Headwaters Fall 2014: The Will to Thrive on Colorado's Eastern Plains

H e a d w a t e r s | F a l l 2 0 1 4 1

COLORADO FOUNDATION FOR WATER EDUCATION | FALL 2014

Just Add Water

The Will to Thrive on Colorado’s Eastern Plains

Can the Ogallala be saved?

Why irrigation efficiency is worth the trouble

When water quality goes south

Water = Food + Habitat

Grit----

C o l o r a d o F o u n d a t i o n f o r W a t e r E d u c a t i o n | y o u r w a t e r c o l o r a d o . o r g

H e a d w a t e r s | F a l l 2 0 1 4 1

DEFINING VALUES

CFWE On TourCFWE’s latest tour adventure led a diverse group of water professionals to a closer examination of the narratives found in our new Citizen’s Guide to Colorado’s Transbasin Diversions. In September, the group learned firsthand how the water supplies of the Fryingpan-Arkansas, Homestake, and Twin Lakes projects are managed, used and conveyed to various entities across the Continental Divide. Highlights included a history lesson on top of Tennessee Pass at Ewing Ditch, a glimpse at how transbasin water helps maintain recreational and environmental flows, a moment listening to the roar of Mt. Elbert Powerplant, and an examination of models for collaborative water supply planning. Thank you to our expert speakers and generous sponsors: City of Fountain, Colorado Springs Utilities, Eagle River Water and Sanitation District, Pitkin County Healthy Rivers and Streams Program, and Pueblo Board of Water Works.

Continue learning with us as we partner with Colorado Water Congress to offer a series of webinars on the history, operations and future of transbasin diversions. Members receive a discounted rate. Take advantage of this opportunity by signing up at yourwatercolorado.org.

And join us December 12 to quench your thirst on CFWE’s Beverage Tour. Get an inside look at water treatment, use and efficiency with MillerCoors in Golden as well as Denver microbreweries. We’ll enjoy a day of networking, learning and, of course, beer tasting. Register at yourwatercolorado.org.

CFWE tour participants learned about the Homestake project and other major diversions during the Transbasin Diversion Tour in September 2014.

STRENGTHENING LEADERSHIP

Water Leaders Apply HereGrow your career and discover yourself through CFWE’s Water Leaders program. Water Lead-ers offers mid-level water professionals a rare opportunity to develop and explore their unique leadership potential. To date, CFWE has offered nearly 100 participants training in conflict reso-lution, communication and management, pro-viding the knowledge and skills necessary to navigate the complex world of Colorado water. Water Leaders benefit from extensive self-as-sessment, executive coaching, networking op-portunities, and the chance to learn about water resources across the state.

CFWE congratulated the seventh class to graduate from Water Leaders in September 2014 and is making program refinements to continue to grow its leadership offerings. The application period for the 2015 class will be open from December 1 to January 16. If you or someone you know is interested in joining the pipeline of water leadership, visit us at yourcoloradowater.org to find training dates and locations, application materials, and tuition fees.

Get Certified to Speak Fluent WaterCFWE is excited to develop a new certification program for community leaders interested in building their water knowledge and advancing their career. Water Fluency will provide a practi-cal understanding of Colorado water resource is-sues, complexities and tradeoffs, and the related implications to local decision-making processes. Participants will benefit from interactive learning and critical thinking discussions such as online and in-person instruction, field visits and profes-sional networking. The first offering will be held in the Denver Metro area in spring 2015. Check yourwatercolorado.org in late 2014 for session dates, course content and registration. Contact Kristin Maharg at [email protected] if you have ideas or questions. And help us promote the program by telling your local community lead-ers how CFWE is serving their educational and professional development needs!

CREATING KNOWLEDGE

Citizen’s Guide GiveawayFor a limited time, nonprofits and educational groups can receive free CFWE Citizen’s Guides. The Citi-zen’s Guides are a series of high-quality reference booklets on Colorado water topics. Equip your staff, volunteers, board, students and constituents with these tools to augment their understanding of Colo-rado’s water resources. To be considered, you must submit an outreach plan by November 21. Learn more at yourwatercolorado.org, or by contacting Jennie Geurts at [email protected].

In a 2013 study by BBC Research and Consulting, only 35 percent of Coloradans correctly identified agriculture as the sector that uses

the most water in Colorado (while 32 percent believed it was households and 30 percent thought it was industrial and commercial industries). CFWE’s new Water Fluency program will provide a basic understanding of Colorado water to decision makers, leaders, new water professionals and others.

CFWE Mission in MotionJu

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INCREASING AWARENESS

Headwaters E-NewsIf you love the important water stories you read in Headwaters magazine and listen to on the Connecting the Drops radio series, it’s time to make sure your name is on CFWE’s email list. We’ve launched a new bimonthly Headwaters e-newsletter chock full of original material, information on upcoming events hosted by organizations across the state, relevant blog posts and links to all of our most recent radio programming. It’s not about CFWE; it’s about you, your water, and information that matters. Check your email for the first issue that hit inboxes this fall, or subscribe at yourwatercolorado.org.

NEW! $1 Million Incentive Fund this year means your gift counts even more!

Give where you live.

Tuesday, December 9online at ColoradoGives.org/cfwe

Support the Colorado Foundation for Water Education on Colorado Gives Day!

Pre-schedule your donation today at ColoradoGives.org/cfwe

CULTIVATING PARTICIPATION

Colorado’s Water PlanIt’s almost here! After nearly a decade of grassroots work by the Interbasin Compact Committee and the nine ba-sin roundtables, and a year and a half since Gov. Hickenlooper issued his executive order directing the Colorado Water Conservation Board to develop the state’s first-ever comprehensive water plan, the draft of Colorado's Water Plan will be delivered at the end of 2014. CFWE has been actively supporting the public engagement process as the plan takes shape, and will devote our February issue of Headwaters to extensive coverage of the draft plan’s content and development in order to further public awareness and engagement in 2015. Here’s what CWCB says to expect from the draft:

5 Things Colorado’s Water Plan will aim to do— » Foster collaborative solutions to responsibly address the looming

gap between future water supply and demand

» Identify and test cost-effective alternatives to the permanent “buy and dry” of irrigated lands

» Affirm that Colorado will protect its interstate compact entitlements, proactively work to avoid compact curtailments where possible, and set effective state policy to prevent federal erosion of state water authority

» Push federal regulatory processes to move faster by ensuring state readiness to complete its role on the front-end

» Align state policies and dollars to support Colorado’s water values and policy objectives

5 Things Colorado’s Water Plan will aim NOT to do— » Erode, or in any way cede, Colorado’s interstate compact

entitlements

» Infringe upon the status of water rights as private property rights

» Ban the permanent “buy and dry” of irrigated lands

» Advocate alternatives to Colorado’s prior appropriation doctrine of “first in time, first in right”

» Allow the status quo to drive increased uncertainty and undesired results

CFWE Mission in Motion

Get ready to make your voice heard in the next round of public commenting on the water plan. Visit www.coloradowaterplan.org to find out how.

H e a d w a t e r s | F a l l 2 0 1 4 3

Dear Friends of CFWE,Over the past few weeks, the last green of sum-

mer transitioned to the ochre and amber of fall. I’ve watched the leaves drop while fishing the Blue River, peering from a hotel window in Avon, and working at my office in Denver. One beautiful thing about Colo-rado is that you can follow a season just by traveling lower (or higher). We all know that if you don’t like the weather in Colorado you just wait ten minutes, but it’s also true that if you aren’t ready for the seasons to change you can just drive two hours.

Thoughts about impermanence and change have pervaded my thinking recently. The Heraclitus quote “No man ever steps into the same river twice” is true in all of our personal lives as well as for the causes we serve. Like a flowing river, a seemingly static exterior conceals shifts that are only visible when you look deeply, over time, or from the right angle.

Part of my role at CFWE is to monitor our external environment for cultural and institutional transitions that affect our work or create opportunities. Staff and Board members recently dove more deeply into these big-picture shifts through a strategic planning session with the firm Conservation Impact. From its interviews with more than 30 stakeholders, in addition to background research and a review of internal materials, Conservation Impact provided CFWE with a greater understanding of our niche, informed by our strengths, demographic trends, and the work of an increasing number of water education and information organizations. CFWE will further mine the positive comments and constructive criticism we received to update our strategic plan by the end of 2014. Stay tuned.

In the midst of analyzing big-picture transi-tions, CFWE also undertook its own smaller but more disruptive change. After 12 years in our office near the state capitol, we moved to a new space at 17th and Humboldt in Denver’s Uptown neighborhood. Now that we are past the immediate distraction, staff is thrilled with the new location—more room, more natural light, more parking! We can once again hold trainings at our office and have plans to install videoconferencing capabilities to conduct high quality online learning. As always, we welcome

visitors and would love for you to stop by and say hi!In this issue you’ll also see several announcements that signal changes within CFWE. To meet the

growing demand for water education, we are launching a new Water Fluency program in spring 2015 aimed at increasing the basic knowledge level of young professionals, elected officials, local decision makers, and the interested public. Water Fluency will combine CFWE’s strength of making the complex topic of water understandable with the large networks of the Colorado Municipal League, Colorado Counties Inc., and the Special District Association, among others. We are also excited to announce that Jayla Poppleton, longtime Headwaters editor, will join staff as our Content Program Manager. She will still lead production of this magazine, but her role will expand to include oversight of other printed mate-rials, online resources, media partnerships, and organizational marketing. Her talents will grow CFWE’s capabilities in these areas tremendously.

So as the days shorten and the snow accumulates we’ll be navigating a river of change here at CFWE. Throughout, we will keep our mission of balanced water education in our hearts and strive to do the best we can for you and for Colorado.

Be well,

ColoradoFoundationfor Water Education

Board Members

Gregg Ten Eyck

President

Justice Gregory J. Hobbs, Jr.

Vice President

Eric Hecox

Secretary

Alan Matlosz

Treasurer

Becky Brooks

Nick Colglazier

Lindsay Cox

Lisa Darling

Steve Fearn

Rep. Randy Fischer

Greg Johnson

Pete Kasper

Scott Lorenz

Dan Luecke

Trina McGuire-Collier

Kate McIntire

Reed Morris

Lauren Ris

Sen. Gail Schwartz

Andrew Todd

Chris Treese

Reagan Waskom

StaffNicole SeltzerExecutive Director

Kristin MahargDirector of Programs

Caitlin ColemanContent and Communications Specialist

Jennie GeurtsMembership and Administration Coordinator

Alicia Prescott Development Director

Jayla PoppletonContent Program Manager

Mission Statement The mission of the Colorado Foundation for Water Education is to promote better understanding of water resources through education and information. The Foundation does not take an advocacy position on any water issue.

Acknowledgments The Colorado Foundation for Water Education thanks the people and organizations who provided review, comment and assistance in the development of this issue.

Headwaters Magazine is published three times a year by the Colorado Foundation for Water Education. Headwaters is designed to provide Colorado citizens with balanced and accurate information on a variety of subjects related to water resources. Copyright 2014 by the Colorado Foundation for Water Education. ISSN: 1546-0584 Edited by Jayla Poppleton. Designed by Emmett Jordan.

1750 Humboldt Suite 200 Denver, CO 80218

303-377-4433 • www.yourwatercolorado.org

Executive Director

H e a d w a t e r s | F a l l 2 0 1 4 3

CFWE Mission in Motion

CFWE has moved!If you want to come visit us or update your records,

CFWE’s new address is:

1750 Humboldt St. #200 Denver, CO 80218

All phone numbers remain the same.

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Contents Fall 2014CONTRIBUTORSAllen Best, a longtime Colorado journalist experienced at covering western water and energy issues, grew up in a town in eastern Colorado but spent weekends on the farms of his grandparents. For water, one set of grandparents had only a hand-pumped well, and he learned as a young boy in the late 1950s to draw water using that primitive technology. The other set of grandparents had an irrigated farm, and it was a world of difference. Technologies used by farmers today are a universe apart from either. For several years, Best has wanted to write about Republican River affairs, and he pounced on the opportunity to write “How to Make the Ogallala Last” for this issue. He can be found at mountaintownnews.net.

Nelson Harvey is a Denver-based freelance print and radio journalist who writes about food, agriculture, public health and the environment. He’s also the editor of edibleASPEN magazine. A few seasons spent working on farms in Colo-rado and Pennsylvania convinced Harvey that farmers were smart, but writing about the maddening complexity of agri-cultural water efficiency for this issue of Headwaters proved it to him once and for all. Find samples of his work at Nel-sonHarvey.com.

Fort Collins-based writer Joshua Zaffos first visited the East-ern Plains a decade ago while reporting on the establishment of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. Ten years later, while reporting “Out on the Eastern Plains” for this issue, the region’s far-flung towns and the open and rolling landscape still fascinate him: “There’s something alluring about the history of the region and the geographic vastness of the plains juxtaposed with the social proximity of the communities and people,” he says. Zaffos’ work is online at joshuazaffos.com.

Matthew Staver is an independent documentary and com-mercial photographer living in Denver. His photographs have appeared in TIME Magazine, Newsweek, Smithsonian Magazine and others, as well as on the cover of The New York Times on multiple occasions. He drove 763 miles to capture the photographs for this issue and enjoyed every minute he was out on Colorado’s Eastern Plains, where he was captivated by the aesthetics of the landscape and the gracious hospitality he received. His photos appear at mat-thewstaver.com.

