that. We are no longer the people we were 16 months ago, we are better, we are stronger. Let us reflect on the road runner experience whenever we are challenged in the future. Let us embrace our humanity and let us mind-fully touch with our hearts as well as our minds, those that need our nursing care. I'm ready, absolutely ready. I can't wait to be in the hospital, I can't wait to be on the unit, I'm interested in the intensive care, critical care and I feel like what we're taught in school and what you learn in your clinical first and foremost is that you're a patient advocate and I think that all of us really believe that and all of us can't wait to be out there and support of our patients and caring for our patients and their families and I know we're all really, really looking forward to that.

Now while many of the recent grads from this accelerated program come from out of state, most plan on pursuing nursing careers in New Mexico, putting their valuable education to work right away and right here. We'll be right back. In a kind of best case assumptions, we're seeing that agriculture could, you know, could be taking a pretty sizable hit, 20 percent decrease in economic contribution. Welcome back. Here in the West, we're used to hearing concerns raised about water and whether there will be enough to meet the needs of the future. Well now, another study conducted jointly by NMSU and the University of New Mexico has been made public confirming those concerns. We have a lot of concern here in New Mexico and I think we have a lot of reason to be concerned. Water. That's what NMSU's Brian Hurd is talking to this group about.

The health of the Mexico's rural economy, blend of cultures, our unique ecosystems are very strongly tied to water. The agricultural economics professor has just completed a joint study with a colleague at UNM to take a close look at how climate change could reduce New Mexico's surface water supply and what that could mean for the state's economy and agriculture in the years ahead. Water has always been the lifeblood of the state and it's the Rio Grande and its tributaries that have always been the great providers. The Rio Grande fuels the region's agriculture and the growing urban population and also creates the state's unique character and landscape that draws tourists to this region. So what happens to our water if the climate warms up? And with really no water to spare in the Rio Grande system, we're highly vulnerable if we have long term significant changes in those water resources and stream flows.

To try and get answers, Hurd study developed three climate change scenarios for this region. For the short term, the year 2030 and the longer term, the year 2080, one scenario assumes dry conditions, one plentiful rain and the third somewhere in the middle. In the worst case scenario, the models predict temperatures rising two to five degrees by 2030 and as much as 10 degrees by 2080. We'll have perhaps a variation of wetter or drier. The model is less certain about how climate change will impact future rainfall. In some scenarios, precipitation could even increase, but possibly not enough to offset the impact of the warmer temperatures. So these are annual growth rates. Another factor in all this is population growth in New Mexico, which is expected to taper off over the next 70 years, but still increase by 75 percent by the year 2080. The impact of all this on water in streams, rivers and lakes is summed up in this graph,

which shows less water in all scenarios and some serious potential consequences. Earlier snow melt, earlier peak runoff, there's greater evaporation losses in the system. Runoff is reduced by as much as a third in this analysis, especially in the drier scenarios. And then even under the wetter scenario, stream flows because of the greater offsetting evaporation losses, even if it was to rain more, we may not have more water in the reservoirs and in the streams. Less water, according to the study, will have implications for the state's economy, with the loss of up to 115 million dollars by 2030 and 21 to 300 million dollars by 2080. The biggest impact would be on agriculture. In the kind of best case assumptions, we're seeing that agriculture could be taking a pretty sizable hit, 20 percent decrease in economic contribution.

Since agriculture uses most of the state's water, some 85 percent, but as only 5 percent of the economy, it may have the most to lose, as water rights get sold to a growing urban population. But there are certain crops we grow here that are in decline, we can say. There are surplus crops, there are crops that receive high subsidies from the federal government. And there are crops that, if you took the water that we put on these surplus crops, that it would more than cover doubling the population in the city. So there's some capacity to readjust things and that's where some opportunities might lie. In other words, we may want to rethink the future of agriculture in New Mexico and how important local food is to us, given possible climate changes in the future. It's the fruits and vegetables that we're supposed to be eating for healthy diets. Are those going to come from Mexico, from Central America, from China? And a question that came to me is, well, what does this imported food have some kind of

hidden costs that maybe we ought to be thinking about, that it may have some concern. You trust that that had a lettuce, which may not be as fresh as grown locally, you see where I'm going with this. There's going to be certain issues here, 10, 20 years down the road. And maybe we don't want to necessarily sacrifice our agricultural capabilities as a result of that. You know, even if it's a small part of our economy, it may still be an important and a special part of our economy. The study also suggests we need more data about climate and water, and we need to take a closer look at how we manage the water resources we have. Adaptive management is going to require, you know, better information, better tune information. We're going to have to be more aware of how changes in one part of the system are going to affect other parts of the system. So we're really, I think, in a period where we need to strengthen our capability of understanding

