Session 2: Agriculture examines where innovations are emerging within the agricultural community itself, from crop switching to producer-led conservation. These approaches push back against the assumption that agriculture and conservation are necessarily at odds, and raise the harder question of what it will take to scale these solutions across the region.

Session 2: Agriculture

 

Framing the Issue

JAMES EKLUND: Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Part Two of Liquid Courage: Water Solutions for a Drier West. I'm James Eklund, a ranching water lawyer at Taft, Sherman, and Howard. I've spent most of my professional life working on Western water in state government and private practice, negotiating Colorado River issues, and now advising communities, businesses, agricultural producers, and others trying to navigate what has become - and the reason you're all here - an increasingly complicated water future.

I also have the privilege of serving on the board of the Institute for Science & Policy. One of the reasons I wanted to serve on that board is that we desperately need places like this: places where science, policy, and the public can actually meet and talk and listen to each other. Thanks for showing up.

Water is the perfect example for this. The technical issues are complicated, the law is complicated, the politics are definitely complicated, but ultimately, the decisions we make about water affect everybody. And Colorado is an extraordinary place from which to have that conversation. Four of the great rivers of the American West begin here: the Colorado, the Platte, the Arkansas, and the Rio Grande.

And right now, every one of them is under stress. Most of you have probably heard the most about the Colorado River. Flows have been historically low. Lake Powell and Lake Mead have fallen to levels that would've been almost unimaginable when the modern Colorado River system was constructed. And after years of negotiations among the seven basin states failed to produce a comprehensive agreement, the federal government has been forced to step in with new operating rules.

The river is headed toward federalization, and we may already have crossed into that. Anne will have much more to say about that later. But one thing I want to emphasize this morning, is that Colorado's water challenge is much bigger than the Colorado River. Go east to the Arkansas, and Colorado has spent generations dealing with interstate compact disputes with Kansas.

At the same time, communities in southeastern Colorado continue to struggle with drinking water quality and infrastructure problems, including communities that have waited far too long for reliable replacement supplies. And while our federal, state, and local water institutions slowly grind away at the problem, there are kids in Colorado drinking water contaminated with radionuclides. That's unacceptable.

Move north to the Platte system, where you are today, and particularly the Republican River Basin in northeastern Colorado, we confront another problem, and that's groundwater. Much of that agricultural economy was built on groundwater. That groundwater is being depleted, and as it declines, meeting Colorado's interstate obligations to Nebraska becomes harder and harder.

Then you look to the Rio Grande and the San Luis Valley, where groundwater depletion, agricultural viability, and interstate compact obligations are converging as Colorado wades through another major chapter of litigation. Different rivers, different laws, different hydrology, but there is a common denominator: we have built communities and economies around more water than nature is reliably providing us.

That part of the story gets plenty of attention. What gets much less attention, and what this series is really about, is what we can actually do about it, and how we create a sense of urgency equal to the moment.

Those of you who joined us for Part One heard about the state of play for water in our cities, suburbs, and mountain communities. Today, we turn to the other side of the equation, and in some ways, the harder part of the conversation. That's agriculture. Agriculture accounts for the vast majority of the consumptive use of water across the West. Sometimes that statistic gets presented almost as an accusation. As a rancher, I think it's exactly the wrong way to look at it, because if agriculture represents the largest share of water, it also represents the largest opportunity for innovation, and luckily, innovation is something that producers do very well. We have to innovate on a daily basis.

And the important question is not simply, “How do we take water out of agriculture?” We've done that before. We know how to do that, especially when cities buy and dry farms and move the water somewhere else. The water may move, but the economic and social consequences stay behind. The much more interesting question is: “Can we conserve meaningful amounts of water while keeping agricultural communities productive, economically viable, and in control of their own future?” That's a much harder problem. It is also where some of the most interesting work in Western water is happening today.

Farmers and ranchers are experimenting with different crops, different irrigation practices, and different ways of managing water. Producers want to participate in voluntary conservation programs. Technology is giving us increasingly sophisticated ways to understand how much water crops actually consume, not simply how much gets diverted at a head gate.

And markets and compensation programs are beginning to ask another important question: if an agricultural producer can conserve water that creates value for the rest of the system, shouldn't that producer share in the value they created? Those ideas challenge an assumption that has shaped Western water politics for a very long time: that agriculture and conservation must somehow be opposing forces. They don't have to be. But demonstrating that something can work on one farm or in one irrigation district is very different from making it work across an entire river basin.

So, the question I hope we wrestle with today is not simply whether those innovations exist; they already do and are proven. The question is: What would it take to scale them? What needs to change in our laws? What needs to change in our institutions? What do farmers and ranchers actually need in order to participate? Who pays? How do we measure conserved water credibly? And perhaps more importantly - most importantly - how do we make agricultural producers partners in solving the West's water, rather than treating them as the problem to be solved?

That is the conversation we want to have this morning, and to lead us through it, I'm very pleased to turn things over to Allen Best. Allen has been covering Colorado since the late 1970s. Since 2020, he has produced the e-journal "Big Pivots," where he chronicles Colorado's energy and water transitions. His work has received numerous honors, most recently for his 2024 reporting on water and urban landscapes in Colorado.

He knows these issues. He knows the people involved in them. I've seen him talk to them, and perhaps most importantly for what we're doing today, he knows how to ask a good question. Please help me welcome the panel.