Caitlin Coleman is a writer for the Colorado Foundation for Water Education. In covering “In Pursuit of Clean Water” for this issue, Coleman was struck by the many water managers who mentioned the stomach upset their water caused and public reluctance to drink the water. “It’s easy, in Colorado, to think about high-quality mountain water, but this story was a good reminder that many communities are limited and struggling to overcome not only the amount of water they have available but the quality of that water,” she says.

Out on the Eastern Plains 8By Joshua Zaffos

The Centennial State’s Rocky Mountain high, followed by its urban Front Range corridor, gives way to its flatter

eastern tier—a sweeping plains region working to preserve hard-won livelihoods that are anything but plain.

How to Make the Ogallala Last 16By Allen Best

The nation’s greatest underground reservoir continues its steady decline. What will it mean when the wells go

dry, and can the fated march be stopped?

The Efficiency Dilemma 23By Nelson Harvey

For Eastern Plains farmers, growing more with less is possible, even attractive, but not so simple as it

may seem.

In Pursuit of Clean Water 27By Caitlin Coleman

Plains communities struggle to bring water supplies in line with shifting state standards.

6 FOODBeef may be for dinner, but cows need water too; The numbers tell all—livestock dominates on the Eastern Plains.

7 HABITAT One upside of irrigated agriculture’s “waste water”; Models in trading and moving water to aid wildlife.

About the cover: Brian Meisner and Rod Lenz savor the fall harvest from fields they irrigate with water drawn from the

Ogallala Aquifer. Ogallala country near Eckley in Yuma County is dotted with the signature circular fields of center-pivot

irrigation. Inset photo by Matthew Staver. Aerial photo by John Wark.

WATER IS…

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COLORADO FOUNDATION FOR WATER EDUCATION | FALL 2014

Just Add Water

The Will to Thrive on Colorado’s Eastern Plains

Can the Ogallala be saved? Why irrigation efficiency is worth the troubleWhen water quality goes southWater = Food + Habitat

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I may be a little myopic in my view of the world, but even after living for 14 years on what could be considered the “flat” side of the state, when I think of Colorado I do not conjure images of the Great Plains. From

where I sit in Denver, I look west, and I see mountains. To the east, I see the vastest of skies—and what lies beneath has remained largely a mystery. Yet more than one-third of Colorado, which I’ve often thought of as “the Rocky Mountain state,” is not mountainous at all, but rather flat or rolling and covered in grassland and steppe. This high plains region is the western edge of the 500-mile-wide Great Plains, and it’s right here—in Colorado.

From my editor’s desk, I couldn’t help but envy writer Allen Best, who travelled out to northeastern Colorado to visit with farmers and water managers in Ogallala country and

learn about their experiences firsthand. Photographer Matthew Staver, who spent two days on the road and covered nearly 700 miles to photograph the people and places highlighted in this issue, also had the exciting, if not grueling, task of bringing the region to life on these pages. Despite excellent contributions by writers Nelson Harvey, Joshua Zaffos, Caitlin Coleman and Joel Warner, as well as Headwaters’ designer Emmett Jordan, himself a plains resident, we could hardly do justice in the scope of this magazine to the vastness of Colorado’s Eastern Plains and the variety of unique challenges confronting different sub-regions north to south. But we’ve fo-cused on what we believe are the region’s most pressing issues.

It’s amazing the difference water makes. Satellite imagery reveals the contrast between wet and dry. A few green ribbons transect the otherwise dun-colored expanses of grass and steppe—the South Platte, the Arkansas, the Republican, and their tributaries—and between those ribbons, one sees the telltale green circles wrought by center-pivot sprinklers. If there isn’t a river nearby, the water fueling those sprinklers is being drawn from the diminishing reserves of the Ogallala Aquifer. And where there is but muted green, the land is largely dryland farmed or ranched, with cattle and other livestock spreading beneath the expansive Great Plains sky.

The challenges of using water sustainably in eastern Colorado, whether along rivers or drawn from the ground, have been magnified recently. Extremely dry conditions in the state’s south-eastern corner have elicited comparisons to an earlier episode in the region’s history—and one that is never far from people’s minds. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s hit far southeastern Colorado’s Baca County hardest, but no community in the Eastern Plains escaped its menacing dust storms entirely. It’s history that no one wants to see repeated. And so efforts are underway to continually improve farming and irrigation practices, using less water to grow more, preserving soil health by altering tilling methods, shoring up well withdrawals near streams using recharge projects, and reverting to dryland farming to reduce the draw on the Ogallala. But despite all our efforts, Mother Nature still plays the stronger hand when it comes to putting water on the ground.

I didn’t grow up in a rural landscape, but after learning more about the lives of people who have, for generations, lived on and plied the same land, carving out a living one way or another year after year after year, I find myself aching for a little of what they have—that deep-rooted attachment to place, which goes beyond anything I’ve experienced. Despite the hardships and challenges wrought by temperamental weather and unpredictable ag markets, rural Eastern Plains communities are waging a battle to hold onto the life and livelihoods they know on this land, in this place.

Even plants with the deepest of roots wither if they go dry for too long. And without water, the most deeply rooted of plains people in eastern Colorado communities will eventually depart. And so their quest to find equilibrium, to ensure water sustainability for years to come, is of vital importance.

TenThings To Do In This Issue:

Jayla PoppletonEditor

1 Re-set your expectations for Colorado’s Water Plan and prepare to make your voice heard in the next round of public comment (page 2).

2 Fuel your lottery ticket habit by mentally connecting the dots between Great Outdoors Colorado and funding to protect Colorado’s wetlands (page 7).

3 Widen your eyes and let your jaw drop at the impact of Colorado ag’s heavy hitters (page 9).

4 Become an Eastern Plains’ geography whiz by locating major landmarks, regional waterways and the Ogallala Aquifer (page 13).

5 Connect with local basin roundtables to find out more about water supply planning for the future and the tie-in to Colorado’s Water Plan (page 15).

6 Discover why the Ogallala is the nation’s most imperiled aquifer, and visually hone in on the areas most at risk (page 18).

7 Peel back the layers on the water issues affecting the Republican River Basin by visiting its local water conservancy district on the web (page 22).

8 Identify some of the financial backers of agricultural efficiency improvements in Colorado (page 24).

9 Understand the biggest threats to drinking water quality—and health—affecting Eastern Plains’ groundwater (page 28).

10 Access resources to help you test the quality of water from your private well—or your kitchen faucet (page 29).

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Cattle: The Plains’ Agricultural MuscleLivestock is the lifeblood of Colorado’s agricul-tural industry, and nowhere is that more appar-ent than on the state’s Eastern Plains. More than 60 percent of Colorado’s agricultural revenues come from the state’s 2.65 million head of cattle, of which more than 2 million are located in the eastern half of the state. Most of those animals are first raised by ranchers on the plains, then bulked up in huge feedlots owned by big ag names like JBS in LaSalle, Kersey, Yuma and Lamar and Cargill in Eckley.

A majority of the irrigated crops grown on the Eastern Plains go to feed these cattle, in addi-tion to the state’s 130,000 dairy cows, many of which supply dairy processing plants like the one owned by Denver-based Leprino Foods in Greeley, says Bill Midcap, director of external affairs for the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union.

The end products of the region’s livestock in-dustry are sold all over the United States and beyond, with Colorado ranking as the country’s fourth-largest beef exporter. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s agricultural census, the total value of all the livestock, poul-try and related products in Colorado’s 24 East-ern Plains counties topped $4.8 billion in 2012. “People need to realize that life doesn’t end 100 miles from the Front Range,” says Richard Holtorf, a rancher in Akron.

But the drought conditions that have gripped southeastern Colorado since 2008 have left the industry in a bind. With minimal precipitation, and surface and groundwater levels dropping in the rangelands, there’s not enough to provide the 20 to 30 gallons of water a 1,200-pound graz-ing cow needs to drink each day, not to men-tion nourishment for the 25 to 50 daily pounds of forage it requires, says Holtorf. In the past year, he’s had to purchase a tanker truck to haul thousands of gallons of water a week to vari-ous parts of his nearly 10,000-acre ranch. And with agricultural operations becoming increas-ingly specialized, most modern cattle operations don’t have their own farms from which they can obtain feed crops; to supplement dwindling for-age ranchers have to buy more feed from others. “In the western United States, if you don’t have water and you don’t have forage, you can’t sup-port livestock,” says Holtorf.

Many struggling ranchers have been forced to sell off some cattle or liquidate their herds, pro-ducing an economic effect that is compounded for years, adds Holtorf. “You have to regenerate your base, and that takes time,” he says. “A cow takes over two and a half years to go from birth to meat production.”

The dwindling cattle supply is being felt in the feedlots, says Brad Rock of Box Elder Ranch, a farm and feedlot in Wray. “We’ve never seen cattle prices as high as they are,” says Rock.

It’s a plus for those selling, but to stock his lot, Rock has paid 40 to 50 percent higher prices for a 500-pound calf in 2014 than he did in early 2013. He adds that hay prices, thanks to drought conditions, were costly at over $200 a ton earlier in 2014—although that fell off by more than half later in the season. Either way, it wasn’t as bad as it was in 2012, when prices reached $300 a ton.

Ranchers and feedlots aren’t the only busi-nesses feeling the crunch, says Rock: “There’s not as much feed being bought at the feed stores; there’s not as much fuel being purchased to take care of cows; and the sale barns aren’t getting commissions.” The lack of beef supply also leads to higher meat prices in the supermarket.

The feed industry hasn’t been impacted as dramatically, points out Midcap, because farm-ers are shipping their hay, corn, and other feed crops to livestock operations in other states.

Ranchers and feedlot owners are adapt-ing to the times, says Rock, implementing new groundwater monitoring systems, installing ad-ditional water storage tanks, and developing more efficient grazing methods. But these ef-forts likely won’t be enough, meaning communi-ties are going to have to look at large-scale wa-ter transportation and storage systems for the sake of livestock, in addition to securing new water supplies. If unsuccessful, the business will either dwindle, or become consolidated into large-scale operations that can handle the cost of providing water to livestock—adding to the corporatization that has already transformed beef’s feeding and meat-packing industries in Colorado and beyond.

Midcap knows some people might balk at the idea of allocating water for livestock that could otherwise be going to people. But as he points out, agricultural water ends up in peo-ple’s homes anyway. “Agriculture is not the end use of water,” he says. “As you eat food, you are eating the water that produced that food.” —Joel Warner

Water is Food

Packing Heat with Meat

The Eastern Plains’ 24 counties deliver a wallop when it comes to agricultural muscle:

Farmland 22.72 million acres (72 percent of state total)

Irrigated cropland 1.3 million acres (52 percent of state total)

Pastureland 13.83 million acres (68 percent of state total)

Market value of agricultural products sold $6.57 billion (68 percent of state total)

Value of all livestock sold $4.81 billion (90 percent of state total)

Value of cattle and calves alone $3.95 billion (91 percent of state total)

Source: Agricultural statistics for the Eastern Plains counties (Adams, Arapahoe, Baca, Bent, Cheyenne, Crowley, Douglas, El Paso, Elbert, Huerfano, Kiowa, Kit Carson, Las Animas, Lincoln, Logan, Morgan, Otero, Phillips, Prowers, Pueblo, Sedgwick, Washington, Weld and Yuma) taken from the 2012 USDA Census of Agriculture

The Five Rivers Cattle Feeding division of JBS recently invested $18 million to upgrade its 90,000-cow Kuner feedlot near Kersey, earning a nod from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency which called it “the feedlot of the future.” Five Rivers estimates a water-recycling system it built into the new design for filling troughs and keeping them from freezing saves 20 million gallons per year.

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Buy a lottery ticket and help protect wetlands. Great Outdoors Colorado, or GOCO, uses a portion of Colorado Lottery proceeds to fund a program of Colorado Parks and Wildlife that, working with voluntary partners, has protected or restored 300,000 acres of wetlands across Colorado since 1997. Learn more at goco.org.

Ag Water Partnerships Benefit WildlifeDucks can be particular. They like low plant growth and shallow water, and the South Platte’s riparian wetlands provide prime migration habitat for these choosy waterfowl. Ducks Unlimited doesn’t want to see that habitat diminish as water leaves agriculture or irrigation becomes more efficient, so the organization has developed groundwater recharge proj-ects that boost river flows while providing habitat for migrating birds. The projects have forged surprising partnerships with private landown-ers who host the recharge ponds on their properties and benefit from the ability to legally pump their irrigation wells as a result of the aquifer recharge they enable.

In the Arkansas River Basin, Colorado Parks and Wildlife works in a similar partnership with the Lower Arkansas Water Management Associa-tion (LAWMA) to optimize conditions for wildlife by moving water around the basin. Colorado Parks and Wildlife is unlike other LAWMA members who pay to replace groundwater withdrawals made from the Arkansas’ alluvial aquifer, where those withdrawals affect river flows, through a process called augmentation. The agency benefits from LAWMA’s aug-mentation abilities and together the organizations work on water trades, exchanges, and direct delivery of water rights to habitats around the basin. This exchange helps keep water in the Las Animas fish hatchery, where Colorado Parks and Wildlife owns junior water rights that beg for LAWMA’s augmentation water during dry years, and in several gravel pits Colorado Parks and Wildlife stocks for fishing. The partnership has also enabled trades where the agency has exchanged water to gain public access to LAWMA member-owned private properties that boast ameni-ties like fishing ponds.

