When I calculated the percentage of Colorado’s water consumed by our agriculture industry, based on figures published by the US Geological Survey, I came up with 92 percent.
When the Colorado Division of Water Resources calculates their own data, they tell us that Colorado’s agriculture industry uses about 86 percent of all the water used in the state.
The true number might be somewhere in the middle? Let’s call it 90 percent.
As I mentioned in Part One of this editorial series, I currently serve on the San Juan Water Conservancy District (SJWCD) board, and I — along with the other five board members, and our consultant, former Pagosa Area Water & Sanitation District (PAWSD) manager Renee Lewis — have been working on a new ‘Strategic Plan’ to guide the District’s work over the next few years. SJWCD was created by a vote of the District’s electors in 1987, with a generally-defined mission of ensuring long-term water availability within the residential/commercial core surrounding the Town of Pagosa Springs.
Our modest effort to document the current and future water needs in the Pagosa area, by the volunteer members of the SJWCD board, will likely have little resemblance to the 2015 Colorado Water Plan (a 567-page document you can download here as a PDF). But we might end up with a better understanding of the situation we are facing, locally, over the next couple of decades.
Several documents concerning Archuleta County water supplies were published between 2003 and 2010, when our two local water districts — PAWSD and SJWCD — were collaborating on the purchase of the Running Iron Ranch, in the Dry Gulch valley northeast of downtown Pagosa, as the site for a proposed 35,000 acre-foot reservoir projected to cost $357 million. (That project has since been consigned to the back burner by the PAWSD Board of Directors, who have more recently been concerned about the 40% loss of treated water through the leaking PAWSD delivery lines.) The documents and data that supposedly justified the 2008 purchase of the Running Iron Ranch, and the water rights claimed by PAWSD and SJWCD to service the proposed reservoir, were soundly criticized by the Colorado Supreme Court in two court cases, which were remanded each time back to District court.
I am hopeful that the ‘Strategic Plan’ currently under development by the SJWCD board will contain accurate data and sensible projections, instead of the pie-in-the-sky nonsense published a decade ago. (You can read about the nonsense in this Daily Post article from 2009.)
As with the state of Colorado as a whole, Archuleta County’s economy is driven partly by agriculture. And as with the state of Colorado as a whole, a significant portion of the water consumption that supports agriculture, here in Archuleta County, is based on water rights that date prior to 1920. If you are a farmer or rancher, it’s likely you have pre-1920 water rights, so your water is available to you at basically no cost, other than the cost of maintaining your membership in the ditch company that delivers the water to your farm or ranch.
The US Census currently estimates the population of Archuleta County at about 13,300 people. Very few of us are farmers or ranchers. The US Department of Agriculture counted 372 farms and ranches in Archuleta County in 2012, generating about $14.2 million worth of livestock sales, and about $1.3 million in crop sales. Net income from farm operations totaled $4.8 million. The average net income per farm? $12,944.
In 2017, the USDA took another look at Archuleta County and concluded that the agriculture industry had a negative income. The industry as a whole had lost $2.1 million, meaning an average loss of more than $5,000 per farm or ranch.
Withdrawals of water in Archuleta County in 2005 (according to US Geological Survey) totaled 71 million gallon per day, or 26 billion gallons per year. The portion withdrawn for agricultural use in 2005 totaled 70 million gallon per day, or 25.5 billion gallons per year. I assume those are rough estimates.
If we believe the USGS, then roughly 95 percent of the water withdrawn in Archuleta County went into agricultural production, to produce a net loss of income in 2017.
One is tempted to summarize the situation this way:
Because of Colorado’s agricultural heritage, and the way water rights laws were originally conceived, and the way the economy has developed, an overwhelming quantity of publicly-owned water is being used to provide relatively little economic benefit to our community.
But this would be an incomplete view of the situation, because food is absolutely essential to human (and animal) life, and, generally speaking, the foods we eat, in their most natural state, consist mainly of water. No modern industry — outside of oil and gas production, and mining — consumes anywhere near the water consumed by agriculture. The products created by agriculture absolutely require the application of water, via rain or via irrigation.
The question being, therefore : are our farmers then applying our water in the most cost-effective manner? Could Colorado agriculture become more ‘thrifty’ with our publicly-owned water?
If we’re truly facing a water shortage, and if our water planning experts truly wanted to solve such a problem, they would focus on how water is used in Colorado by the agriculture industry — the industry that uses 95 percent of the water in Archuleta County, and 90 percent of the water in the state of Colorado.
Are there sensible, affordable ways for the agriculture industry to use less water?
If the agriculture industry in Archuleta County were to cut its water consumption by a mere five percent, it would theoretically double the amount available to the rest of the Archuleta County economy, without adding a single drop to the San Juan River.
It’s not that easy, of course, because we have a bunch of other, really sticky problems. For one, a collection of water rights laws that were designed for a Colorado with fewer than 1 million people, most of whom were farmers. Another problem is an influential construction industry that absolutely loves big, taxpayer-funded water projects. And we have agriculture industry that generates a relatively small amount of income compared to the amount of resources — land and water — consumed, and that makes it financially challenging to upgrade to more efficient irrigation systems.
Generally speaking, farmers are not terribly wealthy.
But maybe the biggest problem is: Denver.