Water Supply and Demand

ALLEN BEST: Thank you for that introduction, James. James, as you've already observed, can speak very well. He also writes very well. I follow him on LinkedIn, and last December, I persuaded him to write a piece for Big Pivots that others wanted to pick up in Durango and Cortez. They said, "This is such a good piece." He writes very well.

Like many of us here, I have relatives who lived on farms. One set of grandparents lived north of Fort Morgan on a dry land farm. I had another set of grandparents that lived on a farm north of Sterling. The latter, on an irrigated farm, lived a little bit more prosperously. Myself, I've always been a “townie”, or I guess a “city” at this point.

However, in my journalistic career, I have written about growing hay on the Western Slope, and most recently, I had something in The Denver Post about the Republican River Basin. They have enormous challenges there in trying to use what remains of the Ogallala Aquifer. And I must confide that when Kathy, my companion in life, and I travel in places like the San Luis Valley - we've been there twice this year - we invariably find ourselves saying to one another, "Boy, I wish we had somebody that really knows water and agriculture."

Well, luckily, we have four people here on the panel today that fit that bill. My first speaker here this morning is Anne Castle. She is a senior fellow at the Getches-Wilkinson Center at the University of Colorado Law School. There, her work focuses on Western water, Colorado River policy, and tribal water interests. From 2022 to 2025, she served as US Commissioner and Chair of the Upper Colorado River Commission, which put her at the center of some of the hardest negotiations in the basin. Before that, she was Assistant Secretary for Water and Science in the Department of Interior, and there she oversaw the Bureau of Reclamation as well as the US Geological Survey, and in that capacity launched several initiatives. Anne also co-founded the National Initiative on Universal Access to Clean Water in Tribal Communities and is a founding member of the Water Policy Group. Earlier in her career, she practiced water law at the Denver firm, Holland & Hart, and there she chaired the Natural Resources Department and the firm's management committee.

I first came across Anne's name in the 1990s. I was in Vail in the Eagle Valley those years, and at some point, there was some legal scuffling between Vail Resorts and the town of Minturn, and Anne represented Minturn. So that's when I first came across Anne. But more recently, there's another thing I want to mention about what Anne is doing. She and about five others from New Mexico and Utah and Arizona all get together occasionally and decide, "There's something really important we need to say," and they issue reports, and anybody that pays attention to the Colorado River wants to pay attention to what they're reporting.

Last fall, they had another report, and I did an interview with Anne and several others, and I ran it in Big Pivots. It was kind of a last-minute decision, but I'd had a conversation with my directors and my board who said, "Wow, you've got the Traveling Wilburys of the Colorado River here." So, I used that in the headline. It has taken on a bit of a life of its own. Whether Anne is Roy Orbison or Bob Dylan or George Harrison, I'm not sure!

Anne, let's start with the bigger picture, specifically the supply-demand gap, not just in agriculture, but more broadly. What is the actual gap between what our snowpack and summer rains have been producing and how much water has been promised on paper? Just how much of a pinch are we in? And I might add this question: what if we do nothing?

ANNE CASTLE: There's a lot packed into that question. First of all, I'll say I am not Bob Dylan. I aspire to be George Harrison, but that may be too high a bar!

The first part of your question, Allen, was what's the difference between actual supply and what's allocated on paper? And that difference is huge. We've allocated way, way, way more water than Mother Nature is supplying. But I think, even more important is the gap between supply and actual use. And I'll caveat this by saying that I'm most familiar with the numbers in the Colorado River Basin, which of course you all may have been reading about recently in the press.

But this is a problem in the Colorado River Basin that's emblematic of the rest of the western United States. But in the Colorado, the gap between supply and demand - so nature's supply and actual use every year - varies from 1.5 to 3.5 million acre-feet per year. That's a lot of water. Just to put that in context, last year, the gap between supply and demand was over 2.5 million acre-feet, and this year will be more because we have less supply. It's such a dry year. That's a 20% to 25% difference. We're using that much more than nature is supplying, and the reason we can do that is because of our reservoirs.

But the reservoirs, particularly in the Colorado River Basin, the big ones like Powell and Lake Mead, are at historic lows. And we really don't have that storage reserve to draw on for very much longer to offset the gap between supply and demand, so we need to bring our use in line with what nature is supplying.

The good news is that there are many efforts to try to do that, and just last Friday, the federal government issued a record of decision, which is kind of a directive to all users of Colorado River water, about how much less they're going to deliver to water users in the lower basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada, and how they're going to operate those reservoirs to try to deal with this continuing crisis.

Now, that was Friday. On Monday, the state of Nevada filed a lawsuit challenging the adequacy of that directive and the environmental impact statement behind it. So, there's a lot of uncertainty right now in the Colorado River Basin, but big picture, that's what we have to do: we have to bring our usage in line with supply, and that's a very difficult problem.

ALLEN: About a decade ago, I started hearing this word "aridification." Now, I've been around long enough to remember the drought of 1977, and then, of course, the drought of 2002. But aridification, how is that different?

ANNE: Well, drought is something that we usually think of as temporary and aberrational. We're used to one level of water supply, but we have a bad year or a series of bad years. We call that a drought. But we expect things to get back to normal.