LAWMA benefits as well. The organization receives any water Colorado Parks and Wildlife doesn’t use, plus a wet management fee: 15 percent of the water LAWMA manages on the agency’s behalf can be used for LAWMA

members’ augmentation needs—which indirectly results in benefits for wild-life. “Generally the more water that is spread out over the valley, the better it is for wildlife,” says LAWMA’s executive director Don Higbee. “And that is a benefit that’s not frequently recognized.” —Caitlin Coleman

Water is Habitat

Colorado’s Created WetlandsAs irrigators divert water to sprinkle and flood ag-ricultural fields across Colorado, the water does more than vitalize crops. It leaks from ditches and ponds and seeps beneath the reach of crops’ roots, tracing a path through the earth back to the river. As it strays from its given task of irrigating, the wa-ter forms and animates wetlands that otherwise wouldn’t exist. But as advances in agricultural ef-ficiency and ag-to-urban water transfers play out, some are wondering what the impact will be on the state’s created wetlands.

The wetlands we see today are generally differ-ent from what once existed. According to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service National Wetlands In-ventory conducted by researcher Thomas Dahl in 1991, Colorado lost about 50 percent of its natural wetlands between the 1780s and 1980s due to de-velopment. But at the same time, irrigators created new, ancillary wetlands in different, unexpected places, some that have now been in place for more than 100 years.

“It would be hard to actually tell if we’ve added wetland acreage to eastern Colorado through irri-gated agriculture when you compare that [acreage] to the loss of riparian wetlands along the rivers,” says Erick Carlson, a Colorado State University graduate student doing his doctoral research on the value of different wetland types. “Do we have a one-to-one transfer? Are there more wetlands now based on acreage? Are [the ancillary wetlands] only half as good in terms of ecological function?” There are many gaps in today’s understanding of these

ancillary wetlands, Carlson says, and he hopes his research will answer some of those questions.

According to Jeremy Sueltenfuss, a wetland ecologist with the Colorado Natural Heritage Pro-gram, incidental wetland creation happens all over, not just across Colorado’s Eastern Plains. A 2012 study conducted by Colorado State University researchers on incidental wetland creation in the North Poudre Irrigation Company’s service area showed that water seeping from ditches, dams, ponds and irrigated fields was responsible for 92 percent of the total wetland area in that region. Re-cent research across Colorado’s South Platte Basin by the Colorado Natural Heritage Program has re-sulted in similar findings. “We’re redistributing wa-ter across our landscape and creating significantly more wetland habitat than there would be other-wise,” Sueltenfuss says.

But all wetlands are not created equal. Incidental wetlands are typically flat and shallow with cattails, grasses and sedges reaching no more than 6-feet-tall, while riparian wetlands are more “vertically complex” with tall cottonwood trees, Carlson says. These different characteristics meet the needs of different species and also have different abilities to purify water.

The very inefficiencies in irrigation that led to wetland creation can also have negative effects on water quality. As irrigation water percolates through the groundwater table, it picks up miner-als, salts and nutrients. Researchers recommend combatting water quality problems with irrigation

efficiencies like lining irrigation canals—but with those efficiencies will come a decline in wetland area. According to a study conducted by CSU researcher Meagan Smith, increasing irrigation efficiencies in her northern Colorado study area resulted in as much as a 50 percent decrease in wetland area.

Although Colorado has exchanged many of its natural riparian areas for incidental wetlands, Sueltenfuss believes there’s no choice between the two today. In either case, wetlands are es-sential. While constituting a mere 2 percent of Colorado’s landscape, biologists agree that wet-lands support more than 75 percent of the state’s plant and animal species at some stage in life—Sueltenfuss says the figure is closer to 97 per-cent. “Would all 97 percent of species disappear without wetlands?” he asks. “Probably not, but it highlights the importance of wetlands in general.”

Now the question of maintaining wetlands goes back to efficiencies and keeping water in agricul-ture versus moving that water out off the land and to municipalities. “Every drop is going to be used,” Sueltenfuss says. “The choice now is whether we maintain those wetlands created by irrigation or we allow those to dry up also.” New research on the quality of different wetland areas, determining for instance which types are most productive in filter-ing contaminants or offering suitable habitat, could provide the key to maximizing the quality of all wet-lands, as Carlson hopes to do, while assessing the risk of letting certain areas go dry. —Caitlin Coleman

Colorado is part of the Central and Pacific flyways and its shallow wetlands provide important foraging and resting habitat for migrating birds—even these mallard ducks.

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By Joshua Zaffos

Eastern Colorado appears on maps and in people’s minds as an open and featureless space. But amid the seemingly flat, monoto-nous terrain, travelers can find badlands and buttes, canyons and lakes, wagon trails and ghost towns. The region rises from east to west as the edge of the continent’s Great Plains reaches the foothills of the Rockies. The high plains soil, washed from the rising moun-tains millions of years ago, is a mix of sand, gravel and clay that forms a loosely compacted and well-drained layer of earth, vulner-able to erosion but fertile for crops and favorable for replenishing groundwater and rivers.


Horses are trailed to summer pasture near Stoneham in Weld County.

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Colorado Ag’s Top ProducersColorado ranked 14th nationally for total corn-for-grain production in 2012 and 6th for winter wheat. Eastern Plains counties top the list for their contribution to state totals.

Top 5 Colorado Corn Counties in 2012Rank County Acres Planted Production (bushels) Est. Value of Production*

1. Yuma 261,000 42.22 million $298 million

2. Weld 135,800 17.26 million $122 million

3. Phillips 118,000 12.18 million $86 million

4. Kit Carson 219,000 11.93 million $84 million

5. Logan 96,000 11.51 million $81 million

* Based on $7.05 corn prices in 2012.

Top 5 Colorado Wheat Counties in 2012Rank County Acres Planted Production (bushels) Est. Value of Production*

1. Kit Carson 242,000 10 million $80 million

2. Washington 291,000 9.36 million $75 million

3. Adams 157,000 6.18 million $50 million

4. Cheyenne 161,000 4.75 million $38 million

5. Lincoln 162,000 4.72 million $38 million

* Based on $8.05 winter wheat prices in 2012.

The South Platte flows through the plains’ northern reaches, the Arkansas through the south, and the massive Ogallala Aquifer provides groundwater for some landowners in between. Average rainfall is ten to 20 inches a year, but extreme highs and, especially, lows occur regularly. The summers are hot, the winters are cold, and thunderstorms, tornadoes, dust storms, bliz-zards, floods and drought are expected.

Jim Yahn says the plains and the ranching life is “in my blood,” as way of confession for his decision to ditch a well-paying engineering job in Fort Collins and move back home to Logan County with his wife, Tracy, a few years after he finished college. Now they raise hay on 90 acres and run 110 head of cattle on an additional 2,000 acres of pastureland near Iliff, popula-tion 213, not far from the Nebraska border. When Jim isn’t on the ranch, he manages the North Sterling Irrigation District, overseeing North Sterling Reservoir, which supports 41,000 acres of irrigated farmland, and Prewitt Reservoir, a supplemental water supply for an additional 30,000 acres.

North Sterling and other projects are essential to many farmers along

the lower South Platte and the northern plains, which are among the most productive agricultural lands in the nation. But regional farmers also share a river with metro Denver and growing Front Range towns that have bought up agricultural water rights and converted the supply for municipal use. The process, known as “buy and dry,” has shut down water-deprived farms and ranches, exacerbating pressures on rural landowners in the South Platte as well as the more southern Arkansas River Basin.

Meanwhile, the Ogallala Aquifer, once the wellspring of much of the East-ern Plains, faces an uncertain future. Decades of over-pumping have shrunk its reserves, and comprehensive measures to slow its decline have yet to be implemented on any meaningful scale.

As the pressures of water shortage and economic challenges mount amid a decade-long drought, many plains communities are being forced to chart new courses. As they seek new ways to use and conserve water, they’re aiming not only to sustain a viable economy but also to preserve the region’s agricultural and cultural heritage.

The 75-megawatt Twin Buttes Wind Power Project has 50 turbines dotted across 9,000 acres near Lamar. It is capable of supplying power for up to 22,000 homes and supports the local economy through county tax payments plus lease payments to landowners, who continue to ranch and farm on their properties.Jo

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The NortheastIn northeastern Colorado, agriculture—and economic development—has been closely tied to a few key crops. For much of the last century, a majority of the region’s irrigation produced sugar beets. In the early 1900s, the Great Western Sugar Company began opening processing plants in Loveland, Greeley, Ster-ling, Fort Morgan, Brush and elsewhere, and the South Platte Valley became the country’s sugar beet factory. Production covered more than 1 million acres by the 1950s, pacing communities’ growth and boosted by irrigation water spir-ited through transmountain diversions managed by private irrigation companies as well as the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District.

Advances in farm equipment technology and market changes, including the expansion of corn crops and corn syrup as a sweetener, led to sugar beets’ decline in the following decades. Sterling compensated for the loss, at least in part, by opening feedlots, dairies and, many years later, a state correctional facility, but the small factory town of Ovid, population 330, in Sedgwick County has never recovered economically. A similar fate struck

Sugar City in the southern plains in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s when its sug-ar beet factory closed and water rights were sold to distant municipalities. In 2002, more than 1,000 growers from Colorado and neighboring states acquired Great Western to run it as a cooperative. Sugar beets continue to be grown in a handful of South Platte Basin counties, but comprise less than 10 percent of regional crop sales.

Now, corn and hay account for roughly 60 percent of crop sales along the South Platte. Mechanized farm machinery, center-pivot sprinklers and efficien-cy improvements have increased yields for those crops, which mostly feed cat-tle in regional dairies or midwestern feedlots. The improved production means farmers can grow more with less, Yahn says, but they also face steeper up-front costs for equipment and fertilizers. Those combined factors have contributed to the consolidation of parcels into larger farms run by fewer families.

South Platte irrigators have faced other challenges. A 2003 state su-preme court ruling, which came on the heels of the drought that struck

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in 2002, threatened to shut down 3,000 groundwater wells that had been operating under temporary substitute water supply plans. The plans, in place under approval of the State Engineer, provided temporary replace-ment water to offset groundwater pumping’s impact on flows destined for the river and downstream surface water-rights holders. But the 2003 case affirmed that an earlier ruling from the Arkansas Basin, the 2001 Empire Lodge case, also applied in the South Platte Basin, negating the State Engineer’s authority to issue such permits. “The court case, along with the drought, brought to light that the wells weren’t replacing enough water,” Yahn says. Such replacement is a mandated practice known as augmen-tation. Going forward, the well users would need to apply to water court for permanent augmentation plans—a process the state legislature gave them until 2006 to initiate.

“In our area, the well owners stepped up and went to water court and got a decree, and did a lot of work and spent their money to make sure they’re replacing what their wells are pumping,” says Yahn. He says the changes restored flows to the river and in ditches around Sterling, and irrigators have adapted to more closely monitoring their use. But when 2006 came, close to 1,000 wells elsewhere along the South Platte, whose irrigators were un-able to augment their water use, were shut down, leading some to sell off their farms. Today, according to Division 1 Engineer David Nettles, around 6,500 wells continue to operate along the South Platte, with some pumping only a portion of what they once did.

In response, farmers, cities and others are pursuing innovative management to further maximize efficiency and enable water sharing

between agriculture, industries and municipalities. But others are holding out for a return to the old ways. Since pumping has been curtailed, high groundwater levels have flooded basements in Gilcrest, Sterling and other areas, leading some well users to ask state officials to allow them to return to pumping. That hasn’t happened, and augmentation plans remain intact while policymakers continue to devise new approaches and tools.

Meanwhile, drought patterns continue to dictate life on the plains. “It’s a historical thing that’s been happening for 100 years,” says Yahn, adding that 2014’s favorable conditions elevated crop yields. “We have the rises and falls of water availability, and farmers have learned to make do with whatever they receive.”

The Central High PlainsEighty miles east of Colorado Springs, Lincoln County’s tiny town of Karval has lost its café and there are rumors the post office may finally close. Jeff Thornton and his wife, Tammy, whose family was among the area’s earliest homesteaders, raise crops and cattle near Karval, 60 miles north of the Arkan-sas River. Like landowners to the north, the farmers and ranchers of the central high plains are making do when it comes to water.

The Thorntons are dryland farmers, raising wheat, milo, corn and millet with-out irrigation. The family’s 450 cattle forage across thousands of acres. The drought has parched the high plains of central Colorado more severely than the northeast, decimating dryland cattle herds and forcing farms to cut back on labor, although the 2014 summer was a relatively wet one here, too. “If it rains, we’re pretty productive,” Thornton says. If it doesn’t, the family relies on crop insurance in lean years.

Many dryland farmers and ranchers faced with similar circumstances have sold their land or enrolled acreage in the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program through the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Since 1986 the program has contracted landowners to plant native grasses on their fields to provide permanent vegetative cover, bringing relief and opportunity to some struggling families while also contributing to sharp declines in dryland agriculture in Lin-coln, Kiowa, Bent and other counties. Across the 24 Colorado plains region counties, 8.7 percent of all farmland or nearly 2 million acres was enrolled in CREP in 2013, down from 2.3 million in 2008, the program’s biggest year.

Locals are also contending with efforts to protect the mountain plover, a bird that uses the mix of local shortgrass prairie and fallow farm fields as prime nesting habitat and has been considered for protection under the Endangered Species Act. Listing could limit landowners’ farming practices and patterns in order to benefit the birds. Thornton and his neighbors hope to avoid such con-straints, which could make it harder for them to make a living.

