Click image for enlargement. Graphic by Mike Johnson.

In a vast White Pine County valley where cattle and sheep have long outnumbered people, a new breed of livestock is taking hold: the Las Vegas water buffalo.

Three months after it bought two spreads in Spring Valley, the Southern Nevada Water Authority snapped up a third ranch and its water holdings this week. More acquisitions could be on the way.

"The ranchers up there know we're buying ranches," said water authority General Manager Pat Mulroy. "Some of them have approached us."

Spring Valley is at the northern end of a planned pipeline network that could one day stretch across eastern Nevada and supply the Las Vegas Valley with groundwater from as far as 250 miles away.

Nevada's top water regulator, State Engineer Tracy Taylor, is reviewing the water authority's request to pipe almost 30 billion gallons of groundwater a year out of Spring Valley alone. Taylor's decision is expected sometime next year.

The water authority's most recent land acquisition, approved by its board this week, is the 440-acre Phillips Ranch, which came with more than 550 acre-feet of groundwater rights and 1,200 acre-feet of surface water rights in Spring Valley.

The authority paid $2.16 million for the land and the water.

In July, the authority closed deals on two ranches that total 8,520 acres and cost a combined $26.9 million. The properties included 3,000 acre-feet of groundwater and 13,700 acre-feet of surface water rights.

There are 326,000 gallons in an acre-foot, which is almost a one-year supply of water for two Las Vegas Valley homes.

John Entsminger, deputy counsel for the water authority, said water that came with the three ranches will not be exported from Spring Valley. Instead, it will be used to "protect species of concern and, more importantly, to ensure the sustainability of groundwater development in the area."

Water from the Phillips Ranch will be particularly useful in protecting Shoshone Ponds, home to a protected species of fish, and a nearby population of swamp cedar considered vulnerable to the effects of groundwater pumping, Mulroy said.

The ponds and the swamp cedar are of concern to federal officials, who signed a monitoring and mitigation agreement with the water authority in early September, the day before the state convened a hearing on the authority's request to pump water from Spring Valley.

Entsminger said owning the Phillips Ranch will help the water authority satisfy terms of that agreement.

The Nevada Cattlemen's Association, established in 1935 to help represent the state's beef industry, has not taken a position on the water authority's Spring Valley purchases. But the association's director, Rachel Buzzetti, said her organization does have an opinion about piping water to Las Vegas from across rural Nevada.

"We are opposed to what the SNWA is trying to do. What we're opposed to is the inter-basin transfer of water," she said.