The concept that aridification is trying to get at is that, in a warming climate - and we know that global temperatures are going up, and we can feel it here in Denver and across the state - what that does is it shortens the winter, so we have a shorter period for snowpack accumulation. It dries out the soil moisture, so that every year when we do get runoff from the snowpack, it has to fill up that soil moisture reservoir first before it then goes into the streams and runs downstream. There are longer growing seasons for natural vegetation, so the riparian areas suck up more water than they did previously. And there's greater evaporation from the surfaces of reservoirs. So it's that phenomenon, caused by rising temperatures, this sort of “drying out” of the land, that's referred to as aridification.

And it's not something that the climate scientists believe to be temporary. It's caused by global warming, and we can expect it to continue.

ALLEN: This year, we are hearing an awful lot about El Niño. Is it going to save us?

ANNE: Oh, God, I hope so. I'm not a climate scientist, but I listened really carefully to a presentation earlier this summer by Brad Udall, who's one of Colorado's leading climate scientists, and he focuses particularly on the Colorado River.

And he put up this chart that was just amazing. He had plotted the El Niño strength and - this is beyond my expertise - but the strength of El Niño, and as you get less strong El Niños, you get into La Niña. He looked at 120 years of data for El Niños and how strong they were, and he plotted that against the flows in the Colorado River at Lees Ferry, which is the midpoint between the upper basin states like Colorado and the lower basin states. It's just below Glen Canyon Dam, just below Lake Powell. It's a good measuring point for flows in the Colorado River system because 90 to 95% of the flows in the Colorado River originate in the upper basin. So, it's a good proxy for the whole system.

So, he looked at strength in El Niño, looked at flows at Lees Ferry: zero correlation. Zero. That is counterintuitive, right? We've all been hearing about, "Oh, great, El Niño, it's going to save us." There are some strong El Niño years, like we're expecting, that have produced big flows, but there are others that have just been average and some that are below average.

That's in the upper basin, so maybe we'll luck out. Maybe we'll get a good snowpack year. I hope so, but we can't count on it. But what's interesting is that there is a correlation between El Niño strength and big flows in the lower basin, the lowest part of the lower basin, like Southern California and Southern Arizona.

And in fact, I just looked at an old movie that shows that the Salton Sea was created by a huge flood on the lower Colorado in 1906. That was a big El Niño year. That's just an example, but there does seem to be a correlation there. So, we can hope for big flows in the lower basin, and if we get them, that will help relieve pressure on the overall system.

ALLEN: When was our last El Niño, by the way? Do you happen to recall?

ANNE: I don't know, but within the last 10 years for sure. But this one is supposed to be super strong; I think that's the distinguishing factor.

ALLEN: Finally, we obviously have to have cuts. Who gets the short straws? Does ag get the short straws in this?

ANNE: Not at all, I don't think. In the Colorado River Basin, about 75% of the human use of water is associated with agriculture. The other 25% is municipal, industrial, whatever. And that's relatively true for other river basins. That's largely representative. So if we have this big gap between supply and demand, ag is going to be affected, no question about that.

But the way water rights work, and you all know this: in the West, we are wedded to the prior appropriation system. In times of shortage, junior water rights get cut off first. And agricultural water rights tend to be more senior. That's not universally true, but in general, ag rights have senior priorities, and that's just because we've been farming for a lot longer than the cities have been the size that they are today. So ag is going to be affected, no question, but it's just not accurate to say that ag is going to take a disproportionate share of the reductions that are going to be necessary.

Conservation and Agriculture

ALLEN: Our next panelist is Nathan Coombs, who is a San Luis Valley native. He grew up on a farm near La Jara, which is about 20 miles north of the New Mexico border. After high school graduation, he did a two-year mission in Rome for his church and then got a business degree from Adams State. Returning to his farm today, he and his wife, Charlotte, raise alfalfa and small grains. Their four children are fifth-generation Coloradans. Since 2009, Nathan has managed the Conejos Water Conservancy District. Along the way, he has also chaired the Rio Grande Basin Roundtable, led the Manassa Land & Irrigation Company, and served as director of the Colorado Farm Bureau. In 2023, he was appointed to represent the Rio Grande Basin on the Colorado Water Conservation Board, and this year he was reappointed to another three-year term.

Just a little footnote about La Jara: I was down there a few weeks ago, and we happened to cross paths with the town manager, and we got to talking about how warm it had been this summer. We ended up in his backyard garden looking at the corn that he was already harvesting. Talking with Nathan and several others, I guess that's not exceptional, but it's a little bit unusual this year, particularly how early the corn was coming. I don't know whether that's something for the future or not.

Nathan, I must confess that I know absolutely nothing about the Winter Flow program. Walk us through this program, if you would. What does it do, and why would somebody describe it as “clever,” as it has been described? How can you help a river and ranchers at the same time without having anyone giving up too much water?

NATHAN COOMBS: The Winter Flow Program is an interesting concept. As the manager of the Conejos Water Conservancy District, we operate Platoro Reservoir. Platoro was built after the Rio Grande Compact was signed, so it has a whole bunch of difficult triggers before you can store water long term.

So it walks that fine line - when James was talking about the legal constraints, Platoro has almost all of them. And so, when we purchased that from the Bureau of Reclamation, the natural inflows in the winter up there are about three to five CFS (cubic feet per second), and we have to release seven. So every year, our conservancy district goes in the hole.