The focus on plover conservation, however, has provided a different form of economic benefit by bringing local tourism and research opportunities to Lincoln County. Scientists using ranches as study areas to monitor the birds’ recovery sometimes pay landowners for a place to stay. And locals started an annual Mountain Plover Festival that attracts birdwatchers during the spring nesting season to participate in wildlife viewing tours, dinners, and even home-stays at local farms and ranches.


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Dryland farmers Jeff and Tammy Thornton, at the Karval home Tammy’s parents once lived in, epitomize the persistence of Colorado plains people.

Cattle are gathered on winter range near Briggsdale in Weld County.

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Keeping the River WholeSince 1969, Colorado has sought to integrate the regulation of surface and groundwater, spurred by the growing recognition of the connec-tion between the two. Groundwater users, with the exception of those in designated groundwater basins where the groundwater does not interact with any surface stream, stand in line according to the prior appropriation doctrine much like everyone else. To enable groundwa-ter users to pump water during times when their withdrawals are out of priority, or harmful to a senior surface water user, the state permits the use of augmentation plans. An augmentation plan is a court-approved document detailing how a water user intends to replace his or her de-pletions to the stream, usually by purchasing additional water supplies that are released to compensate the river at the same time and place where it would have otherwise been impacted.

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Colorado

Colorado’s gross domestic product was $294 billion in 2013. An estimated $129 billion, or 44 percent, came from the 24 counties of which all or a portion lie in the state’s Eastern Plains. In 2013, the 2.65 million people living in those 24 counties made up 50 percent of the state population, and their median incomes ranged from $26,500 in Baca County to $58,000 in Arapahoe County. The statewide median income in 2013 was $51,000. Source: Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade

president of the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District, Long has worked to find a new purpose for Fort Lyon and also to protect the ag-ricultural legacy of the region. “It’s very difficult to attract manufacturing and what-not to rural areas, such as ours, but it still comes back to the drought,” says Long. “If we don’t have water, we don’t have much.”

In November 2013, after months of work by the county commissioners and the Bent County Development Foundation, Fort Lyon became Colo-rado’s first state-funded homeless shelter. The facility, run by the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, has gradually expanded its services, and its employed workforce is up to 50 positions. Bent County has also benefited from the 75-megawatt Twin Buttes Wind Power Project near Lamar, which generates $291,000 in annual property taxes and royalties for landowners. Elsewhere in the Eastern Plains region, the 430-megawatt Peetz Table Wind Energy Center in Logan County, the 550-megawatt Cedar Creek Wind Farm near Grover in Weld County, and others like them also provide needed rev-enue to rural areas.

Addressing water challenges has proven even more arduous. An inter-state compact with Kansas constrains use on the Arkansas River and has led to rules that require well users who tap river-connected groundwater to “augment” their use, as on the South Platte. Drought conditions in 2013 meant there wasn’t enough augmentation water to go around, leaving many irrigators high and dry. According to the Arkansas Basin Roundtable’s draft basin implementation plan, soon to be part of Colorado’s Water Plan, aug-mentation water in the Arkansas River system is currently 30,000 to 50,000 acre-feet short of what is needed, meaning local water users are already severely strapped. And cities such as Aurora, far outside the river basin, have relied on buy-and-dry strategies to acquire municipal water and could contribute to regional economic losses if they ever pipe additional flows out of the region.

Raised by a fourth-generation farming family in the plains community of Manzanola, 20 miles west of La Junta, state Sen. Larry Crowder witnessed the dry-up of Crowley County in the late 1960s when the National Sugar Manufacturing Company closed and sold its water; shortly after those rights were acquired by cities to the north and west. “It affected all the counties surrounding it,” he says. Now Crowder represents 16 counties encompass-ing one-quarter of the state, ten of which are in the southeastern plains, and, though critical of a pending local effort to temporarily transfer water between agriculture and cities without permanently drying up farmland,


Water’s ATM MachineIrrigators know all about stopping or starting the flow of water, so Jay Winner, general manager of the Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservancy District, has coped with the stops and starts of innova-tive water planning.

Winner has led the charge for the Arkansas Valley Super Ditch, an uncharted approach to enable ditch companies to lease agricultural water to cities and industries through a system of rotational fallow-ing, where varying acres of land go unirrigated or even unplanted depending on the year. The project could circumvent buy-and-dry scenarios by keeping water-right ownership attached to farms and ranches, protecting the long-term viability of agriculture and ag-based communities.

The Super Ditch began, in concept, with funding through the Col-orado Water Conservation Board grant program for Alternative Ag-ricultural Water Transfer Methods (ATMs). Since 2007, the program has provided 21 grants and $3.8 million for studies and pilot projects that enable water sharing to address the state’s water supply gap.

Concerns from the state and other water users, including non-participating farmers, conservancy districts and industries, shelved the first two proposed Super Ditch pilot projects. A third attempt in 2015 would lease up to 500 acre-feet annually from the Catlin Canal to the towns of Fowler, Fountain and Security, while irrigators fal-low 1,120 acres on a rotational basis. “We’re at a critical juncture to figure out if fallowing works as part of the state water plan,” Winner says. That includes finding a way to address objections one time—instead of squaring off with critics each year.

Along the lower South Platte, the ATM grant program helped start the Northeast Colorado Water Cooperative in January 2014. The co-op, which formed with roughly 20 members who pay $1,000 to $2,000 for a share, similar to agricultural cooperatives, will explore how irrigators who have augmentation plans to offset their ground-water pumping can exchange available water credits with other members of the cooperative as needed.

“We’re looking at innovation, with a bunch of farmers working to-gether to exchange that water, maybe through a reservoir or what-ever we need to do,” says Jim Yahn, manager of the North Sterling Irrigation District and a member of the South Platte Basin Round-table, which backed creation of the co-op. “We need to see if we can satisfy some of the municipal needs without drying up all of agriculture.”

The Pawnee Buttes, two striking landforms within the 193,000-acre Pawnee National Grassland in northeastern Colorado, have withstood the erosive forces of time. Em

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Bent County Commissioner Bill Long has fought for new economic opportunities, including the resurrection of historic Fort Lyon, while working to preserve the region’s agricultural legacy.

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The SoutheastIn the state’s southern plains, cattle feedlots and irrigated and dryland farming historically dominated the regional economy. But correctional fa-cilities have replaced agriculture as major employers and revenue sources. In Crowley County, 50,000 acres of irrigated farmland have moved out of production and feedlots have closed due to consolidation and regulatory and market pressures. In Bent County, agriculture has remained a little more stable, but the state prison at historic Fort Lyon—a former military post, sanitarium and veterans’ hospital—shuttered in 2011 because of budget constraints, eliminating more than 500 local jobs.

For an area that’s already depressed, the closure has been devastat-ing, says Bill Long, a lifelong resident of Bent County, who has witnessed farms and ranches vanish and consolidate, child-poverty rates skyrocket, and towns dwindle. As chairman of the Bent County Commissioners and

called the Super Ditch (see sidebar), he believes agricultural and urban us-ers need to work together toward a shared future. “Conservation is huge, not only for urban but for rural, too,” he says. “We also need to realize that we do need each other. We need urban to buy our products and we need agriculture to furnish our products.”

Crowder is most concerned about variable climate conditions like snow-pack, which dictates runoff and surface water availability, or the drought that took hold in 2008, emptying the plains of most of its cattle. Rebuilding herds will take time, and while the summer’s plentiful moisture brought relief to the parched landscape, it’s uncertain how long it will take for the land to fully re-cover. “This summer was as green and pretty as you’ve ever seen it. It really picks up the spirits,” says Crowder. But weeds still dominate in the dry soils. “When you’re driving across the prairie and the wind is blowing, and you see ten or twenty thousand tumbleweeds, it’s almost hypnotic,” he says, and then, referencing the region’s struggles, adds, “It’s almost poetic.”

The Way SoutheastIn the far southeastern corner of the state, counties and landowners look-ing for new revenues haven’t met with much success. A group of 30 land-owners in Baca County have banded together to market the local wind-power potential, says Fred Hefley, whose family raises irrigated corn and crops near Walsh, population 546, but the lack of transmission lines has deterred progress. (It’s one of several infrastructure issues Sen. Crowder says he’s working on.)

The Hefleys and others in Baca and Prowers counties rely on ground-water, drawing from several aquifers managed as a single system under the Southern High Plains district by the state Ground Water Commission. That includes the shallow yet enormous Ogallala Aquifer, which spreads beneath eight states and provides water for about 20 percent of the coun-try’s corn, cotton, cattle and wheat. But decades of overuse hint at an end for the region’s irrigated agriculture.

Hefley says improved irrigation and no- and low-till practices have helped conserve soil and water and maintain crop yields, but local well levels are still dropping two to three feet a year. Scientists say farming above the aquifer may start to decline by 2040 unless major changes occur. As wells run dry, farms in Baca County are sold off, but Hefley says he sees more young farm-ers returning to the area, including one of his sons. The adversity—including the lack of political weight among rural towns—binds locals together, the Hefleys say. “The southeastern corner, and even each county, has a strong identity,” says Kay Lynn Hefley, Fred’s wife. “Baca County is very rural, and we tend to stick together over issues.” A recent example is the regional opposition that has fended off the expansion of the Army’s Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site in Las Animas County.

Next EvolutionsDespite so much in flux along the Eastern Plains, the Hefleys and many others don’t sound fazed. They are used to the ups and downs, they know how to adapt and persist, and many landowners say their rural lifestyles and practices haven’t changed much from generations past.

Of course, plenty of environmental and economic changes are still un-folding that will alter these communities. The expansion of rural broadband and high-speed Internet will help areas still lacking such tech amenities and attract new businesses as well as new—and former—residents. Com-munity members across the plains also see opportunities in heritage tour-ism, accommodating visitors to Bent’s Old Fort, the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, Comanche National Grassland, and the Santa Fe Trail in the south, the Pawnee Buttes, Pawnee National Grassland, and Overland Trail in the north, and the dozens of ghost towns scattered all across the plains.

Some ghost towns, like Karval, are still inhabited—by people who are as rooted in the landscape as the short and tall grasses. “It’s been some pretty tough years,” says Thornton, “but the families here are pretty tough people.” n

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A Chapter in Living HistoryIn 1864, around 675 volunteer Colorado cavalrymen serving in the U.S. Army raided a peaceful camp of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians in southeastern Colorado. The unprovoked attack, known as the Sand Creek Massacre, killed nearly 200 Indian people, mostly women and children, and ultimately led to the tribes’ removal from Colorado. No-vember 29, 2014, marks the event’s 150th anniversary.

The Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes now have reservations in Wyo-ming, Montana and Oklahoma. Coloradans and tribal members have worked to rebuild the tribes’ connections to the Colorado Eastern Plains. A major accomplishment came with the National Park Service designation of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site in 2007.

Sand Creek and nearby Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site are now primary attractions, together drawing about 30,000 visitors a year, and many tourists also stop at Fort Lyon, Boggsville and other sites along the Santa Fe Trail to learn about the area’s history.

“At Bent’s Old Fort the intention is to let people experience and learn through living history interpretation,” says Alexa Roberts, superinten-dent to the two national historic sites. “At the Sand Creek Massacre site the story emanates from the landscape itself. It’s very powerful.”

Activities leading up the 150th anniversary should draw additional visitors and highlight the southern plains’ continuing significance to Colorado and the tribes. More details at: www.nps.gov/sand/parknews/index.htm.

“The Sand Creek Massacre” by Robert Lindneaux portrays the 1864 U.S. Army assault on the peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho camp.

Connect with the South Platte and Arkansas basin roundtables for more information on water-sharing pilot projects to avoid permanent agricultural to municipal water transfers and other water planning efforts in the plains. Find meeting calendars and contact information at: http://cwcb.state.co.us/water-management/basin-roundtables.


How to Make the Ogallala Last

Can the future of the

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The Ogallala Aquifer underlies 14 percent of Colorado along the state’s eastern border. This is a land without mountains and mostly bereft

of snowmelt for irrigation. The climate is stingy to thirsty crops. Annual precipitation averages from 14 to 18 inches and mostly arrives as rain during the hot growing season. Never is it assured. Dryland corn is on the climatic margins, and even wheat is a roll of the dice. Drought is always lurking around the corner.

Farming at the foot of the Rocky Mountains began almost immediately after the discovery of gold in 1858. On Colorado’s eastern tier, though, giant cattle companies prevailed until the first wave of homesteading farmers arrived in 1886 to plow the soil around Burlington, Yuma and other new towns. Then drought hit. By 1900, Yuma had lost half its residents. It was a boom-and-bust economy joined at the hip to climatic variability. It took grit to survive.

Mining the Ogallala, which started mid-way through the 20th century, has untethered farming from both weather and climate. Farmers have used this cushion of subterranean “fossil” water, accumu-lated over several million years, to smooth the raspy edges of this tough country into lush circles of green. Red-brick houses such as you might find in the better urban neighborhoods now are found along graveled county roads. Towns with carefully trimmed lawns possess quiet vigor as centers of culture and commerce.

