This story by Heather Sackett appeared on AspenJournalism.org on December 8, 2023.
The results of a recent economic study of Grand County irrigators show that certain water conservation programs may be worth it for irrigators who grow hay but not for those who grow cows.
In 2020, a group of nine flood irrigators in the Kremmling area, scientists and conservation groups began a multiyear research project to find out what happens when irrigation water is withheld from high-elevation fields for a full season and a half-season. The project, officially called “Evaluating Conserved Consumptive Use in the Upper Colorado,” is ongoing through 2023, but preliminary results from 2020-22 show that the effects of taking water off a field linger beyond one season and that these types of programs may not make financial sense for irrigators who raise livestock.
In 2020, control fields were irrigated normally; some fields received no irrigation water and some received irrigation water only through June 15. Normal irrigation practices were resumed in 2021, 2022 and 2023. But the fields with no or less water in 2020 did not fully bounce back and produce the same crop yield as the control fields in subsequent years. The amount of water used by the plants, known as consumptive use, as well as the amount of forage crop production, lagged behind the control fields even two years after resuming normal irrigation, something maybe partly due to the extreme drought in the summers of 2020 and 2021.
Perry Cabot, a researcher with Colorado State University, and Hannah Holm, associate director for policy with environmental group American Rivers, worked on the project and presented their findings to the Colorado Basin Roundtable last month.
“2020 was such a horrible drought year, especially late in the season,” Holm said. “We are wondering if the fact that there was basically no precipitation falling from the sky, and that summer of 2021 [was also dry], might have knocked back the treatment fields that much harder. … We do see substantial recovery when returned to full irrigation, but it’s not uniform across the fields and it seems to not be 100% a couple of years later.”
Where water was removed for half of the irrigation season, irrigators received $281 per acre, and those with full irrigation withdrawal received $621 per acre in 2020.
The study was funded by the Colorado Water Conservation Board, with support from the Colorado Basin Roundtable, The Nature Conservancy, Trout Unlimited and American Rivers.
The 2020 Economics and Enterprise Budgeting Report, released in August as part of the preliminary project report, found that these amounts need to be increased for irrigators who also raise livestock to make participation in the program worth it for them. The report, which is based on interviews, financial data and budgets from six of the participating irrigators, said agricultural producers who relied on their hayfields to feed cattle experience a net loss of profit, despite the payments.
Producers with livestock would have needed an average payment of at least $971 per acre to fully compensate them for the additional costs of not irrigating their fields. This was mostly due to the high cost of having to buy hay in a drought year to replace the hay they didn’t grow.
Those just growing hay saw an average of a $221 increase in income per acre on the treatment fields; those who also had a herd of cows to manage in addition to growing hay lost an average of $350 of income per acre on the treatment fields.
Paul Bruchez, a Kremmling rancher and CWCB member, is one of the project’s leaders.
“We were part of creating a deficit in our local hay market,” he said. “That was compounded by what was a natural drought. And then the end result was that hay was off-the-charts expensive.”
Many ranchers continue irrigating late into the season after their last cutting of hay so that they can grow back a little bit of grass, alfalfa or other forage crop on which their cattle can graze for several weeks in the fall before they start feeding them hay. Ranchers who participated in the project also lost this bit of fall grazing because they didn’t irrigate.
“They had a loss of production initially for the harvesting of the hay to feed them through the winter, but then they also lost fall grazing,” said Jenny Beiermann, an agriculture and business management specialist with Colorado State University, who co-authored the economics study. “They incurred a lot of additional expenses compared to those who were just harvesting hay, and that’s why they needed a higher rate of payment for their fields.”
These findings could have basinwide implications for the Upper Colorado River Commission’s System Conservation Program, which in September water managers voted to continue in 2024. The federally funded program pays irrigators to forgo watering their fields for a season with the goal of protecting critical elevations in the nation’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead. The 2024 program will have a narrower scope that explores demand-management concepts and supports innovation and local drought resiliency on a longer-term basis.
For the 2023 System Conservation Program, water managers set the opening payment to producers at $150 per acre-foot conserved, a number that some producers told Aspen Journalism was insultingly low. Producers could then negotiate up from there. SCP project participants in Colorado were paid an average of about $394 for every acre-foot conserved. The average price per acre-foot across the four upper basin states — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico — was $422.
For 2024, the program will offer Colorado irrigators a fixed price of $509 per acre-foot conserved.
UCRC Executive Director Chuck Cullom said the agency used projected commodity prices and crop budgets from CSU to arrive at the amount of compensation offered to producers for 2024 and did not take into account whether an irrigator had a cow/calf operation.
Another thing the project is studying is how birds use irrigated agricultural lands. But the results through 2022 of an avian monitoring project by Audubon Rockies were inconclusive. Researchers expected that when irrigation was resumed in the years after 2020, there would be more water-associated birds. The number of bird species counted did increase in 2021 — the first year irrigation water returned — but not in 2022.
“In some regard, the results from 2022 were diminished from those in 2020 (treatment year), which further opposed our expectations,” the report reads. “Birds are highly diverse, mobile creatures that use a wide array of habitats for many different seasonal purposes, often making it challenging to interpret the outcomes of avian monitoring efforts.”
The thing to keep in mind about the economics study, Beiermann said, is that it was small and that conditions in high-elevation Grand County can be particularly brutal, with long winters. Drought and water availability can vary widely across the upper Colorado River basin and from year to year. Still, a key takeaway is that these types of water conservation programs may be better suited for irrigators who grow only hay.
“Agriculture is a really risky business and being profitable is really tough,” she said. “There are too many variables (for livestock producers). Generally speaking, they are going to have a lot higher costs.
This story is provided by Aspen Journalism, an independent, nonprofit, investigative news organization covering water, environment, social justice and more. Visit http://aspenjournalism.org.