And then the environmental and recreational groups come to us and knock on the door and kind of kick down the door, "We need more water. We need more water." And if you noticed in my pedigree, I have nothing biology in my degree, right? I grew up farming, shining the shovel, irrigating. My degree is in business. Environment and recreation was just something that happened to occur around my irrigation water, right? So I never had the mentality of cooperation, and it seemed like when those groups came to us, it was very aggressive, and it was very, "Well, if you just knew better, you could do better." You know, really demeaning, and it's like, well, I think we've done all right. We've held onto our water for five generations. I think we've done okay.

But, to get to the point, in walks to the roundtable a guy named Kevin Terry with Trout Unlimited, and he asks questions: How can I figure this out? How can we work together? So we start talking about how the fish need more water in the winter for the spawn to keep the eggs inundated off the gravel banks.

The problem, like I said, is we go in the hole every winter with this precious water. So we worked out a deal where we got Tony Aloia with Colorado Parks and Wildlife, and Kevin Terry and myself, and we sat down, and we started talking about how can we overcome some of these challenges of moving water.

The Conejos is the largest tributary to the Rio Grande in Colorado, and so we have a connection in that nexus, but we did not have a social norm there. There are big divisions. What it came down to is we sat in a room -  I'll offend somebody. I don't mean to, but - we sat in a room with no lawyers and we started drafting - in pencil - what would this or what would this look like? How could we exchange water from a Rio Grande reservoir into a Conejos reservoir? We put all the politics aside. We forgot whose grandpa hated whose grandpa, and we started down that road of saying, "How can we get wet water down the Rio Grande in the summer when they need it for recreation and boating and fishing, and it'll increase those flows?"

And then because the rivers are connected, that volume of water would pay a portion of the Conejos’ compact obligation, and then I could store that amount back in Platoro. So physically, we had put more water in the reservoir, and then in the winter, I would release that water at a specific rate to help the fish.

And we all kind of made the blood oath. Nobody writes this down. Nobody is guaranteeing this. This is an experiment. And Craig Cotton, our division engineer, he said, "Okay, just don't tell me what's going on." I'm joking! He sat there with us, and he helped us avoid conflicts with New Mexico, and we got it done.

Ten CFS was their goal. We ended up with 11.5 CFS from CPW, whose mission is to help wildlife and the water to get it down. And so then after that, we had other conservancy districts that had water that would donate water when we couldn't come up with exchange water from CPW.

They would donate water, and we would exchange it up to Platoro. We had a ton of people want to get involved, and I think the genius of why it works is - like I said, I'm not trying to offend anybody - it's not memorialized. You're not going to find guidelines. You're not going to find specific requirements. You're going to have a meeting every year when we sit down and say, "What can we do? Who has water where? Can we move it? How do we use it?" And my board was generous enough to say, "We'll donate Nathan's time, and he's going to release and make this water work."

So that's why it works, because nobody's trying to take credit for it. Nobody's trying to mandate anything, and everybody's trying to make sure everyone succeeds. And then think about that water when we release it in the winter for the fish. It actually gets to New Mexico and diminishes Conejos’ compact obligation during the irrigation season. So everybody's winning; honestly, there isn't anybody losing.

We release the water from the Rio Grande when they need more recreation in the summer, and we can increase those flows, and then we release it from the Conejos again when it can help the fish and pay the compact. I think that's the genius of it, making those molecules of water work a lot more than they normally do.

ALLEN: You were quoted saying that when this process started, you were the most anti-environmentalist guy in the room. What changed you from heck no to heck yes?

NATHAN: Senator [Cleave] Simpson's nervous now. I get told a lot that I say something, and then I think… So I guess I'm not anti-environmentalist as much as I'm very lacking in the experience with it.

Growing up on a farm where water was a premium, you see the value of it, you see what it has to do. And the word conservation, honestly, growing up in a very pro-solid ag was almost like the “F” word. It was very offensive because if I use less, that means somebody else is using it. Well, my family has to eat too, you know?

Your paradigm is very difficult to get out of because you see no matter how much seed or fertilizer you put down, without water, you have nothing. And so that idea that someone else needs your water was very difficult, and I had always viewed conservation and recreation as antagonistic, not cooperative to ag.

What happens is when you finally get people that come and ask, "Where's the space where we can operate? Where is that void where we can both gain?", it changes your idea. You have to be willing to have that conversation knowing that it doesn't obligate you to anything. And when you sit down with people, you start learning quickly who you can and you can't trust, and you just filter through there.

And when you find those people, no matter what segment they come from, that you can trust, that you believe will tell you the truth, that you don't think have ulterior motives to take your resource, which is the basis of your agricultural operation, then you start looking at how can we share this. Because I know darn good and well that everybody needs the water, but I also know that we have had to work our tails off to maintain that water.

Like I said, it does not just stay there without effort. I see a lot of farms that have sold the farms, divided the farms, and the water goes away, or they're drying up. It never comes back. And so for us, it's very difficult to get to the win-win. And so, when I finally met a group of people, and I'll tell you, right now the Rio Grande Basin seems to have a lot of those people that are trying to figure out what's the win-win.

And I know they're everywhere in the state, but I don't work everywhere in the state, so the conversation about saying, "You can trust me. We're going to talk about how we preserve your family farm and your heritage to where there's six and seven generations on this farm," then I'm going to have that conversation.

So it's about people. If you want to know the truth, it's not about the water or the cause. It's about the people that you sit across the table with.