Just add water, they say. This difference can be found in Baca County, in the state’s southeastern corner. In 1934, when it was at the heart of the Dust Bowl, Walsh had 900 residents and Pritchett, 700. Both relied upon dryland farming. Population has declined since then. A single farmer now tills land once worked by ten or more. People drive more to distant towns to shop. But Pritchett now has only 137 residents and a café that is closed more years than not, while Walsh has 540 residents, a bank, computer dealer and easily a dozen other businesses. The difference? Walsh sits over the Ogallala. When temperatures rise above 100 degrees, as they often do, the center-pivot sprinklers gush around the clock over the thirsty circles of corn. Fittingly, one of the town’s businesses is called Artificial Rain. Its customers are homeowners seeking green lawns, but the concept is the same.

Will this continue? By 1978, Colorado had ceased issuing permits to tap the Ogallala in the northern high plains. Even then, barely 20 years into the muscular extraction of water from the High Plains Aquifer, as the Ogallala is sometimes called, it was clearly unsustainable. Ponds where local youngsters had ice-skated were drying up. A small lake on a river’s headwaters where a high school keg party was held in the early 1970s shrank and then disappeared alto-gether. Wells also dropped, neither uniformly nor consistently over time or geography: Here a foot a year, there nothing at all, but then seven feet in just one frantic summer of pumping in 2012, when Mother Nature brought little to the table except searing temperatures. Many wells near Flagler today have too little water to justify the cost of pumping. The town of Seibert has installed an 11-mile pipeline to reach a better-producing well. Even around Burlington, near-ing the Kansas border, pumps sometimes suck air like a car with a missing piston.

In southeastern Colorado, the story is similar. A 2002 report to Colorado submitted by McLaughlin, a Denver-based water engineering company, found that groundwater levels in the state’s southern high plains had dropped 100 feet during the previous half-century. “At current withdrawal rates of 220,000 acre-feet annually, the groundwater reserves for the entire aquifer system are estimated to have an economic life expectancy of 56 years,” the report stated—and that was 12 years ago. Places on the margins don’t even have that long.

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Fifty-two new wells and another 72 replacement wells, which require the abandonment of the original, were drilled in Colorado between 2012 and 2014 to tap the Ogallala Aquifer, bringing the total number of active Ogallala wells in the state to 5,400 as of late 2014. Source: Colorado Division of Water Resources


The scale of this depletion is staggering. Dick Wolfe, Colorado’s state water engineer, calculates that Colorado has drained an average 850,000 acre-feet of Ogallala water annually since large-scale pumping began, three-quarters of it in the northern high plains and a quarter in the southern high plains. This is after deducting for recharge from irrigation return flows. Recharge from precipitation is minimal. By comparison, all transmountain diver-sions—the controversial practice of redirecting wa-ter across the Continental Divide from the state’s Western Slope—amount to an average 450,000 to 600,000 acre-feet annually.

In his masterful 1993 book, “Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land,” John Opie laid out the challenge suc-cinctly. “A resource is mined, or developed or ex-ploited, when it is consumed at a pace far beyond any known rate of replacement,” he wrote. “A Faus-tian bargain was struck with the water, and today’s payment is coming due.”

The surface map representing the Ogal-lala poses a Rorschach test. I see the visage of a menacing bear across northeastern Colo-rado. Sedimentary rocks containing Ogallala water tend to be thinner at the edges, such as north of Sterling, along the state line with Wyo-ming and Nebraska, where, with 50 feet or less of saturated thickness, there is too little water to exploit economically. Generally, the aquifer’s saturated thickness grows deeper from west to east. You encounter its basement rocks when driving on Interstate 70 east of Limon, near the hamlet of Genoa. At 5,600 feet in elevation, the outcrop there is higher than the state capitol’s golden dome. Continuing toward Burlington, now losing elevation, the band of sandstone rocks expands and deepens. In the Republican River Basin, around Wray, the saturated thick-ness grows to 300 feet.

Pumping began in a few places in Colorado during the Dust Bowl but accelerated in the 1950s after a drought that, in places, was even more severe. Steve Kramer remembers his fam-ily’s first well in 1964, located about 20 miles northwest of Burlington along the South Fork of the Republican River. His father drilled the well 327 feet deep. “His words were, ‘I can finally raise some feed in these dry years so I don’t have to sell the cow herd,’” Kramer remembers.

With this new buffer against the weather, Kram-er’s father and grandfather expanded operations and diversified crop production. Now Kramer has been joined in farming by his two sons; one has a degree in mining engineering from the Colorado School of Mines. “His degree is working out well for us, because farming is a lot like the mining busi-ness,” says Kramer.

Technology has enabled this mining. First came the high-capacity centrifugal pumps. Far more powerful than windmills, they also required outside energy, which was readily supplied by the rapidly expanding petroleum industry. Centrifugal pumps, limited in reach to a vertical depth of 30 or so feet, were soon followed by vertical turbine pumps, which could access water hundreds of feet below the surface. With the arrival of electricity to rural areas in the 1940s, the stage was set for more in-tensified groundwater mining. The energy intensity of this extraction is reflected in the annual electri-cal demand of Highline Electric, a co-op based in Holyoke. From 25 megawatts, the demand jumps

to 190 megawatts in the hottest summers. Mark Farnsworth, Highline’s general manager, says high-capacity irrigation wells in the Ogallala constitute 55 percent of this demand.

Center-pivot sprinklers have also been disruptive technology. Before they arrived, shovels and can-vas tarps, later replaced by moveable pipes, were used to flood fields. It was labor intensive, and in 1948 Frank Zyback set out to create something better on his rented farm near Strasburg, east of Denver. Locals called it a “newfangled contraption.” With refinements, his invention is today the ubiqui-tous Valley-brand of sprinklers.

Sprinklers have been modified over the years. Except for the end guns on some models, water

no longer shoots up and out, where it evaporates easily. Instead, water drizzles from nozzles that dangle a few feet over the crop rows. This has slowed the drafting of the Ogallala. “We prob-ably use half the water we did back then,” says Kramer, referring to that first well drilled in 1964. But he and other farmers have also adopted oth-er innovations, including no-till and minimum-till farming, to better retain soil moisture. “It’s amaz-ing how much more production we can get out of that same well than we did.”

The sprinklers have also enabled mining of the Ogallala in new places. Flood irrigation requires slightly tilted fields. Gravity does the work of application. But large portions of eastern Colorado,

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EXPLANATION

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Draining the Ogallala

The Ogallala, also known as the High Plains Aquifer, spans 175,000 square miles underneath parts of eight states. The U.S. Geological Survey has conducted a water-level monitoring study since 1987, documenting the aquifer’s decline. As of 2009, the entire aquifer contained an estimated 3 billion acre-feet of water, but was losing 18 million acre-feet per year. The distance between the water table and the aquifer’s base is its saturated thickness, a measurement used to calculate aquifer volume and water storage. Typically, the greater the thickness, the more water there is to be had, although wells aren’t capable of extracting every drop.

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especially between Wray and Yuma, consist of sand and loess blown into dunes during the last 2.6 million years of ice ages and now stabilized by yucca, sagebrush and grasses. If not as fertile as what the farmers call the “heavy” soils near Burlington and Haxtun, the hills of sand have still produced bumper harvests of corn, beans and other crops.

Mining the Ogallala has allowed great expan-sion of irrigation in the northeastern plains, from around Burlington to Julesburg, most of this land drained by the Republican River. From 1960 to 1978, according to Slattery & Hendrix Engineer-ing, groundwater pumping in the Republican Basin ballooned from 40,000 acre-feet per year to more than a million acre-feet. Despite no con-tribution from mountain snowmelt and precious

little water available, the Republican Basin has 16 percent of Colorado’s irrigated acreage.

Corn is king here. In 2006, according to a study by Colorado State University ag economist James Pritchett and then-graduate assistant Jennifer Thorvaldson, corn was responsible for 80 percent of the $255 million in crop sales from Kit Carson and Yuma counties. Again, irrigation is the brawny story. Between Julesburg and Paoli in late July, I inspected a field of dryland corn. It had been an extremely wet June, but the rows were scraggly, with large gaps between stalks. The tallest tassels were head-high. A few miles away, I entered an-other cornfield. Just a few rows in, it was jungle-like. The stalks were crowded together, their leaves dark green, and the tassels rose several feet above my head. This was fossil water at work.

The Ogallala underlying the Sand Hills between Wray and Holyoke has plenty of water—for now. “We have 250 and even 280 feet of satu-rated thickness. But you don’t know how fast it will accelerate or how it will act,” says Rod Lenz, who farms north of Wray with three brothers and now another generation of “partners.” The broth-ers grew up near Greeley, but their family moved to Yuma County in 1973. “We plopped down in the Sand Hills,” says Lenz. “We were some of the first wells in this area.”

They operate on 10,000 acres, not an uncom-mon size in Ogallala country. “The cash cow for us, in most years, has been potatoes: Yukons,” Lenz says. The tubers go to Florida, Georgia, Texas and Illinois. The Lenz family also runs cattle and grows pinto and kidney beans and, of course, corn.

Lenz wasn’t immediately alarmed about the declining Ogallala. Now, he’s raptly attentive. “Ev-erybody knew that the aquifer was going down, from eight inches to a foot and a half per year. But you tended to ignore it because we had a lot of water,” he says. Then he became a direc-tor of the Sand Hills Ground Water Management District, and later the Republican River Water Conservation District, and gained a new sense of responsibility. “It became more serious and more pointed,” he says. “When you’re on the outside looking in, it’s ‘why are you guys regulating?’ When you’re on the inside looking out, you think

Rod Lenz shares a laugh with son-in-law Brian Meisner as they catch a rare break during potato harvest in September. Three generations of Lenz family members farm and ranch in the Sand Hills on more than 11,000 acres, 5,000 of them irrigated by the Ogallala. The Sand Hills, north of Wray and east of Yuma, is the region with the best outlook for longer-lasting Ogallala water in Colorado.

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Irrigated Versus Non-Irrigated Corn Production in Yuma County, Colorado’s Top Corn Producer

Irrigated Acres Harvested in 2012

Yield (bushels per acre)

Production (bushels)

203,000 205.4 41.70 million

Non-Irrigated Acres Harvested in 2012

Yield (bushels per acre)

Production (bushels)

20,000 26.2 523,000

Source: USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service Note: About 38,000 acres in Yuma were left unharvested.


‘why aren’t you guys listening?’”Colorado has 13 groundwater districts, of

which eight are partly or entirely over the Ogal-lala. In enabling formation of districts, Colorado legislators in 1965 delegated to them authority to measure water tables and monitor changes in wa-ter rights. Legislators also gave the districts broad powers to work with the Colorado Ground Water Commission to govern groundwater extraction. The districts, however, have almost no money to execute such programs. State law allows assess-ment of 15 cents for every acre-foot of ground-water withdrawn. In the case of four districts in the Republican River Basin, that yields about $100,000 for staffing and other purposes. Anoth-er district in the basin sought a property tax but was rejected by voters. For groundwater districts to become bold agents of change will require a strong push from state government and greater local consensus.

One trigger for change, a lawsuit over the Re-publican River Compact, came howling over the horizon like a tornado a half-mile wide a decade ago. Colorado, Nebraska and Kansas share the Republican River, and after great floods killed 100 people in 1935, the three states sought help from the federal government. In time, the federal gov-ernment bankrolled seven flood-control dams, one of them in Colorado: Bonny Reservoir on the South Fork of the Republican, 30 miles north of Burlington. But first, the feds required an inter-state compact governing apportionment of the Republican’s waters. When the compact was struck in 1942, Colorado had 11 percent of the lands in irrigation within the Republican Basin.

But in 1998 Kansas sued, alleging Nebraska was using more than its compact share. Colo-rado was soon entangled. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2002 approved a settlement that stipu-lated Colorado deliver more water to Nebraska.

Tim Paulter farms near Stratton, on the Ogallala’s brittle edge. The aquifer once allowed his family to take big risks, but he and his brother returned to dryland farming in 2006 after well production slowed.

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Then in 2004 the Colorado Legislature created the Republican River Water Conservation District, composed of local water users. The district got taxing authority but a daunting challenge: Figure this out, or we’ll start shutting down your high-capacity wells, warned the Colorado State Engi-neer’s Office in 2006. The compact is federal law, and Colorado must comply.

The Republican River district has crafted a multi-pronged response. It levied a fee of $5 per acre, later increased to $14.50 per acre, on all irrigated lands in the seven counties within the district. This money helps pay for a partial fix: In 2009, the district spent $40 million to purchase 62 groundwater rights in the still water-rich Sand Hills north of Laird, a hamlet along the Republi-can’s north fork at the Nebraska border, and with the purchase retired 9,000 acres of irrigated land. Then, in 2012, it built an $18 million pipeline to deliver this groundwater to the river. The pipeline currently connects eight irrigation wells, each ca-pable of pumping up to 2,000 gallons per minute. They run January through March and, if neces-sary, November and December. Deb Daniel, gen-eral manager of the Republican district, describes it as a bittersweet solution. Nobody is happy to see the Ogallala water pumped to feed the river at the state line.

The Republican’s troubles are even more graphically revealed at Bonny Dam. Constructed from 1948 to 1951, the reservoir became an oa-sis for boating and fishing. By the 1970s, though, water levels began dropping. The primary cause was increased pumping of the Ogallala, which tapped water that would have seeped into the river. Finally, in what some called a mercy killing, Colorado State Engineer Dick Wolfe in 2011 or-dered the reservoir to be unplugged. The small amount of water also helped Colorado with com-pact compliance in that the reservoir, being broad

and shallow, was responsible for significant evaporation loss. Today, you can drive to the boat docks and see an expanse of green, but no water. There are signs describing the different types of fish, but no water for them. Yucca sprouts from the parking lot. The oasis lasted roughly 60 years.