the nature of our hydrologic system of being able to fine tune our management of it so that we can operate, you know, with a little tighter control over it. Dr. Herd joins us now in our studio to talk more about the study. Welcome to our program. Well, thanks, Gary. Thank you for joining us. Let me just get this clarified, you did this study with Dr. Julie Kuhnrod, is that, I might paraphrase that. That's correct. Dr. Kuhnrod. That's correct. Dr. Kuhnrod. From the University of New Mexico, a civil engineering professor, and why does collaboration with UNM? Oh, it's a great question. Well, the collaboration with UNM and NMSU was to really bring together the idea that we had an expertise internal to New Mexico to actually look at this problem. Dr. Kuhnrod is a professor in civil engineering, and she brings a lot of a hydrological expertise to the problem, whereas I deal more with the social aspects, the economic aspects. So why this study right now, clearly we're all concerned about the effects of global warming.

I assume that had something to do with it. Well, certainly that did. Part of this follows on actually some work that was done previously by the state engineer's office of, if you're aware, two years ago, Governor Richardson signed a Climate Change Initiative that asked the Environment Department and the state engineer's office to produce some studies on the impacts of climate change on New Mexico and their resources. And following on the state engineer's project that Ann Watkins developed, we wanted to actually look at some New Mexico data, the work that was done in the state engineer's report was really bringing in data from other regions and other literature. It wasn't as focused with actual models applied to New Mexico's situation, so we thought that it would be helpful in this process to develop models for New Mexico and use the data here.

Really have some very, to have some very specific information about what we might expect. Which we may not have had available to us up till this point with your report. That's right, with the idea in mind that we would start to understand New Mexico's particular situation as opposed to trying to extrapolate from say the Colorado River or the Missouri River or some other watershed. You know, I heard mentioned just within the last couple of days and I didn't know whether to believe this or not, that New Mexico could be one of the first areas impacted in a global warming scenario in the United States, is that true? Well, one of the first areas, I think that the Southern United States is a vulnerable area. The Southwest and some earlier research that I did looking at the vulnerability of different regions in the United States, highlighted the Southwest as being one of those critical areas. Driven largely in part because we have so little native water and we're such a large population growing area and we utilize such a high percentage of the water that we have available to us.

We're sort of already on the edge as it is and now we're looking at it. And you push any of those parameters a little too hard. We have to endure a long drought, for example, that's going to really stress the social and natural systems beyond what's perhaps their capacity without failing. Right. Now, in your study, as a basis for all of this, you looked at a number of models for predicting the weather in the future. Everyone sort of agrees we're in a global, I think everyone agrees, global warming is a reality. Well, yeah, I want to step quite into that agreement issue that there's a growing consensus. But the models, at least, that we utilize what was really unique about our study that way applied to New Mexico is that we were able to combine climatological data, projections of climate change with the hydrologic systems, with the economic systems, and you're right,

Gary, that the climate change data that we use to drive the simulations were based on the GCM, the general circulation models that come out of the large supercomputers that National Center for Atmospheric Research, for example, is one of the developers of that data in the United States. And we looked at a suite of these model results that were driven by middle of the road's scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions. And that's one of the key assumptions that goes into that model, in the climate models, are what type of emissions scenarios. And we used a very standard one that they use, a middle of the road that's a little bit more conservative and less emissions than business as usual, but pretty close to it. And I noticed that the worst case scenario, your report says it could be one-third of, I read that correctly, less water than we have now.

That was the one-third. One-third less. One-third less, so about 70 percent, 66 percent of the water that we have right now, so on average. That's significant. It is quite significant. It's quite significant. And what's also difficult to assess, and one of the conundrums of living in the Rio Grand, is the fact that these precipitation models, I was saying we had some wet and some dry. The reason we couldn't pick one or the other, is there's not very good agreement across the different GCM models as to what might happen to precipitation in this basin. They do predict drier winters, which of course in the snowsheds of the northern part of the state and in southern Colorado, would diminish the snow path. Which is a big factor, right, at least. It's a huge impact on what flows down the river and gets stored. Or we have a lot of uncertainties, what happens in the summer.

