Agriculture is a major user of ground and surface water in the United States, accounting for approximately 80 percent of the Nation’s consumptive water use and over 90 percent in many Western States. Efficient irrigation systems and water management practices can help maintain farm profitability in an era of increasingly limited and more costly water supplies…
— from the US Department of Agriculture website, dated April 2019
I shared some statistics yesterday in Part Three, based on some preliminary research, suggesting that the agriculture industry in Colorado contributed about 1 percent of the ‘real value’ in the state’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $320 billion in 2018. Those numbers were suggested by the US Department of Commerce. Another set of federally-generated numbers, from the US Geological Survey, suggest that Colorado’s agriculture industry as a whole used about 92 percent of the water extracted from our rivers and aquifers in 2015.
I also referenced the uneven growth of Colorado’s population, beginning in 1920 at about 937,000 residents and hitting a high point last year of about 5.7 million. (US Census data.) The Denver water industry coalition known as ‘For the Love of Colorado’ wants you to believe:
- That Colorado’s population is going to double in the next 30 years, and
- That ‘climate change’ will reduce the amount of water in our rivers and streams by 35 percent during that same period, and
- That the taxpayers and water users of Colorado can mitigate these problems if we will simply fork over $20 billion to fund the Colorado Water Plan developed and adopted during the Hickenlooper administration.
A (perhaps more accurate?) estimate of the Colorado Water Plan’s total cost, issued by the Colorado Water Conservation Board, is $40 billion.
A (perhaps more accurate?) estimate of population growth, by the Colorado State Demography Office, pegs the state’s 2050 population at 8.5 million. That’s not a 100 percent increase, of course. It’s a 49 percent increase.
In other words, the marketing spin we are getting from the ‘For the Love of Colorado’ seems to consist largely of ‘invented facts’ that have little relationship to reality.
But we can’t ignore the general issue of water supply. People have been fighting over water in Colorado since long before the state was officially adopted by the US government in 1876. In fact, we are probably safe to assume that access to the best watering holes was a contentious issue 14,000 years ago when the people of the Clovis Culture were flaking their elegant and useful spear tips.
The question I’m most curious about, at the moment, has to do with agriculture, and with the thousands of acres of farmland that are ‘at risk of going dry’ by 2050. Let’s start by looking back on the year 1920, in our imaginations, since we already know the approximate Colorado population for that year — 937,000 residents. Who were these residents? And what did their lives look like?
From the Colorado State University Library:
But the “Great American Desert” didn’t turn into a garden with the snap of two fingers. As the Colorado agricultural historian, Alvin Steinel, noted in 1926:
…”Yields under irrigation were astonishingly large, when compared with farming “back east;” nevertheless, the farmer realized that he got results only at a cost of great effort in labor and outlay, and that he could leave nothing to chance in a country where the average precipitation was about one-third of that to which he had been accustomed…”
Irrigation and water law rapidly moved into the limelight of Colorado agriculture. The earliest farmers claimed the well-watered bottom lands; later arrivals had to learn how to maneuver water out of rivers and onto their land. Done successfully, this involved more than one farm family’s labor—it required the cooperation of the local community, engineering expertise, and the establishment of water law.
The new ditches and canals — tapping the rivers that sprang from high mountain snowmelt — promoted the cultivation of crops like hay, alfalfa, sugar beets, melons, grapes, tree fruits, and grains.
The creation of cooperative “ditch companies” during the late 1800s and early 1900s allowed Colorado farmers to grow a range of crops that would never be possible using ‘dry land’ farming in the arid Southwest. These agricultural ditches were made possible by a couple of factors. The ingenuity and effort of individual farmers and ranchers, and a very Western approach to water rights law: the ‘first in time, first in right” Colorado water law. When a group of farmers or ranchers successfully constructed a new ditch to irrigate their crops or livestock, the state of Colorado granted them the right to use that same amount of water — forever into the future — so long as they didn’t harm the water rights of farmers and ranchers who’d been previously granted rights. If a drought came along, and water shortages became apparent, a ditch company that had obtained its court decree in 1899 could legally demand every ditch company upstream stop taking water, if their water rights decree dated from later than 1899.
As the population grew, so did the value of those early water rights.
From the CSU history:
As irrigation reached across the landscape, water rights turned into an expensive commodity — too expensive for some. Dry farming looked attractive to farmers of small means, and a wet run of years in the 1880s encouraged homesteaders to try their luck on the eastern plains. Succeeding waves of drought in the 1890s and, later, the 1930s, undermined the viability of dry farming in Colorado…
… By 1920 most of Colorado’s new settlement was over. Fittingly, this year also marks the tipping point of urban migration — since 1920, more Americans have lived in cities and suburbs than in the country. Today, most Coloradans live in the urban areas along the Front Range, where the high plains meet the mountains. Yet Colorado’s roots remain deeply fixed in agriculture. This project helps maintain a connection with our older, agrarian identity.
From this description, we might come to understand that by 1920, most of the farms and ranches that have obtained their Colorado water rights for agricultural uses were already established. After 1920, most of the population that moved into Colorado — most of the 5.7 million people who now live here — never obtained agricultural water rights. Thus, the vast majority of historically valuable water rights belong to farms and ranches established before the next 5 million people arrived. The 92 percent of water used in Colorado goes mainly to those farms and ranches… the ones that contribute 1 percent of the state’s economic wealth.