Both the pipeline and the draining of Bonny Reservoir represent immediate solutions to a le-gal problem but only partially address the more fundamental problem of sustainability. The aqui-fer continues to decline. The rate varies by lo-cation, but at some point the wells won’t make sense to pump. Like a straw at the end of a root-beer float, there will be mostly air.

In southeastern Colorado, the mining of the Ogallala continues unabated. No conserva-tion measures have been adopted. Indeed, new wells can still be drilled, accelerating the deple-tion. Unlike the Republican River Compact, there has been no trigger for change. “We all know something needs to be done, but nobody wants to be the bad guy,” said one farmer who did not want to be identified.

Burke Griggs, who grew up near Denver but is now assistant state attorney general in Kansas, sees the Ogallala situation similar to other water woes in the West: “The engineering is ahead of public policy.” Griggs, who recently spent a year re-searching groundwater law while serving as a con-sulting professor at Stanford University’s Water in the West program, says, “We haven’t really thought through the consequences of tapping the Ogallala or [California’s] Central Valley groundwater.”

Colorado is thinking—and, in at least small ways, taking action. One possible future is found at the Pautler family farm near Stratton. It’s on the edge of the shrinking Ogallala. The first well here was drilled in 1961 when Tim Pautler was seven years old and, like the Kramer farm about ten

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miles away, maintaining the cattle herd was the original motivation. Operations expanded signifi-cantly over the decades. “The Ogallala gave us the ability to be a big risk taker,” explained Paut-ler one July afternoon at his office. Outside it was 102 degrees, and the wind was blowing. “This is the most severe test the corn has had this year,” he observed.

Dryland farms relying on the whims of Mother Nature take longer to rebound. Nonetheless, Paut-ler and his brother Gary have converted their own 3,000 acres back to dryland. They continue to ir-rigate some of the additional acres they rent. “For some of us, we have gone full circle,” he said. “We had three irrigation wells at one time, and we’re back to none.” Forcing the decision was a retreat of well production. One well that produced 1,100 gallons a minute in 1987 had slowed to 400 gal-lons by the time it was retired in 2006.

The Pautler brothers and others retiring land from irrigation benefit from financial incentives. The Republican River Water Conservation District has committed to spending $67.9 million through 2028 to permanently retire 49,000 acres of irri-gated land. Federal funds administered through three separate programs of the U.S. Department of Agriculture have assisted with the retirement of 34,600 acres so far, with federal investment in the district reaching $42.3 million.

The Conservation Reserve Enhancement Pro-gram brings the largest amount of federal funds to the Republican River Basin. This program, sponsored by the Republican River district, pays the Pautlers $150 for every acre that goes unir-rigated, but to qualify, the land must be put into grass for at least 15 years and the water right retired permanently. It can, after 15 years, be re-stored to dryland production.

As a director of the Republican River district, Pautler reviews the state’s water production

records from some of the 4,000 wells in the Republican Basin and sees a steady decline in most cases. “There is still irrigation in this community, but in another 20 years,” he says and shakes his head, “it ain’t gonna be here.”

Many share his opinion. Engineers predict continued pumping at today’s rates will exhaust reserves within 15 to 20 years in many areas. I asked one Holyoke resident how he expected this to impact his town. “We’ll lose half the pop-ulation,” he answered.

The broad strategy of Pautler and other direc-tors of the Republican district is to gently wean the area of its massive doses of fossil water in order to lengthen the life of the Ogallala. “How do we conserve the resource we have left in a way that doesn't kill the economy?” explained Pautler. But later he hinted at just how difficult this will be: “We’re trying to close the gate now, but the cattle and horses have been gone for years.”

Can the cattle and horses be herded back into the corral in order to ensure a sustained, longer-term depletion of the Ogallala in Colorado? Dan-iel, at the Republican district office in Wray, is hopeful. “We will have so much more conserva-tion in place five years from now,” she says. “Not only is land being taken out of production, but a whole host of water-saving measures are being used. Many are based in new technology, such as soil mapping and measuring precisely how much moisture crops need. Already, many farm-ers have learned that they can dial back the water and still get successful crops.”

But embracing water reduction is easier when it’s raining a lot than when it’s dry and windy. “We are used to farming as many acres as we can and watering as much as we can,” observes Greg Larsen, a 41-year-old farmer from Haxtun. “It will be hard to back off. We’re so scared about drying things up…To make sure we cover ourselves, we

At the Republican River Water Conservation District, Deb Daniel leads efforts to sustain the Ogallala for future generations and also ensure more water makes it downriver to Kansas.

Like corn, grain sorghum, also called milo, is used to feed livestock and for producing ethanol. But it uses one-third less water than corn and can be

planted in rotation with other crops to conserve water. Source: Kansas State University

have a tendency to overwater.”With other family members, Larsen farms

11,000 acres, 1,300 of them irrigated. He figures the water underlying his land will last longer than that around Burlington and Stratton, but not as long as in the Sand Hills, where in some places the water may last a century at current rates of extraction. “We all have to work on this together or none of us will get to pump,” he says.

Carrots or sticks? Colorado so far has dan-gled carrots. They’re crucial because, as Larsen says, “Guys won’t do it out of the kindness of the hearts.” But he probably speaks for most in the Republican River Basin in resisting mandates.

Instead, local leaders are pushing education. An organization called the Water Preservation Partnership was recently forged between the Republican River district and eight groundwater management districts. It will seek to educate area farmers while laying out a variety of policy options that could prolong the life of the Ogallala. A first step will be ensuring every well permit holder is only pumping within the limits of his or her per-mit, a role the groundwater management districts have committed to tackle while also seeking state assistance with enforcement. Beyond that, the Republican district has no direct authority to order reductions. Groundwater management districts do, but until a goal for actual reduction is set, along with a timeline for achieving it, little progress can be made.


Kansas has pioneered one promising model. A 2012 state law gave groundwater manage-ment districts there authority to adopt specific conservation plans to meet local goals. In the first such local enhanced management area, or LEMA, farmers in Sheridan County have adopt-ed the goal of reducing pumping by 20 percent during the next five years. Each of 185 irrigation wells can pump a maximum 55 inches over the five years, using a little more or less each year. In 2013, the first year, irrigators used an aver-age 10.23 inches as some farmers switched to milo, soybeans and other less water-intensive crops, says Katherine Wilkins-Wells, manager of Northwest Kansas Groundwater Management District 4. The law also gives the Kansas Divi-sion of Water Resources a big stick: fines of up to $1,000 for each day of excess pumping and a suspended water right. A new federal crop in-surance program is being piloted as part of the program to cover crops grown without full irriga-tion, which normally cannot be insured. Farm-ers could not afford the risk of reduced pumping without this type of coverage. Griggs believes the LEMA strikes a balance. “The LEMA can be a wonderful tool if it combines local decision-making regarding water conservation with cen-tral state power to ensure that conservation oc-curs,” he says.

Some wonder whether the states should band together, even cede authority to a regional, quasi-

federal district. After all, the Ogallala transcends political boundaries, and the federal government likely needs to be part of the solution. It has clear-ly provided incentives for prodigious pumping. Griggs and others point to federal crop insurance provided to farmers that is based on rolling ten-year averages of bushels-per-acre, encouraging maximum production. “It sort of rewards high-risk behavior,” notes Griggs.

That same argument is made by Michael Bow-man, whose great-grandfather homesteaded south of Paoli in the late 1880s. At one point, his family’s partnership had 100 pivots in the Wray area. Fed-eral crop insurance has improved profits and, in the process, boosted land prices. With corn reaching $8 a bushel in recent years, irrigated land now sells for as much as $10,000 an acre, compared to $500 for grass. It is, says Bowman, an artificial economy.

But yet another solution may be an even more dramatic shift in farming. Agriculture today consists of annual plants in monoculture and brought to har-vest with the aid of massive amounts of what farm-ers call “inputs,” including chemicals, fertilizer and, of course, water. Decades ago, Kansas farmer and plant geneticist Wes Jackson concluded that agri-cultural systems that most closely approximate na-ture would be most sustainable. With that purpose, he founded The Land Institute at Salina and hopes to someday breed perennials, including wheat, that can produce at least three-quarters of current yields but without the massive inputs.

Josh Svaty, a former director of the Kansas De-partment of Agriculture now affiliated with The Land Institute, also points to a question of ethics, and not just for those in Colorado. “Why do we deserve to extract that centuries-old aquifer any faster than our ancestors?” he asks. Without changes, the vast Ogallala resource of Colorado and several other states will be exhausted within the lifetimes of just three generations.

And if the Ogallala vanishes, so will much else in eastern Colorado. One clammy evening in July, I drove from Wray to Holyoke, pausing along a dusty county road to study a center-pivot sprinkler that was fizzling ancient water over a field of beans on what was undoubtedly pastureland a few decades ago. It was quiet as the sun dropped below the horizon. Then I thought about the two towns, both with hospitals, new motels, and the bustle of 2,300 residents each. This vitality is a direct result of these Ogallala sprinklers. How quiet will they become when the wells go dry? n

Visit the Republican River Water Conservation District website to find meeting calendars, updates, and YouTube links to presentations on the Water Preservation Partnership,

Kansas’ LEMA program, the Republican River Compact compliance pipeline, and more at republicanriver.com.

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Late last year, 67-year-old Arkansas Valley farmer Bill Grasmick and his partners

at GP Irrigated Farms inked a deal with Syracuse Dairy of Kansas to grow wheat,

barley, triticale, corn and oats as feed for the company’s cows on 8,000 acres of

Colorado prairie near the Kansas state line. For the past 40-odd growing seasons,

Grasmick had flooded his farm fields west of Holly with water that began as snow-

melt high in the Rocky Mountains and flowed down the Arkansas River. The dairy

owners, who had become overly reliant on farms irrigated with groundwater from

the vast but rapidly declining Ogallala Aquifer, figured that access to Grasmick’s

renewable water source would help shore up the future of their feed supply.

For Grasmick and his partners, the deal with Syracuse presented an opportunity to finance a major efficiency improvement they’d long been contemplating: Rather than continuing to flood irrigate their crops and letting so much excess water flow back to the river, the group wanted to install 72 center-pivot sprinklers across their network of southeastern Colorado farms. Com-pared with flood irrigation, center pivots require far smaller water applications and also minimize runoff. The owners of Syracuse, heartened by the idea that their feed crops could get water even in the driest years, agreed to help pay for the ef-ficiency upgrade.

In most regions of Colorado, Grasmick’s next step would have been to simply buy and install his sprinkler system. Yet in the Arkansas River Basin, farmers reliant on surface water who improve their efficiency—either by swapping out irrigation sys-tems, lining canals, or piping ditches—have been required since 2011 to ensure that they return the same amount of water to the river, at roughly the same time and place, as they did with their old and inefficient irrigation techniques.

The surface water rules, along with earlier reg-ulations enacted for well pumping in 1996, were conceived after Kansas sued Colorado in 1985 alleging violation of the Arkansas River Com-pact. When the compact was signed in 1949, it essentially froze river water consumption in the basin, preventing Colorado farmers from under-taking any development that reduced the river’s flow at the Kansas state line to below 1949 lev-els. By the time negotiators settled the Kansas lawsuit in the mid-2000s, Colorado recognized that irrigation efficiency improvements made by Colorado farmers were increasing the fraction of diverted water that was absorbed by crops while decreasing the fraction that flowed back to the

The Efficiency DilemmaPlains farmers reap the benefits—and pay the price—of irrigation upgrades

By Nelson Harvey

After a multi-million-dollar efficiency upgrade, Bill Grasmick now irrigates alfalfa on his farm near Lamar with sprinklers.

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river. So the State Engineer’s Office, also known as the Division of Water Resources, enacted rules designed to ensure those improvements wouldn’t lead to another compact violation. The rules re-quire farmers to submit detailed plans showing how they’ll purchase replacement water to offset the efficiency improvements they make. By the time Grasmick finished installing his center-pivot sprinklers in summer 2013, he’d submitted two such plans to the State Engineer and had one plan pending in water court.

Despite the steep cost of his efficiency up-grade—the pivots run between $80,000 and $100,000 apiece—and the protracted paperwork push required to get it done, Grasmick doesn’t doubt the value of his project. Compared to flood irrigation, which typically involves over-watering plants near the top of a field where water is re-leased and leaving plants at the bottom of the field too dry, sprinkler irrigation permits a more precise and uniform application of water that can

boost crop yields by giving plants exactly what they need at the optimal time of day. “We think we can actually increase our production with cen-ter pivots,” Grasmick explains. “If you’re more timely and you’re more accurate, you’re going to get better yields.”

Grasmick’s complicated quest to use his wa-ter wisely illustrates that even as farmers work to improve the water efficiency of their farms, they must constantly weigh the financial and regula-tory cost of irrigation improvements against the labor savings, productivity gains and water sav-ings those improvements provide. Still, a growing number of farmers on Colorado’s Eastern Plains are realizing that pursuing efficiency is worth the trouble. In 1999, less than 2 percent of irrigated land along the mainstem of the Arkansas River between Pueblo and Kansas was under sprinkler irrigation, according to the Colorado Division of Water Resources. By April 2014, the number was 11 percent and rising.