And with the summer monsoons that we have here, we realize that we've had floods and we had those record floods in El Paso just the last year. And we have a very flashy type of a system. The climate models are not able to handle the summer weather patterns very well. And so if we have a situation where we had drier winters, we'd have less cool season grasses growing. We may have less vegetation that way that could create a more flashy flood prone system when the summer rains come because there's less vegetation to intercept that water and that energy. So even if we're talking about on average having less water in the reservoirs, we may still have flood problems at the same time. So we really have that conundrum to work with here. It's amazing. You kind of get extremes on both sides. Well, let's talk about your study then also looks ahead to what some of the economic impacts could possibly be. And that's, of course, what we're all interested in. And I think we have a little graphic that we stole from your study that talks about,

you can see it over there. It talks about economic impact of all these scenarios you were talking about, a wet situation, a middle situation, a dry and I think the year 2030 and again in the year 2018. And you can see in some of these areas the impact on agriculture, the impact on sort of industry and the impact on recreation. And in some of these cases we're looking at economic impact, 25 percent decrease to explain what how these things would come about based on the climate change. Okay. The models and this is a particular qualification and certainly there are a host of critics that will look at the limitations of this study and I recognize many of them. There are assumptions that we built into this model. One of the key assumptions that we have here is that I'm assuming that we have a fairly cooperative institutional setting for transferring water, that we have agriculture which Gary

consumes 85 percent of the water in this state is agriculture and so we have a large water user that we all know that with the value of agriculture in this state we enjoy the fresh produce, the pecans and the chili and the cotton and the onions and the hay that's grown in this region and throughout the valley, the question is is what happens, for example we lose water because of the climate change, where is that water, how are we going to reuse and repattern our uses. So my assumption has been that we will actually be able to transfer some of that water out of agriculture, manage it better and so we see a significant hit perhaps in the agricultural sector as it makes some adjustments to that.

Now critics would point out that really we have a lot of legal hassles with water in this state and if we're not as cooperative about that the cost may be higher than I project. So these could be conservative estimates of the economic issues that we might be faced with. I just wanted to ask you one final, real quick question. So what's the solution, what do we need to do now? Well I think we have what I call the three P's, what I think we need to do some changes to our policy so that we create an environment where there's an incentive to manage water cooperatively, to compensate farmers for property rights if water gets transferred, allow them to market their water. We need to do better planning at city levels, at irrigation districts and I think we need to do better partnerships between institutions, between non-government organizations, government organizations, I think we're all stakeholders in this problem and if we start to behave

proactively I think we're going to set ourselves up better with much less damage in the future. Well Dr. Herd, thank you so much. So much to talk about, I think we'll have to invite you back to the show and get a little more in depth into the study that you're doing but we appreciate the information. Well thank you very much for inviting me, Gary. Thank you. Well before we go a moment to recognize something extra special going on at New Mexico State, something we think is simply amazing. They are the people who take your trash and now the giant Camino Real Landfill in Sunlin Park is giving back. It handed over the first of what will be $500 monthly checks to the Donia Anna Community College at its Sunlin Park campus. It will fund a new scholarship, a money will assist adult basic education students in the South County who are seeking U.S. citizenship, learning English, getting work skills and working toward a GED.

If you'd like to nominate an amazing Aggie or have any comment about the show, call us at 646-2818 or send an email to AggieOminac at Yahoo.com and that's our show for this week. I'm Gary Worth. Thanks for watching. UP

boop boop boop boop boop boop boop. It is Tropical and Tasty Desserts today on Bake Decorate Celebrate. Hi, I am Melanie Glasscock and this is Nancy Seiler, your tour guides for a tasty trip to the tropics dressing net fest.

We all like to add a little sunshine to our celebrations and the easiest way is with a tropical themed dessert. Luows, outdoor barbecues and even indoor beach parties. Today's desserts will bring a little warmth to your next event. Swim right up to our first cake featuring aquatic plants and fish. It's all about these fun decorations. Then it's asking Nancy. Today's question is about that popular school treat, cookie pops. Then we have rated the palm trees for a few coconuts for a traditional recipe featuring toasted coconuts. Next is our tip segment.

It features specialty tips for the triple star and special ruffle. And our last dessert is Margarita flavored cupcakes. Yummy. So a little island music please. Let's head off to the tropics. Just take a look at the fish on this cake. Can you guess how they were made? They are colorful and they truly catch the eye. This is a great cake Nancy. And it's tasty. It is tasty. Well, I think there's a lot of fun to go around and I can see getting, I've got a seven-year-old getting the kids involved. Wash your hands, grease, and am absolutely. How would they help? Well, we've done here. This is a rice cereal treat that's been shaped into a ball. How'd you get the color? Well, we add icing color to it when the butter is melting. You want to do it then and remember that you're going to be adding the marshmallows in the rice cereal treat. So you want it a little bit more intense than what you're going to actually end up with when you finish. And if you're going to get the kids involved, have them put some shortening on their hands and shape it. Then while it's still a little bit warm, rub it like that on the counter so that you get a flat surface.

If you forget to do that, you can always slice it off, but then you'd waste a little bit of the rice cereal treat. Okay. And then we've just got some fruit gems here that I've cut in half and I've made his little lips. And I'm using some buttercream icing and we're going to attach those.