Let's talk water in the Lower Arkansas River Valley: an overview, rampant water speculation, and the fallacy that fallowed land seamlessly and easily returns to production.
Let's talk the Arkansas Valley, specifically the lower part of the river, not up closer to the headwaters.
This summer, in addition to visiting the San Luis Valley, I took a quick day trip to Fowler, CO at the invitation of a reader.
It was an interesting trip, and one I'd recommend that you consider. How well can you know your state if you've not taken the byways? Take a day, take a weekend. Start north and go buy some melons in Rocky Ford.
Seen on a map, CO 71 takes a nearly straight southerly course out of Brush, paralleling our state's Eastern border. Driving it, you notice the kinks and offsets as the highway moves around cities and the terrain. It passes through a fair bit of dryland farming (whose corn looked a hell of a lot healthier than the dryland corn closer to me), and one of the biggest windfarms I've seen.
I'd driven this highway once before, taking the leg up from Last Chance to Brush so I could skirt a winter closure on I-76: the ground blizzard wasn't much better on 71, but it was open. Pointed southerly this time, I continued down out of Last Chance until I hit Ordway. Peeling off, I went on some smaller feeder and county roads on my way into Fowler.
I hope you can appreciate what it means when someone who lives on the Northeastern Plains comments about the flatness of an area; when I tell you that the land in and around Crowley County is flat, I don't mean flat like near me. Flat near me still has some roll in the land.
The land in Crowley is flat. The kind of flat uninterrupted by even a slight change in elevation or tree. The kind of flat where he sky sits over you like a dome instead of a lid because you are the tallest thing in it.
It's also dry. The kind of dry that makes one think that trying to grab at the vegetation would leave you with a handful of ash. Small wonder, in addition to being hit with a drought, a lot of Crowley County's due is sold back to the Front Range or dried up to satisfy Kansas. If you want more context on that history, check out links 1 and 2 below.
As I neared Ordway, and Fowler, the terrain picked back up some of its former movement, and it greened up. Nature's not been generous, but clearly she's been less parsimonious with water here.
And, we'll get to this soon, the residents down here are still holding on to their water despite attempts to send it up to the Front Range. For now.
Unlike up near me, it seems like there is a lot more surface (ditch) irrigation down in the lower Arkansas river valley. Not the just the corners of the fields either, entire fields I passed on my way to see my host were irrigated with PVC pipe running down the side of the rows.
Greater variety of crops too. There are the melons, obviously, but unlike the corn on top of corn on top of corn near me, you see the green tops of onions here, some kind of squash (winter? summer?) with a bush, not vining habit.
The third link below is, I thought, a good effort at an overview of the situation for the Lower Arkansas river valley residents. It's worth a look and does a decent job of allowing the residents' voices to come through. It does a decent job of highlighting the efforts of the Front Range to get creative about their wording so as to continue to try and get water away from the people I met in and around Fowler, people whose jobs, lives, and livelihoods are tied to the river that flows in and round them.
People who were here long before the Front Range became so popular, and the state drifted even further away from a respect for agriculture. People here long before urban progressive voices came to dominate the state's policies.
People who have the water law and court precedent on their side, but, as I said before, only for now. Demand like the Front Range has for water means money which means lawyers, which means creative lawyers and will/resources enough to find cooperative judges.
This post is an overview, in the following post, I want to talk about just exactly what I mentioned right above. When the price is high enough, friends and agreements change.
In the last post, I want to touch on something mentioned in the Sun article below: the fallacy that you can dry up formerly irrigated land and have it quickly return to usefulness. Don't work that way.
https://www.coloradoindependent.com/2015/07/09/buying-and-drying-water-lessons-from-crowley-county/
https://coloradosun.com/2024/08/04/lower-arkansas-valley-water-rights/
If it sounds too good to be true ....
I have written in the past about Aurora reaching down into the Lower Arkansas River basin for water. I characterized it then as a deal that felt too good to be true, as a deal where everyone is friends now, but I questioned if the good feelings would hold later as times got tough.