ALLEN: Thank you. Three years ago, I stopped by the office in Alamosa of State Senator Cleave Simpson, visiting him in his capacity as the manager of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District. One of the things that really stuck with me in that conversation was when Senator Simpson said, what you see happening in the Rio Grande is almost identical or very parallel - I forget the exact word - to what is happening in the Colorado River. The hydrograph is very similar.

Nathan, I wonder from your perspective in the southern half of the San Luis Valley, what are people thinking? What are they saying about the challenges ahead? Are people optimistic? Are they scared? Are they in denial? Are they determined? Or something else?

NATHAN: I would say you don't get into agriculture if you're not optimistic. Next year's always going to be better. That's almost genetically ingrained in agriculture to be optimistic and to be looking for opportunities. But there is a reality. I don't think there's a single family farm I know of that doesn't have the story of selling this 40 [acres] to make the payment or dividing the farm, or they have a story of severing an appendage that was part of that.

And so there's a reality. There's a hard flint look in the eye of people that are multi-generational. They understand the cost of staying in agriculture, and they understand that it won't look like what it did look like. To Anne's point of aridification, that is a completely different scenario than surviving a couple years of drought. It's a completely different scenario. And so I do not farm anything like my grandpa did. It's not similar, and I think that is overwhelmingly common. There's a resiliency, there's a decision that we will be here and we're going to carry on, but there's also an understanding that it won't look like what it did in the past.

It's a swing of a pendulum or two edges of a knife, however you want to look at it, because we used to flood-irrigate everything in the south end of the valley, so you had a really high sub-aquifer, a lot of water, a lot of grass. You can't do that anymore. The river doesn't provide. To Anne's point, the river does not provide enough water for that to be an effective irrigation method, so we go to center pivots. It's way more effective; it's more productive, but it contributes nothing to the residual. So now we're paying for that, right? We're seeing drier corners…we're trying to find that line of how do we move, and I think that determination to figure it out is what I see overwhelmingly more than anything else.

I do have some neighbors that live in denial, but they’ve got faith. And it runs the gamut, but I'd say it’s an overall determination that we're going to figure it out seems to be what the ag community at our end of the valley has decided to do. Whether it's with the sub-districts, or whether it's with the winter flow programs.

And to prove that point, the Winter Flow Program has now turned into a summer program with Farms to Fish, and Trout Unlimited will help pay farmers. In July and August, the river temperatures get so high that it's also detrimental to the fish, I learned. And so, now if we have farmers that are willing to sign up for certain days to release their water, Trout Unlimited has a fund to help offset their cost of storing water, so they can run that water during those critical times in the summer.

So here's another example of how they're determined to figure out how they can help the entirety, because they fish, they camp, they want to do those things. So I would say determined is probably the best adjective I could use.

Crop Switching and the Rye Resurgence Project

ALLEN: Our next panelist is Sarah Jones, who has a very interesting journey on her way to this podium.

She grew up, unlike the rest of us, I think, in the suburbs and on the beaches of San Diego. And along the way, she has lived in New York, London, Boston, and here in Denver before she and her husband, Michael, took a leap of faith, and in 2017, they moved to the family farm, which is in the shadow of Kit Carson Peak and Mount Blanca, two of our fourteeners. They arrived, she says, to a double rainbow at golden hour. This is in 2017, and they have never looked back.

Today, she co-owns Jones Farms Organics. It's a fourth and fifth-generation farm, and they have three young daughters. They grow heirloom wheat, rye, and more than 20 varieties of potatoes. It is the first regenerative organic certified farm in Colorado. As director of sales, marketing, and logistics, she has built relationships with direct customers across the state and beyond. Perhaps, though, she is best known as the co-founder of the Rye Resurgence Project, which got funding from the San Luis Valley Water Conservancy District to help farmers cut groundwater use while staying profitable.

And a measure of the importance of this and of the interest in this is that at the Colorado Water Congress conference in Steamboat last week, a full hour was devoted to a presentation about the Rye Resurgence Project. There's more to what Sarah has been doing down in the valley. She also serves on the boards of the Colorado Grain Chain and the Alamosa Farmers Market.

Sarah, from what I understand about the Rye Resurgence Project, it rests on a very simple proposition: rye requires less water than some other crops. I have two questions coming out of that. Is there a difference between rye and other crops, and how much water? How does that make that much of a difference? Second, I understand that growing rye is one thing farmers in the San Luis Valley have been using as a cover crop to avoid dust. I was in the San Luis Valley just this summer and saw there can be quite a lot of dust. So how is turning rye into a profit - how is that going?

SARAH JONES: Yeah, great question. Thanks so much for having me, and I just wanted to say thanks for being here. Thanks for caring. Thanks for being curious. I feel like Nathan had some great themes that really summarize everything. The question of “what can we do” is so important, and we should all be asking that as consumers and as farmers.

And I've got some really fun action items for you guys that we'll get into in a minute. So let's see… raise your hand if you've heard of the Rye Resurgence Project. That's a good start. Yeah, that's exciting. So how is it going? I guess I'll start with how the project started briefly, and then I'll get into how it's going. I also started a timer for myself, so I'm not multitasking and checking email. I just could talk about rye and potatoes all day, and unfortunately, we don't have all day.

