BIG PIVOTS: Colorado Democrats Gather to Celebrate the Republican River

Photo by Allen Best. This story appeared on Big Pivots on May 16, 2023.

Colorado’s lieutenant governor, Dianne Primavera, never lived on a farm, but her mother did, in eastern Colorado. Her grandparents grew dryland wheat on 640 acres in the area of Joes. This is along the South Fork of the Republican River.

In 1919, just after World War I, Primavera’s grandfather traveled 130 miles to attend the National Western Stock Show in Denver. It was his last trip. He contracted the Spanish flu and died.

The grandmother remained, working the farm for many years and raising five children, and bestowing in her offspring, according to Primavera, the values of hard work and resiliency.

Primavera told that story on May 8 during an announcement at the Colorado Capitol. A federal program called the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program, or CREP, has been revised. Water leaders in Colorado consider those changes important to help the state remain compliant with the compact governing the Republican River. From Colorado, the river flows downstream into Nebraska and then Kansas.

The gathering attracted a large number of elected and appointed officials from Colorado, and like Primavera, nearly all were Democrats — ironically for a cause called ‘Republican’.

The Republican River, alone among Colorado’s major agriculture producing areas, has no water from mountain snows. Instead, the irrigated farms there rely almost entirely upon wells that draw from the underlying Ogallala Aquifer, water deposited millions of years ago.

In most areas the aquifer has declined substantially since large-scale pumping began in the 1950s and ‘60s. Those declines in turn have caused reduced flows of the Republican, provoking crankiness among the down-stream states, who objected that Colorado had violated the compact among the states struck in 1943. For details see the Republican River Compact website.

The Republican River Water Conservation District was formed in 2004 to address this unsustainable pumping of water from the Ogallala for irrigation on 450,000 acres in the basin. Progress was slow at first. Farmers in the district agreed to an assessment of $14.50 per acre beginning in 2008. The money was used to help create a pool of money to pay landowners willing to take their land out of production. The assessment also helped build a pipeline to deliver water to the main fork of the Republican River at the state line, near Laird, to ensure compact compliance.

The district’s efforts accelerated in 2016 when Colorado, after negotiations with downstream states, resolved to work with producers who will voluntarily retire land out of irrigated production. The water-use assessment was increased to $30 an acre in 2022 to augment the treasury used to retire acres from irrigation in the first area of focus, the South Fork.

The first goal of 10,000 acres had been exceeded by a thousand acres in early May, about 18 months ahead of the deadline.

The second, more difficult, goal is another 15,000 acres in 2029.

The cutbacks, still voluntary, will become mandatory if the goal is not met. Kevin Rein, the state water engineer, told a legislative committee in March that he had the authority and obligation to shut down wells to ensure compact compliance. He did not say what criteria will be used in determining which wells would have to cease withdrawals.

About a third of wells must cease withdrawals in the South Fork area of the basin.

Using CREP, state and local officials hope to lessen drafting of the Ogallala Aquifer by 6.5% from 2005 levels while also annually stanching 490,000 tons of soil erosion and causing 3,865 fewer tons of fertilizer and pesticides to be applied. In this way, there is a water quality component to the program, too.

The revisions will allow farmers to continue farming but without drawing water from the Ogallala Aquifer, as this pump permits, although with reduced payments.

This is an incentive-based program. Farms are paid for taking their land out of production. Money from the Republican River District is augmented by funding through the federal Farm Service Agency. Colorado legislators in 2022 sweetened the pot with an allocation of $30 million through HB 22-028.

Payments to farmers depend on several criteria, including location of the well, soil structures, and other factors.

Still, with prices of corn and other commodities high, farmers have been hesitant to enroll in the federal program. The revisions announced in Denver by the federal and state officials assembled at the Capitol provide a middle ground that may attract more participants – and hence reduce water consumption and keep Colorado out of compact drama.

The revision allows farmers to dryland farm the formerly irrigated land. However, they must make more concessions to devoting land to wildlife habitat along parcels devoted to corn and other crops. Tools include no-till farming, cover crop sowing, and wildlife-friendly harvesting.