My thinking has evolved on this as I've dug deeper and talked to people in that river valley. I still hold to the idea that the "all upside and no downside" rhetoric by Aurora feels too good to be true. It's just that now I think I'm leaning toward saying that there is some dirty pool here, at least lots of questions left unanswered about fair play.
Let me go back and give some context before I flesh that out. The first link below is to a CPR story about a water deal. Quoting the article:
"A pending $80 million real estate deal includes transferring more than 4,800 acres of agricultural land and about 7,500 acre-feet of water rights in Otero County to Aurora Water."
Just in case you weren't familiar, one acre-foot of water is the amount of water that would fill 1 acre of land to a depth of 1 foot. You can imagine just how much 7500 of these would be. A lot of water, and a lot of money.
Continuing on in the article you see the following. Again, quoting:
"Under the plan, the city can use the water three out of every 10 years — and only when the city’s storage reservoirs are at 60 percent or less in mid-March. This would align with agreements the utility signed in 2003 with 'several Arkansas River Basin entities' according to the announcement from Aurora Water. Otherwise, they said, the land and water will be used for agriculture through a lease and water-sharing agreement with the current owner, C&A Companies. The real estate and resource investment company has other farm operations in the region and plans to grow smaller grains, grass hay, alfalfa, and other crops on the land included in Aurora Water’s pending purchase."
This is the blinkered optimism that I mentioned before. Everyone is happy right now. Money went to someone, water will come out. It's not buy and dry (as in Crowley County where the water was bought up by a thirsty Front Range and it essentially decimated the area).
Don't worry about it. Aurora's only going to take the water when it has minimal impact. We'll time it with the natural agricultural cycles of fallow fields. And they'll only do it when the Aurora reservoirs are 60% or less of capacity in March.
So they say now. Thirst does funny things to people, voters complaining and developers pounding on doors does too. This is a prime example of why you need to dig a little deeper, to make sure you read widely.
Toward that end, I want to present you some counterpoint. The first example I have no source for, but it is something I heard more than once from people down in the Arkansas River Valley while visiting.
As with all things you hear passed from one person to another, take it with a grain of salt. But take it also with the added (and documented) context that follows.
The rumor I heard while there was that the water deal from the CPR article was rampant water speculation. That is, the owner of the land sold his water rights to a dairy in WS. Said dairy then turned around the next day and made the deal with Aurora. And when I say next day, I mean just that: within one single day's time. If true, this is the very definition of water speculation. This is working around a system to get what you want.
Even if this rumor is not accurate, I want to point you to the second, third, and fourth links below which document, if not speculation, a claim by both Colorado Springs and Arkansas Valley residents that Aurora is trying to skirt/violate an agreement which has been in place a long time. An agreement intended to prevent the Arkansas Valley being on the same trajectory as Crowley County's regretful buy and dry.
The first link is to a Gazette Article giving Colorado Springs take on the water buy, the second is to a blog post from the Ark Valley Voice (good overall view of the issue and written by locals), and the third is to a press release by the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District.
I'll leave it to you to read them as much as you'd like, but I will give a quick summary. In 2003, Aurora signed an Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) with Aurora and Colorado Springs which delineated the terms by which those municipalities could draw water out of the basin and away from farms.
In essence, the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District claims that Aurora violated this 2003 agreement with their 2024 water lease.
I took screenshots from this press release and labeled them as 1 and 2 because they appear in that order. I want you to note, in particular, the highlighting in screenshot 2. They point to questions NOT asked by reporters but which need to be addressed about this issue.
Reading the Gazette article, you see that Colorado Springs shares the view of the Conservancy District. Quoting the Gazette article:
"Colorado Springs Utilities said in an official statement they agree with the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District's interpretation that the purchase is a violation of the 2003 agreement. 'As signatory to the Arkansas River Basin Preservation Principles, we oppose permanent out-of-basin transfers from an already water-short basin,' the statement said."