The project started a few years ago. I was sitting at the kitchen table, and we were having a dust storm, and it's not a cute dust devil. We're talking brownout; you can't see in front of you. The sky turns orange and brown. Heather Dutton, who's on the project with me, she's one of the co-founders, she's told stories about having to put towels in her windows. We have one of the highest rates of emphysema and asthma in the country down in the San Luis Valley, so the whole problem of air and dust and water are really alive and well and heartbreaking. So, I was sitting at the kitchen table working - that's my office - and really sad and mad and disheartened at the state of the air and knowing about traffic accidents that happened down there, and I wanted to throw in the towel for about a minute. I let myself wallow for a second, and then started asking: What can I do? What can we do? This has to change.

My father-in-law had been growing rye. He took our farm organic in the early 2000s, which was amazing to get to move down to the farm and for it to already be organic. He had started planting rye in the '80s as a cover crop, just as the right thing to do. After potatoes, which are harvested in October, we have bare dirt, and we don't plant until May, so that's a really long time to have bare dirt. Rye is one of the only things that can survive in the valley, so we can get down to the negative 20s, even sometimes the negative 30s. It can be the national low with cold temperature, which is a fun fact.

So he had been planting it just as the right thing to do. Even as a conventional farmer, rye was such an amazing calming ground for him. So he was planting it, and then he would just either till it in, incorporate it, graze it, or bale it. We didn't really have a market for it.

Then, when we moved down to the farm, we were looking at diverse crops. What are other things that we can grow that use less water, that aren't as hard on the soil, that can also be a cash crop? And grain continued to come up for us, heirloom organic grain. So we got into grain world pretty early on, 2018, 2019, and then through grain world, got introduced to rye demand.

So, by being at some events, we started getting asked for rye, and it was a fun little secret because it's like “wait, you, you want to buy this?” We've been growing it for 30 years as a cover crop. That's exciting. So really quickly, within a year or two, just by being out there, we got to sell 100% of our rye, which was just incredible for this cover crop then to be a cash crop. Nathan mentioned the phrase win-win. For a farmer to have a cover crop that's also an incredible cash crop, that can cover your soil for close to 11 months out of the year and have that living root for carbon sequestration, that was a dream come true.

So that was the model that we had been using that was working for us. And then, I had been talking with Heather Dutton from the Water Conservancy District about what we were doing as a farm, what I was doing in terms of being able to sell that crop and the success we've been having with that, and also the amount of water we were saving.

Rye uses one-half, if not one-third, of the amount of water as potatoes, alfalfa, and barley. And why are those our three crops down in the valley? Raise your hand if you've eaten a burger or beef this week. And carbs: have you had anything with wheat in it this week? All right. Okay. And beer: raise your hand if you've had a little bit of beer. Oh, okay, barley.

So, this fun graph that was passed around, showing what uses the most, we are growing those things as farmers because we as consumers are wanting those things, right? Alfalfa, barley, potatoes. We love cheap French fries and chips. We love cheap beer. We love beef. We love burgers. So that's why we're growing those things. In order for us to change what we're growing as farmers, we as consumers get three votes a day: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And if we can start changing what we're eating, that can start building demand, and farmers will grow that. Farmers are ready and willing.

So that was kind of the premise of just one small person selling 100% of what our farm is growing, working with two distilleries in the entire state of Colorado and a few millers and bakers. But if we can replicate the efforts of the sales and marketing - so the cart before the horse - if we can help build demand for a crop, then we can help farmers grow those things and help them continue farming while simultaneously saving the aquifer and also saving our soil and preventing the dust bowl in our area. So it was really just a win-win project, and it's really taken off.

ALLEN: Great. I'm wondering how we, as people who go to grocery stores, how can we participate in your project?

SARAH: Yeah, great question. I have a few examples down here. One thing my husband likes to talk about is rye reputation rehabilitation. What does that mean? Raise your hand if you think that rye tastes like caraway seeds. Do you know what I mean by that? Thank you for admitting that. I also thought that.

I have been in rooms with millers and bakers, and a majority of them raised their hands. We all love Reubens and pastrami sandwiches with marbled rye, and we all know that's marbled rye bread. It also has caraway seeds in it. So often caraway seed gets attributed to the flavor of rye. Not a big deal. I like caraway seed. However, I don't want caraway seed in my cookies. I don't want it in my brownies. I don't want it in my pancakes and my waffles, and neither do my kids. The good news is rye does not taste like that. Yay!

Rye is twice the amount of fiber, which is very important for gut health, and half the amount of gluten, which for gluten-sensitive people is also awesome. And you can use it in everything that you're making at home. Since learning just as a farmer that rye does not taste like caraway seed, we are now using an insane amount of rye because every recipe I find online, I just cut, right? All-purpose flour, I just cut 50% of that with rye flour, and there's no difference in the texture. It's more nutritious and more flavorful.

The beauty with that is that we have some incredible millers and bakers in Colorado. We started as a farm. I was working with probably five direct customers specific to rye and grains. Now as a project, we have over 90 direct customers. You can go on the Rye Resurgence Project website and see all of our partners. We've got tons of distillers, brewers, bakers. Joy Hill Pizza is an incredible example. We popped in one day. They had tagged us in a post because they were using our baby potatoes on one of their pizzas. Popped in, met with the owner, gave her a sample of rye flour. Within a week, they were doing R&D. They use 10% now in all of their crusts, which equals 50 pounds of rye flour a week, which equals an acre of rye planted in the San Luis Valley. One pizza restaurant in all of Colorado.