The Case for EfficiencyThe idea that Arkansas Valley farmers who improve their irrigation efficiency will wind up consuming more water and returning less to the river is based on a simple truth about the Arkansas Basin. Like many other river basins in eastern Colorado, the Arkansas is water-short, meaning that farmers are sometimes unable to exercise all of their water rights or fully irrigate their crops with the available water supply. In 2011, for instance, a year the Colorado Divi-sion of Water Resources classified as average for precipitation in the Arkansas Basin, farmers there irrigated more than 255,000 acres. Yet in 2013, a dry year, that number dropped to just under 154,000.

“Many ditch companies have available land that can be irrigated in good years and that has to be fallowed in dry years,” says Steve Witte, Division 2 engineer for the state. By adopting more efficient irrigation practices, Witte says,

Financing Efficiency » Under the Environmental Quality

Incentives Program (EQIP), the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture provides cost-sharing for efficiency upgrades like sprinklers and drip systems that improve water quality by reducing erosion or preventing the leaching of chemicals from the soil into drinking water. EQIP grants typically cover 50 to 75 percent of the cost of an irrigation upgrade, but the program requires patience: Brad Wind, deputy manager of operations for Northern Water, used an EQIP grant to install 40 acres of underground drip irrigation on his farm near Brush and estimates that between applying for funding, winning the grant, and hiring a government-approved contractor to design his system, the decision to use EQIP added

about two years to his project. More at www.nrcs.usda.gov/getstarted.

» The Conservation Stewardship Program, also operated by the NRCS, provides funding to help farmers maintain existing efficient irrigation systems or install new irrigation improvements. The funding is distributed over the course of a five-year contract, and farmers who adopt a water-conserving crop rotation system are eligible to receive additional payments. More at www.nrcs.usda.gov/getstarted.

» The Water Quality Control Division of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment offers low- to no-interest loans for projects that reduce water pollution or improve water quality. Some irrigation

efficiency improvements, such as piping ditches to reduce mineral leaching, may be eligible. More at www.colorado.gov/cdphe/wqcd/grantsandloans.

» Water Supply Reserve Account grants offered by the Colorado Water Conservation Board can be used to fund irrigation efficiency upgrades, but before applying, candidates must win approval of their proposal from their river basin roundtable group. Public or private entities and nonprofits may be required to come up with a 25 percent match or supply equivalent in-kind services in-lieu of matching funds. More at cwcb.state.co.us/LoansGrants/water-supply-reserve-account-grants/Pages/main.aspx.

Sprinkler irrigation near Longmont

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Just over 1,400 acre-feet of water was released into the Arkansas River in 2013 through Colorado irrigators’ arrangements to legally account for improved water efficiencies. That number is growing every year, but still pales in comparison with augmentation water supplied to offset tributary groundwater pumping on the Arkansas, which totaled nearly 40,000 acre-feet in 2013,

just shy of the 42,800 acre-foot average over the past seven years. Source: Colorado Division of Water Resources


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farmers with the right to irrigate more land can do so using the same net amount of water as before. But the result is an increase in overall crop consumption of the water applied—and a decrease in return flows.

As Colorado water planners contemplate a projected doubling of the state’s population by mid-century, many have wondered whether agricultural efficiency could free up water for use by cities and industries without doing the same damage that “buying and drying” farms and transferring their water to urban areas has done in recent decades. The answer is likely no. Many farmers and administrators say effi-ciency will benefit water-short farms and junior irrigators long before it makes water available for transfer to urban areas. Still, the ability to make ag water go farther will advance the state’s quest to meet competing water needs into the future.

“In water-short areas, even if farms become more efficient, I believe that the same amount of water will be diverted, just because farmers have a place to put it and they have a use for it themselves,” says Witte. “In the Arkansas Basin, one of the options is for farmers who become more efficient to divert less water, but that’s not the option that anyone has taken ad-vantage of so far.”

Instead, farmers are reaping the benefits of efficiency improvements themselves, but only after steep investments, including the cost of abiding by state rules. When farmers in the Ar-kansas Basin make efficiency improvements, they must pay groups like the Lower Arkansas Water Management Association (LAWMA) to purchase water and return it to the river as com-pensation for the decline in return flows from their newly efficient fields. The cost of buying or leasing that water depends on a range of fac-tors—annual snowpack and precipitation affect supply, while demand fluctuates as commodity prices change and it becomes more or less at-tractive for farmers to plant crops.

In 2014, a LAWMA share, which provides

about one acre-foot of replacement water in an average year, cost at least $2,200 to own in perpetuity, and could be leased for an an-nual fee of $135. Those costs add up. Just leasing enough replacement water to run a single center-pivot sprinkler covering 120 acres would have cost $27,000 this year, while buying enough to run that sprinkler in perpetuity would have required a $440,000 investment.

On top of these compliance costs, farmers can expect to spend up to $100,000 on a cen-ter-pivot sprinkler that irrigates about 120 acres of ground. That’s no small sum in a business whose profit margins are notoriously thin, but farmers are finding such investments have ben-efits beyond water savings. Not only can they often put more land into production, but they are also seeing increases in the overall produc-tivity of their fields.

“I have seen anywhere from a 5 to 10 per-cent increase in yields for farmers who go from flood to sprinkler,” says Joel Schneekloth, a regional water resource specialist for Colo-rado State University, noting that sprinklers in-crease yields both by reducing water stress to crops during critical times like pollination and by leaching fewer nutrients from the soil than flood irrigation does. They also apply less wa-ter—Schneekloth says that in eastern Colorado it would take just over one acre-foot of water to grow an acre of corn using sprinklers in an av-erage precipitation year, compared to roughly two acre-feet with flood irrigation.

Increased yields and lower water use are ma-jor benefits, but they’re dwarfed by the labor savings that irrigation efficiency improvements can provide. In parts of the South Platte River Basin, which stretches from the Continental Di-vide to central Logan and Washington counties in eastern Colorado, more than two-thirds of the agricultural acreage is now under sprinkler irrigation, permitting farmers to cultivate more land with fewer employees and less work than in the past.

“If you’re farming around here, we are kind of

in hilly country, so you have to put a lot of work into flood irrigation,” says Jim Yahn, manager of the North Sterling Irrigation District in north-eastern Colorado, where 80 percent of irrigated land is now fed by sprinklers. “The farmers farm so much more land now to make a living than they used to, so they were spread real thin with flood irrigation.”

As of 2010, 44 percent of the irrigated land in the South Platte Basin was sprinkler-fed, up from 32 percent in 2001. Federal grant money earmarked for irrigation efficiency improve-ments played a major role in that increase, but the transition was also eased by the fact that the South Platte River Compact of 1923—un-like the Arkansas River Compact—hasn’t led to rules requiring farmers to maintain their his-torical return flows after installing efficiency improvements. The compact mandates that South Platte River water users in Water District 64, downstream of the Washington County line, manage their water use to keep flows at the Ne-braska state line at or above 120 cubic feet per second between April 1 and Oct. 15. As long as Colorado meets that basic flow obligation, farmers along the South Platte can be as ef-ficient as they like.

Groundwater users in the South Platte are further motivated to increase efficiency by rising costs. State law passed in 1969 and strengthened in 2003 requires that well own-ers develop augmentation plans to replace ev-ery gallon of groundwater they consume out of turn. The measure is intended to keep out-of-priority well depletions from harming the own-ers of senior surface water rights in the South Platte Basin, where, as in the Arkansas Basin, the alluvial aquifer is directly tied to the river and groundwater depletions can affect river flows. Yet augmentation water is expensive to purchase. In dry years, an acre-foot can cost upward of $150 in the Sterling and Ft. Morgan areas and much more as you move upstream, according to Joe Frank, general manager of the Lower South Platte Water Conservancy

District. Thirsty municipalities seeking water for their own urban uses compete in the same water market, which drives prices up further. To limit their expenses, savvy groundwater users adopt more efficient irrigation systems, and at the same time save on pumping costs.

Surface water irrigators in the South Platte are also eager to stretch their water resources through efficiency. The basin is heavily depen-dent on return flows: Water users there divert 4 million acre-feet of water per year and send about 400,000 to Nebraska, despite the fact that only 1.8 million acre-feet of water enters the basin through snowmelt or transbasin di-versions from west of the Continental Divide. “In the South Platte, water gets used six or seven times before it leaves,” says Frank. “The system as a whole is efficient, even though when you look at an individual farm it doesn’t seem that way.”

Ironically, some worry that the South Platte’s dependency on return flows could someday prompt regulators there to follow the Arkansas Basin down a path of strict rules for irrigation efficiency improvements. If downstream us-ers in the South Platte begin to complain about changes in the timing and amount of return flows brought on by the efficiency improvements of upstream irrigators, rules mandating the main-tenance of historical return flows could follow.

“If return flows got low enough, water users in the lower part of the basin could try to do some-thing about the efficiency improvements higher up in the basin,” says David Nettles, Colorado’s Division 1 engineer. “I’m not sure how success-

ful they would be with a legal challenge, but they could work through the State Engineer or the legislature to try to get some rules in place.”

Still, as Nettles points out, if downstream users see their return flows changing because their neighbors upstream are becoming more efficient, their best line of defense may simply be to hop on the efficiency train themselves.

Technology RevolutionThere is one region of Colorado’s Eastern Plains where concerns about harming downstream users through efficiency improvements are eclipsed by more existential worries about the future of irrigated agriculture itself, and where increased efficiency is considered essential for the continued viability of farming. In the Repub-lican River Basin, which runs from north central Colorado to the Kansas state line, irrigators rely almost entirely on groundwater from the imper-iled Ogallala Aquifer to water their crops.

The desire to sustain the Ogallala, combined with the fact that excessive groundwater pumping has caused Colorado to fall short of its Republican River Compact obligations during nine of the last ten years, strongly encourages irrigation efficiency in the basin. Republican River Basin irrigation was already largely dominated by center-pivot sprinklers by the late 1970s, and today all but 1 or 2 percent of land is fed by sprinklers or drip systems. Conservation tillage, which involves leaving much of last year’s crop residue on the ground to preserve soil moisture, is widespread, and many farmers now use soil mapping techniques powered by Global Positioning Systems (GPS) technology that

allow them to customize fertilizer, seed and water application rates across the farm.

“Recently, we’ve begun using some of this higher technology,” says Dennis Coryell, 62, who grows feed corn and wheat on 3,500 acres near Burlington and irrigates 1,500 of those. “We’re using moisture probes in the field along with remote telemetry for our wells, which en-ables us to monitor our soil moisture and then vary our rate of [water] application.”

Even in a place where farmers have so whole-heartedly embraced efficiency as their ticket to an irrigated future, some obstacles persist. New irrigation systems remain expensive, de-spite federal cost-sharing programs. Center pivots irrigate in a circular pattern, so they can’t be used on some small or oddly shaped pieces of land. Adopting new irrigation systems can require changes in farming practices, such as altering tilling patterns to avoid damaging bur-ied drip irrigation lines. And it can be difficult for farmers to keep pace with the rapid evolution of agricultural technology and to choose where to spend their limited funds. On this front, younger farmers have been helpful. In 2004, Coryell’s son returned to the family farm after graduat-ing from Colorado State University, and Coryell says he’s been indispensable in helping navi-gate the flood of new efficiency technologies that hit the market every year.

“I think if there’s a hope for having a more sustainable irrigated agriculture in the Repub-lican Basin,” Coryell says, “it would be our younger generation, who are willing to step up and be innovative.” n


Staff from the Natural Resources Conservation Service tour a Kersey farm where reduced tillage is being used to control erosion and improve soil health as part of the Environmental Quality Incentives Program.

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In Pursuit of Clean WaterBy Caitlin Coleman

If downstream users see their return flows changing because their neighbors upstream are becoming more efficient, their best line of defense may be to hop on the efficiency train themselves.

In Pursuit of Clean WaterBy Caitlin Coleman

Claude Schultz, superintendent of the May Valley Water Association, says the fact that the water makes people queasy isn’t such a problem in and of itself. The association typically hears complaints only when new residents, habituated to purer water, move to the area. They’ll fall sick for a couple of weeks, then turn to bottled water. “In this day and age, people buy bottled water because they don’t like the taste of the water anyway,” Schultz says.

His nonchalance ends when it comes to a more serious contaminant in the water: radium. “It’s a nightmare,” says Schultz, “and we can’t afford to remove it at this point.”

Radium levels in May Valley’s drinking water surpass state and federal al-lowable limits. Radionuclides are the major water quality challenge across the plains, says Ron Falco, manager of the Safe Drinking Water Program under the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE). They include radium and uranium, as well as alpha and beta emitters like plutonium, tritium and thorium—all of which can cause cancer and kidney damage. In Colorado’s affected areas, these substances also happen to be naturally oc-curring in the soils; they’re transported by water as it percolates through the earth. “There are systems that use groundwater all over the state,” Falco says. “But it’s a bad-luck coincidence that more of those [radionuclide] problems are found within the plains.”

May Valley is one of 33 drinking water systems in Colorado currently work-ing with CDPHE to resolve radionuclide problems in order to provide water that

regulators deem healthy. All 33 communities rely on groundwater from deep or alluvial aquifers; 21 are located on Colorado’s Eastern Plains, and 15, including May Valley, are east of Pueblo. That’s not to say that all plains communities face water quality challenges; many towns reliant on the Ogallala Aquifer drink high quality palatable water.