I hope I have been able to convey my sense of the situation here. It's no longer (to me at least) a case of Aurora overselling and ignoring potential consequences of their deal. It's a case of two of three signatories to an agreement calling out the third over what they see as a violation of the agreement. This added context, the questions not being asked, changes things.
It paints a whole different picture.
If anyone from the area wants to chime in here, wants to provide an update, the comments are open.
https://www.cpr.org/2024/04/05/otero-county-could-soon-send-billions-of-gallons-of-water-to-aurora/
https://gazette.com/news/local/water-conflict-colorado-springs-utilities-others-say-aurora-in-violation-of-2003-pact/article_4597712e-fd18-11ee-ab10-f7c45819d7b0.html
https://arkvalleyvoice.com/southeastern-colorado-water-conservancy-district-aurora-water-purchase-violates-2003-agreement/
https://secwcd.org/sites/default/files/home3/secwcdco/public_html/private/uploads/104/4-9-24%20Aurora%20Water%20Buy%20-Press%20Release.pdf
Related:
Let me start with a quote from the Gazette article I link to above.
"It's 'way better for the Lower Valley if they are selling them the milk, rather than selling them the cow,' he [Jack Goble, General Manager of the Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservancy District] said."
It was a bit off topic, for the post immediately above, but I want to leave you with the following from the Gazette article. I would still like to see urban areas participate more in conserving water, but the following extended quote offers another perspective, another look.
"As part of a recent deal to buy water along Arkansas Valley, Colorado Springs Utilities agreed to direct annual payments to Bent County of $45 per acre of water to help offset the losses, Long [Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District President Bill Long] said. Bent County producers planned to use the funds from the purchase to buy center-pivot irrigation systems and sell Colorado Springs Utilities water that will be saved as part of the conversion from flood irrigation, The Gazette reported at the time. As part of the conversion, irrigators will no longer water the corners of their fields because center pivots rotate in a circle. The corners represent about 22% of the fields. 'The deal that Colorado Springs utilities just made with Bent County is far superior,' Long said. In general, Goble said he would prefer the cities lease water rather than buy it to provide economic support to the Arkansas Valley famers."
Wishful thinking: if you dry up the land, why you can just convert it with modern seeds and technology into useful land (or return it to native pasture)!
It doesn't work like that.
I wrote a bit back about a video I'd seen where two Texans were talking about converting formerly irrigated crop land into dry land pasture. I linked to that first below.
I asked for feedback on the video, and I got an earful, with comments ranging from "not possible" to "not feasible" and/or "too expensive".
This last post on the Lower Arkansas River Valley takes up from there and continues. I linked to the same Sun article as in post 1 for convenience. We'll start there; I attached two quotes from that article as screenshots.
Screenshot 1 is a quote from a young farmer in the Valley who sold water to Colorado Springs. He still irrigates but now uses center pivot irrigation instead of flood.**
The water he sells comes from the "corners" of his fields, the areas that are not within the circle inscribed by the rotating pivot. That water is sold to Colorado Springs.
The water going to Aurora, the water that has of late been a controversy, is to be saved by farmers agreeing to "lease" it, that is to fallow their fields, not irrigating for 3 out of every 10 years. The optimistic take here being that the fallowing can be worked into a crop rotation cycle.
And optimism here is appropriate I think. In both cases, drying up land and trying to put in a crop that won't be irrigated, or returning dried land to production, there is the possibility it can work, but you need to understand that this isn't as straightforward as advertised.
If you want firsthand experience, turn your sprinklers off for a whole summer and let what happens, happen. Then try to get your lawn re-established. It's not really different. Alternatively, if you know a landlord whose tenants ruined the lawn, ask him or her how much time and money were spent to get it back.
No situation involving life is static. No source of energy or path to spreading genetic information is wasted. If you leave land empty, it won't stay that way long. Invasive, and/or noxious weeds will (REPEAT WILL) colonize.