So that just shows the power of yes, and how one pizza place, one baker, one home using more rye can have such an incredible impact on our ag region in Colorado. I have a sample of rye berries up here if you don't believe me about the flavor of rye. Take a little nibble, get some good gut health in there and taste it. Also, I have our little baby potatoes, which are not rye, but use half the amount of water, little potatoes, and are extremely nutritious and delicious. The purple potatoes have 10 times the amount of antioxidants and anthocyanins as well.

These are just examples of a few customers that we get to work with that are really helping ag, helping our aquifer, helping our soil. It's the whole “rye-sing” - rye emphasized - lifts all boats, right? By them telling the story of our farm and our valley and our aquifer and our soil, we then get to tell the story of what they're doing, and it's just this beautiful chain and relationship and emphasis on community over commodity and how important that is for us in ag.

ALLEN: Sarah, thank you for that. I've heard you say that when we change what we buy, farmers will change what they grow. That follows what we were just talking about. But I have a final question here, and that has to do with the opportunities, but perhaps more importantly, the limitations of the Rye Resurgence Project. What are the challenges? How big can this go? Can you take care of all the problems that Senator Simpson is trying to solve in his conservation district?

SARAH: That would be a no. Let's see. Challenges are: at the scale that we're at in a region, we need to be selling train cars of rye, right? Not cute three-pound bags of flour. We need mass amounts of rye purchase orders. We were talking at our table at breakfast - people love to show up to farms and be like, "Oh, why aren't you growing quinoa or millet or buckwheat?" And my question for you is, do you have a purchase order for me? How much are you going to buy it for, and what volume, and where do I have to send it, and does it need cleaned, and does it need de-hulled? Oh, you want a little bag of it? That's cute. But no, that's a huge risk for us. We really need huge purchases. Right now, we're in conversation with General Mills, which is very exciting. But we need the big guys to get on board.

We've made a lot of progress. I do think that there's a lot of resiliency and sustainability with the little guys. For example, Moxie Mill is one of our big customers. We started with them with a tote, and now we're sending half semis. Jacob of Roaring Fork Mill, same. He just committed to a semi of rye flour this year. That's one mill in the state of Colorado. Starting small and growing that, it takes time and it takes patience. I wanted to be selling train cars of rye day one for this project, and we're on year two. We’ve saved a ton of water. We've sold a lot of rye, but it's not the scale that we need.

I think to solve the problems, we need a “buck and buckwheat project”. We need a  “marvelous millet project”. You can fill in the blanks; I love alliteration. But we need demand and markets for all of these amazing crops that we can grow at a fair price, but from Colorado, specifically the San Luis Valley, to make changes and to keep farmers farming.

Colorado's Ag Diversity and Changes

ALLEN: Thank you, Sarah. Several years ago, I visited Robert Sakata, our next panelist, at his farm in Brighton. It kind of surprised me. Here was the farm headquarters, not all that far from downtown Brighton. In a way, it was like a turn back from several decades ago. What he told me that morning was that he gave me some details of his life. He'd grown up on the farm and then went off to college and tried to figure out a different life beyond the farm. And he pretty well succeeded, but at some point, the farm called him back. He decided that he liked working with soil and with water.

Today, he still owns Sakata Farms. He's the president, but he has added a lot to his resume. Soon after I interviewed him, he joined the Colorado Department of Agriculture. There, he became the first-ever water policy advisor to the ag commissioner, Kate Greenberg. Earlier this year, she was on parental leave, and he stepped in to serve as the acting commissioner. Now, as senior advisor to the commission, he has continued his oversight of water policy for the Department of Ag and is leading the department's behavioral health program, among other things. He has also served on the Colorado Water Conservation Board, the Interbasin Compact Committee, the Water Quality Control Commission, and the Metro Basin Roundtable.

That's not all. He has been on the boards of Water Education Colorado and the Colorado Water Congress. This is a guy that rolls up his sleeves. He helped create the Colorado Ag Water Alliance and the Colorado Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association, where he was the founding president.

Robert, when city dwellers think about agriculture, they often picture big fields like my grandfather had down north of Sterling, soaking up water in furrows. I understand that agriculture in Colorado has evolved over the last 50 years. It's become much more diverse in how it uses water. Could you lead us through some of the different uses of water? How is water used, and how is that continuing to evolve?

ROBERT SAKATA: Thanks, Allen, and thanks for having me here. Thanks for that very kind introduction. The introduction that I wanted you to use was, "The whole reason I've traveled down that path is because when I grow up, I want to be like Senator Simpson."

AUDIENCE: We all want to!

ROBERT: Exactly. We have some wonderful leaders, and that's what's really amazing. It's really interesting the diversity of agriculture. That's the main thing I want to start off with is the diversity of agriculture that we're so lucky to have in Colorado. We have the San Luis Valley, we have the Eastern Plains, we have the fruit production on the West Slope. We are able to produce everything from A to Z, apples to zucchini, across the state of Colorado, and that diversity is really, really important. It's that old adage of having all your eggs in one basket, right? That's pretty scary. If we go down this path of our food supply becoming more and more centralized, I think history has shown us that that's a very dangerous path to go on.