Before, farmers and ranchers could voluntarily offer land for enrollment in the Republican River CREP through practices that established a permanent cover, including native grasses, wildlife habitat, and wetland restoration—all of them permanent. These acres could not be farmed for the term of the federal contract.

Under the revision, farmers and ranchers may continue farming but only in dryland. No irrigation will be allowed. They will be paid proportionately.

The Republican is the pilot project in what may be a national tweaking of CREP programs rules. CREP has 35 projects in 27 states.

At the announcement in Denver, Rod Lenz, president of the board of directors for the Republican River Water Conservation District, was cautious in predicting the outcome of this new flexibility, but clearly supportive, calling it “another available tool to maybe accommodate more retirements” in the basin.

“I’m never going to say I’m comfortable,” he said with a laugh. “I don’t ever expect that to be part of my vocabulary. I can be a little bit more optimistic that (the 2029 goal) is possible. But we don’t know what commodity prices are going to do. We don’t know what climate’s going to do, whether it’s climate change or even political climates or climate in the farming sector.”

Lenz is a farmer himself. He grows Yukon potatoes and other crops on land between Holyoke and Wray, in a portion of the basin where water tables have not fallen as precipitously. He and his family arrived in the early 1970s, transplanted from the Greeley area, to pursue new farming opportunities premised on extraction of the Ogallala water using well and center-pivot technology developed in the mid-20th century.

So far, much of the land removed from irrigation has been in areas of bad soils or poorly performing wells, said Lenz. With the financial incentives, both federal and now state, it creates a viable economic alternative, he said. Now, he is beginning to see something beyond a purely economic calculation in the South Fork, the focus zone for the retirements, where a third of all irrigated land is to be retired. He calls it a sense of civic obligation. A farmer with 10 wells, for example, might choose to retire one.

“We’re seeing some good wells being retired because they think it’s our civic obligation,” he said.

Colorado’s U.S. senators flew to Denver for the announcement. They and other speakers from the Polis and Biden administrations emphasized the need to ensure a strong agricultural economy in eastern Colorado even as water use necessarily gets cut back.

U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet said the revision was a long time in coming, pointing to the efforts of Don Brown, a Yuma County farmer who was agricultural commissioner in the administration of Gov. John Hickenlooper. Brown told him that initial payment rates for dryland areas were too low to justify program requirements, too rigid to entice farmers. Brown, he said, had reminded him on the way to the microphone that day that more work remains.

“We have to give farmers and ranchers more flexibility to conserve water and fairly compensate them as we face a 1,200-year megadrought across the American West,” said Bennet.

“These agreements are critical to helping our family farmers and ranchers adapt to a hotter and drier future and give them the chance to be able to pass along their farms and ranches to the next generation in Colorado.”

Sen. John Hickenlooper, seen in the top photo, spoke briefly, calling Bennet and Brown “rock stars,” and describing the economy of rural America as “not partisan.” Several other state and federal officials spoke, nearly all of them emphasizing again and again the importance of agriculture while adding small twists of their pet themes. For example, Kate Greenberg, the Colorado ag commissioner, mentioned soil health.

Brown, who farms in Yuma County, in the Republican River Basin, was at the Capitol for the announcement. He said that the idea for the revision came during a discussion with his counterpart from Kansas.

“Many soils are highly erodible, and the highest and best use is putting [them] into native grasses,” he explained afterward. But other soils could continue to be farmed, just not irrigated. And it made sense to allow that farming to continue.

He communicated this to the secretaries of agriculture as well as Colorado’s senators. The 2018 Farm Bill had allowed the secretary of agriculture to make this revision, and Tom Vilsack, the current ag secretary in the Biden administration, made it happen. He says that he corresponded with his old boss, Hickenlooper, as well as Bennet, and he was not surprised to see them at the Capitol.

“They have an interest in rural and agriculture,” he said. “Those guys, they care.”

Brown also credits Clint Evans, the Colorado director of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, and Mike Sullivan, the former deputy director of Colorado’s Division of Water Resources, with being crucial to getting the revision. The latter, he noted, has completed some tasks in his retirement.