To reduce water use, farmers in Colorado tax themselves
Some are voluntarily retiring wells that drain the Republican River, but murmurs of state-mandated closings raise concerns.
from the March 19, 2007 edition
Page 3 of 3
Robin Wiley, a Yuma County commissioner and fourth-generation farmer, enrolled one of his lower-producing wells away from the river in the CREP program. But he acknowledges that although these kinds of wells make up the majority of the ones enrolled, they don't do much to solve the problem, since retiring them has less impact on the rivers' surface flow.
Still, like Fix, he says it's much harder to make the decision to stop irrigating highly productive land. "We've struggled for years with commodity prices, and now we finally have a spike. Producers see an opportunity to make a little money, and it's hard to enroll in a program that will take that away from them," he explains.
He, like everyone here, would like the solution to be voluntary. But a recent state lawsuit verdict increases the likelihood that the state may simply draw a boundary along the rivers and shut down all wells within it.
That possibility haunts farmers like Fix with wells near the rivers, who wonder why they should have to pay for everyone's unsustainable use. Others worry about the damage it could do to small towns like Wray.
"You take the water away, and the economies change," says Brad Rock, who runs a feedlot and farms 5,200 acres near Wray, nearly 900 of them irrigated. He figures close to 200 wells are within three miles of the North Fork. But he's aware that much of the water is being used up on its own. "I'm sure that in 20 years, my son will be a dryland farmer. We figured the water would go away, I just didn't think it would be in my lifetime."
Meanwhile, conservation groups have become partners with the farmers, who they acknowledge were initially distrustful. The Nature Conservancy and the Colorado Water Trust have started a program to pay farmers who retire wells near the Arikaree a premium over what they'd get from the CREP program.
"Our goal is to come in and make the pie bigger for everyone," says William Burnidge, The Nature Conservancy's northeast Colorado director. He figures that if just four key wells near the Arikaree are shut down, the river's flow will double. "Right now, just one summer without water and the Arikaree dries up, and you lose an entire native fish population."
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