These plants, like all life, compete with each other and anyone else trying to get a foothold. And they are tough opponents. Spray, till, mitigate all you like. The weeds (their seeds) will be there waiting. Waiting for water enough to germinate. Germinate and then grow, taking water and nutrients that the crops that might like a share.
Meanwhile, your dryland is sitting next to your neighbor's fields. Those neighbors might not be selling water or fallowing. The weeds on your land won't stay there. They're going to try and migrate over to where all that juicy water is. Again, think of that neighbor that doesn't take care of their yard. How much of their natural bounty tries to get in your turf?
Turn now to screenshot 2 and give it a look.
You get here two sides of the coin: the upper part of the screenshot is a professor talking about success with reviving fallowed land, further down, it's someone who actually works the land.
Don't misunderstand me, there is room enough for both practical and academic experience in many things. I am not here to denigrate or uplift one relative to the other. My main point is to bolster my contention from earlier, that returning land to production is not simple.
Academics are the closest thing we have to a priestly class. They are all too often insulated from the economic realities that others face, and this is something you need to remember when you read stories about this (good thing to remember in general for any academics' pronouncements actually).
When you read things like the researcher here, or the Aurora or Colorado Springs spokespeople talking about how you can take water without consequences, you should ask yourself what the people living there, who work the land, think. Is it really and truly this simple?
I am not going to question the financial decisions made by the people whose livelihoods depend on production agriculture. I am in the fortunate position of not depending on water for my living. I'm not in the position to have to think about survival of my way of life.
There is something to be said for what the young man quoted in screenshot 1 says: this money for the water allowed him to put more of his land into production creating jobs and economic activity that wouldn't otherwise be there.
But one man's experience is not everyone's. You also need to remember that there will likely be no followup with on this story. Will this young man still feel this way in a year? 5? These are things you (and frankly the media) should wonder and act on.
One last thing. In the earlier newsletter, the one about converting Texas land from irrigated crops to dry rangeland, the idea is floated of transitioning from farming to grazing and/or naturalizing the forage that grows.
I wish I had better news to share with you, but these ideas are just as optimistic as drying up land corners (or fields) and then returning them smoothly to production later. So said many of those commenting on that post.
Besides the same issues above (weeds), it's important to remember that cultivated, irrigated land is changed soil. It is an ecosystem in its own right, but it's not the same as natural soil. The structure, the microbes, the nutrients, the aeration of the land, the insects, the depth of the roots, all of these things and more change when you till the land and put it into production.
The kinds of forage for cattle or other grazing animals that can do well in and/or tolerate living only on natural rain and stored soil moisture take a whole other kind of soil profile than crops. Changing from one to another will require time. What would you do for income in the meantime? You'd better get one hell of a check from the Front Range to keep body and soul together (and buy the equipment) while you wait.
If you haven't yet, I'd recommend joining or following at least one rural group's FB page. If people have recommendations, please add them to the comments, but off the top of my head I'd recommend The Van Winkle Ranch sites and/or Rachel Gabel.
A full understanding of these issues cannot come from the all to often wishful thinking you'll see in articles.
**If you want or need some context here, the third link below is to an earlier newsletter where this non-farmer went out, learned, and tried some flood irrigation in the corners of a center pivot field.
https://open.substack.com/pub/coloradoaccountabilityproject/p/williams-gop-v-sun-reporter-fish?r=15ij6n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://coloradosun.com/2024/08/04/lower-arkansas-valley-water-rights/&sa=D&source=calendar&usd=2&usg=AOvVaw1ypvQ9wODwYQAFMA-lDy9S
https://open.substack.com/pub/coloradoaccountabilityproject/p/a-three-parter-on-flood-irrigation?r=15ij6n&utm_campaign=post&utm_me
“Two of the three signatures” is significant until you realize two of the signatures ARE THE SAME PLAYERS. The water grift is a big game in the Ark Valley with the biggest players feigning to be the protectors of the realm. If CS-Utilities is paying the biggest player on a water board…then yeah, same dude.