But for affected eastern Colorado towns, water quality issues don’t end at radionuclides. Burlington in April 2014 started warning pregnant and nursing women and infants under six months old not to drink the water be-cause of high nitrate levels. Other plains communities have also surpassed limits for nitrates, trihalomethanes and selenium, among other contami-nants, not to mention that the water doesn’t always taste great.

In many cases, the water itself hasn’t changed—and flavor is something most residents have learned to cope with—but regulations and monitoring requirements have become increasingly stringent, throwing water providers out of compliance and into difficult financial situations. For May Valley, the equipment required to reach compliance would have cost $3.8 million, says Schultz. The costs were too high to divide among his customers, and as a public entity, May Valley didn’t qualify for government loans.

In the effort to remedy violations and the public health risks they pose, some communities are drilling new wells in search of purer water, while others are installing expensive treatment facilities. Others find those system upgrades so prohibitively costly that system-wide improvements can’t be made and are holding out for a new federal project that will provide better

May Valley’s water isn’t good. It’s more than just the flavor that’s disagreeable, though that’s part of it. Due to high levels of total dissolved solids, the water doesn’t always settle well with people. The problem isn’t unique to customers of the May Valley Water Association, a drinking water provider that conveys water to 589 taps through more than 200 miles of small pipeline. Many other communities in Colorado’s Eastern Plains rely on municipal water that will make a newcomer’s stomach churn.

From Main Street in Wiley, Claude Schulte is combatting radium in the water supply with a reverse osmosis filling station, seen in the brick structure to the right.

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source water. Even as communities struggle to comply with regulations, some remain wary that new drinking water and even surface water quality rules could soon come online and demand additional costly system changes.

Shifting StandardsThe Safe Drinking Water Act was established in 1974. Two years later standards for selenium, ni-trates and radionuclides were set, as were others. New standards are established by the U.S. Envi-ronmental Protection Agency through a process that includes periods of study and public com-ment, plus a cost-benefit analysis meant to weigh the costs of treatment against the health risks of leaving a contaminant in the water. Once those standards are set, they’re reviewed every six years. At the state level, CDPHE oversees Colorado’s clean water programs, collecting water quality data and working with communities to help them meet state standards, which are adopted from the EPA requirements at levels that either meet or exceed the federal recommendations.

In 1991, selenium and nitrate regulations were updated; neither has been changed since. Then in 2000, the EPA reviewed its radionuclide rule and, based on new information about its health effects, added a standard for uranium, which wasn’t previ-ously regulated.

In the South Platte Basin city of Sterling, radio-nuclide levels in the early 2000s were even worse than in May Valley. Sterling, home to about 15,000 people, was the largest municipality in Colorado and one of the largest in the nation with radionu-clide and trihalomethane problems. Trihalometh-anes are formed when disinfection byproducts bond to other contaminants in the water, creating a carcinogen.

Despite multiple violations, and although the new radionuclide standards passed in 2000, Sterling didn’t take action and begin treating its groundwa-ter until 2008, when CDPHE required it. “We knew that we had issues before then, but when the en-forcement order came, we obviously had to start the process of doing something,” says Jeff Reeves, the city’s utilities superintendent.

With help from CDPHE, Sterling evaluated various treatment options and eventually settled on a reverse osmosis plant, which would im-prove the taste and hardness of the water and also bring the city into compliance. Since the plant began operating in October 2013, Ster-ling’s water, which before contained uranium levels between 31 and 32 micrograms per liter, is down to around 0.9 micrograms per liter—the EPA and state standard is set at 30. People are beginning to trust and drink the water again, says Reeves. The city is still completing final piping, but Reeves expects the plant to cost about $30 million when all is said and done—a cost that’s being covered through a 50 percent water rate increase. “It’s been a big project,” he

Eastern Plains communities are heavily reliant on groundwater for both irrigation and human consumption. A few contaminants—some naturally occurring, some human-caused—have proven most problematic in drinking water.

Acute, immediate symptoms:

Nitrates Can be naturally occurring but often traced to runoff from fertilizer and leaking septic tanks. Most harmful to pregnant women and infants under six months old, with potentially fatal symptoms that include shortness of breath and blue baby syndrome.**

Total Coliforms Some are naturally occurring and harmless, but can signal the presence of harmful bacteria like fecal coliform and E. Coli that stem from from sewage and animal waste. These bacteria can cause diarrhea, cramps, nausea, jaundice, headaches and fatigue if ingested. Treated by disinfection, almost exclusively using chlorine.

Long-term exposure effects:

Radionuclides (radium and uranium) Radioactive compounds that naturally occur in soils and mineral deposits. Become unstable over time and may increase the risk of cancer if ingested. Uranium is also toxic to urinary tract and kidneys.**

Arsenic Found in natural deposits as well as runoff from glass and electronics production waste. Can cause skin damage, circulatory problems and an increased risk of cancer. **

Fluoride Water additive that also erodes from natural deposits. Can cause bone disease or mottled teeth in children.**

Selenium Naturally occurring and in discharge from petroleum refineries. Can cause hair or fingernail loss and circulatory problems.**

** According to the Colorado Division of Water Quality, the most practical, cost-effective options for small water providers to treat these inorganic compounds are through reverse osmosis or ion exchange. Both require disposal of a toxic, and possibly radioactive, brine or solution resulting from treatment. A third option is to dilute contaminated water using a cleaner water source if available.

Trihalomethanes (TTHM) and Triholoacetic acids Carcinogenic byproducts formed when chlorine reacts with organic materials, which are prevalent in shallow groundwater from sandy soils. Options include advanced treatment techniques to remove organics prior to disinfection, careful reduction in chlorine used while still killing illness-causing bacteria, or frequent flushing of the system to prevent aging water from progressing toward peak byproduct formation.

Treating Groundwater

2 8 y o u r w a t e r c o l o r a d o . o r g

Colorado monitors and regulates for 87 contaminants under the Safe

Drinking Water Act. In 2013, 85 of Colorado’s 2,008 public water systems, or 4 percent, exceeded the standard for one or

more contaminant. On the flip side, that means 96 percent met all standards. Source: Colorado Department of Public

Health and Environment

says. “Probably the biggest project Sterling has ever had to do.”

Reverse osmosis works by forcing water through a membrane. Purified water emerges on the opposite side, while contaminants are unable to pass through. Those trapped contaminants form a byproduct that must be safely disposed of. “It’s still water,” Reeves says, “But it’s a brine—it’s concentrated.” Sterling drilled two 7,000-foot-deep injection wells at a cost of more than a mil-lion dollars each to dispose of this concentrate. The city will run annual tests, periodically clean the wells, and pay the high electrical bills associ-ated with running 2,000-psi pumps for deep well injection. Not to mention the water they have to send back underground with the concentrate: Sterling now sees about a 15 percent loss of wa-ter, water that is injected “down-hole,” as Reeves says, and can’t be used for anything else. To ac-count for this loss, he expects the city will drill a couple more municipal wells in coming years to satisfy demand.

More than 200 miles to the south, La Junta and Las Animas also operate reverse osmosis systems. Las Animas’ came online in the late 1990s to meet updated selenium drinking water standards and La Junta’s was built in 2005 to manage the hard-ness and taste of water and to comply with chloride standards. For these Arkansas Valley communities with established systems, today’s concerns have less to do with funding new infrastructure, but cen-ter around safely disposing the concentrate pro-duced during treatment.

Unlike Sterling, both of these communities have been releasing their reverse osmosis concentrate into the river mixed with treated wastewater. Re-leases have offset some of the required replace-ments the towns must make for the water they pump from alluvial aquifers, which, under Colo-rado water law, must be replaced due to proven connections with the surface water supply. But the discharges are subject to regulation under the Clean Water Act, and according to CDPHE, the lower Arkansas River and many of its tributaries are already considered impaired for selenium. Se-lenium, another element that is naturally occurring in western soils, becomes damaging to both hu-man and aquatic life at high levels.

Yet even those Clean Water Act standards are in flux, and the potential for new selenium standards worry these water providers. Early in 2014, the EPA released new draft selenium criteria, and the comment period for those changes ended in July. Although the new criteria haven’t been finalized, if they pass and are ac-cepted in Colorado, they’ll push allowable limits for selenium in surface water even lower and will likely throw the La Junta and Las Animas discharges out of compliance. The discharged brine is simply too thick with selenium and other contaminants. Deep well injection could be an op-tion for disposal, albeit an expensive one, but it wouldn’t help these water providers return flows to the Arkansas River.

“We’re very concerned,” says Ken Wagner, di-rector of Las Animas Public Works. “It’s going to affect [communities] from Pueblo to the state line.” Wagner’s concern is echoed by Joe Kelley, direc-tor of water and wastewater treatment for La Junta, where they’re looking at alternative disposal meth-ods as well as water conservation to reduce the quantity of reverse osmosis concentrate.

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Muddling ThroughAlthough most of the contaminants Eastern Plains communities are dealing with are found naturally in soils, human-introduced contaminants like the nitrates found in fertilizers also find their way into groundwater. Irrigation in these farming communi-ties aggravates the issue when excess water drains down, drawing surface and sub-surface contami-nants through soils and aquifers and into rivers.

Dr. Tim Gates, a civil and environmental engi-neering professor at Colorado State University specializing in hydraulic systems, says plants’ roots also serve to concentrate any naturally oc-curring or applied minerals or fertilizers found in irrigation water during evapo-transpiration. “What the crops are doing, they’re creating this huge distillation factory out on the ground,” Gates says. “They’re pulling this water out, they’re vaporizing it, but what they leave behind in the soil is a more concentrated form of that water.” That concentra-tion of contaminants is further pulled through the ground the next time the field is irrigated or rained on. Addressing the root of aggravated water qual-ity isn’t an issue municipalities can solve on their own, but will require a suite of tools including more efficient irrigation, improved management of fertilizers, and more. So towns continue treat-ing their water.

Some Eastern Plains water providers have found creative solutions to solve their compli-ance issues like drilling a new well to find better water or mixing water from different wells, us-ing larger quantities from those wells with higher quality water. Burlington is trying to avoid using its nitrate-laden wells altogether—though when demand is high that’s not possible—while it looks to purchase water rights from additional clean wells and considers making more major changes to the city’s infrastructure. Other communities have piped their systems together, and one, Kit Carson, is working with CDPHE to form a water district to gain eligibility for additional grant fund-ing and bring the cost of treatment within reach.

After it tried drilling additional wells only to find that those, too, were contaminated, the May Valley Water Association found a temporary so-lution to its radionuclide issues. Instead of the

financially unattainable reverse osmosis plant, they’ve built a small-scale reverse osmosis fill-ing station in Wiley where customers can ob-tain purified water. The filling station processes between 70 and 110 gallons of water each day; although it’s capable of processing much more, the limited use can likely be attributed to the in-convenience of hauling water. As for the rest of his customers, Schultz estimates 80 percent of them have a water softener and reverse osmosis filter at home to improve taste and reduce stom-ach upset, but that doesn’t satisfy the state and the EPA, he says. The filling station, however, does—at least for now.

Schultz, along with about 40 other water pro-viders including Las Animas and La Junta, is hold-ing out for a more permanent fix: the Arkansas Valley Conduit. The conduit is a 230-mile pipeline designed to carry water transported through the Fryingpan-Arkansas transbasin diversion project from the headwaters of the Colorado River Ba-sin’s Fryingpan and Roaring Fork rivers to the Arkansas Basin’s Pueblo Reservoir and pipe that water farther east to the lower Arkansas River Val-ley. The project, estimated to cost $400 million, would serve 50,000 people in 40 communities, delivering fresh mountain water to southeastern towns and cities as far as Lamar that are dealing with saline surface water, contaminated ground-water, and water quality violations.

The Arkansas Valley Conduit was originally planned and authorized as a feature of the Frying-pan-Arkansas Project in 1962. But it was later cut from Fry-Ark plans, mainly because beneficiaries in the Arkansas Basin were unable to repay construc-tion costs at the time. Water quality issues resur-rected the concept of the conduit around 2000, and in 2009, federal legislation was signed that would allow project proponents to help finance the conduit with Fryingpan-Arkansas Project revenue generated through storage contracts with entities who use excess capacity in the project’s reservoirs. Then in early 2014 the Bureau of Reclamation ap-proved and finalized the conduit’s Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), which moved the project one step closer to completion. Like the rest of the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project, the conduit would be owned and operated by the Bureau of Reclama-tion, while the Southeastern Colorado Water Con-servancy District would play an administrative role and work locally with project beneficiaries. Now that the EIS is secure, financing the conduit is the top priority for proponents.

Many are counting on this proposed silver-bul-let-ish project. La Junta’s master plan, completed over the past decade, incorporates the conduit—now the city is expectantly waiting. It isn’t alone in eagerly anticipating a completion date estimated for between 2020 and 2023. In Las Animas, Wag-ner wistfully discusses the project. Referring to the water quality and reverse osmosis concen-trate disposal issues plaguing his community, he says, “The Arkansas Valley Conduit would solve all of those issues for us.” n

Private household wells are not monitored or regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Private well owners should have the quality of their water

tested annually for some contaminants, and once every five to ten years for others. Find information and options for testing at: www.colorado.gov/pacific/cdphe/lab.

May Valley Water Association’s reverse osmosis filling station in Wiley satisfies state and federal water quality requirements—for now.

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Documents

Headwaters Fall 2014: The Will to Thrive on Colorado's Eastern Plains