So really figuring out a way that continues to support that diversity in Colorado is so critical. And what we've talked about is that because of that diversity, there's not necessarily going to be one solution. There are going to be great projects like you've heard from Sarah and from Nathan about what we can do. Each basin is really unique. When I started at the Department of Agriculture, I had an intuition of what was going on, but I wanted to see what the facts and figures were saying.

First, let me poll the audience. How many people here, raise your hand if you're a farmer or rancher. That's reflective of the population, right? It's right around 1%, 2% of the population that are farmers or ranchers. Raise your hand if you were born and raised in Colorado. Keep your hands up. Now, those of you who are born and raised in Colorado but have kids, put your hands down if you've had kids. Okay, so there are only a few of us left that are born and raised and have not had kids. The rest of you, you're the problem. Sorry. [laughs]

And not to point fingers, but that's where we're all part of the solution too. We all need to be at the table talking about what we're doing. And Nathan gave a great example of those cooperative efforts that we can be a part of. You've heard from Anne about the gap.

I had the opportunity to be on the Metro Basin Roundtable, and the reason I chose to be a part of the Metro Basin Roundtable instead of the South Platte Basin Roundtable, where most of the agricultural partners were, was I really needed to learn what Alan Salazar, what Denver Water was doing, because I just felt like I had a target on my back because of the senior water rights that I held just below Denver.

But I learned so much from being a part of that process, had a better understanding of the challenges they were facing, just to be able to make sure that they were supplying all of you a consistent, high-quality source of water, right?

Right now, we're all kind of concerned about non-functional turf. In the past, that was actually a nice buffer for them, that when they ran into a dry season, they could ask residents to back off of watering their turf, right? And yet that still provided them income to keep all that infrastructure running, to make sure that they were able to deliver that water to you.

This season, I just heard that the Denver Water board decided that October 1st, that's it for landscape watering outside. So you're taking some amazing measures this year as a result of the drought. But going back to the facts and figures: there's what's called an ag census, so it's very similar to probably the census you guys are normally used to, that focuses in on ag, and every five years it's an ag census.

In the most recent 25-year period, Colorado irrigated agriculture has reduced by a third, and that's a million acres. So what's a million acres? I looked it up just in preparation for this, and that's the surface area of all the cities along the Front Range from Pueblo up to Fort Collins. That's how much of a reduction in irrigated ag we've already seen in the state of Colorado.

Part of it is agriculture adapting to the aridification that Anne has talked about. The challenges that they're facing in the San Luis Valley, and we heard briefly about the Republican River Valley, trying to make our groundwater supplies more sustainable. That we turn to those groundwater supplies in times of drought, but then we over-pumped them, and we're trying to learn how to back off of that. We heard from James about some of the technology that we're using now to adapt. But we're also learning that there's a place for some of this. Just because a consumer may see a field flooded with water, that's not necessarily bad. You heard Nathan talk about this: we're finding in some of the high-elevation pastures, flood irrigation plays a very important role. That water is taking its time. It's soaking into the ground, eventually making it back to the streams and rivers late in the summer, long after the snow has finished running off.

Without that delayed return flow, that river and stream would dry up. Farmers are kind of like this modern-day beaver, and nobody claims to tell a beaver that they're wasting water. But it's not true for all across the state. There are parts of the state where irrigation efficiency is really important, and I think we're really trying to work to do a better job in that area.

ALLEN: We're getting close to when we'll have the Q&A, so if you have questions, please submit them. I know there'll be at least one question about alfalfa, but there may be other questions too.

Robert, I go to a lot of water meetings. I've seen you in the last year in Lone Tree, in Silverthorne, in Steamboat, in Grand Junction - your travel schedule is impressive. You're getting across the state quite a lot. But when you go to these policy meetings, what does the farmer in you wish the policymakers understood? And conversely, when you are back on the farm, how does your experience in policy make you see things differently?

ROBERT: Yeah, I've been so blessed. Choosing early in my life to do the world a favor and not have kids has allowed me the opportunity to be involved in a lot of other things.

My parents were really supportive and encouraged me to serve the public. So that opportunity to serve on the Water Quality Control Commission for 15 years gave me that experience about the water quality issues that we're facing, the historic mining challenges that we're facing, the aquatic life challenges that we're facing with temperature and dissolved oxygen.

I got to serve on the CWCB (Colorado Water Conservation Board), the Interbasin Compact Committee. I think probably why all of you are here is that thirst for knowledge, right? And I think that's what's driven me, and no matter what side it is, whether it's somebody not involved in the farmer, or farmers and ranchers, I hope that we'd be more willing to listen and learn about what's going on rather than pointing fingers at each other.

I think that's really critical because, like I said, my experience on the Metro Roundtable was invaluable in better understanding what's going on. I get many farmers and ranchers coming up to me and go, "Those darn cities, if they would just stop watering their grass, we'd be a lot better off." But understanding, being able to meet with Alan Salazar, with Denver Water, with Thornton, with the challenges that they're facing, I have a better understanding of how efficient they have become, how their water demand hasn't really increased with recent growth but decreased, and their growth has been maintained by the conservation efforts they have. That's not going to continue. They're going to need more water if they continue to grow. But I applaud their efforts, and it's broadened my perspective, and I hope everybody would be more open to that.

ALLEN: You get around the state quite a lot. I wonder, are there other projects that you see beyond the two that we've heard about from the San Luis Valley that should be mentioned? And are there other things that you would like to see done or maybe are underway that are in the early stages?

ROBERT: That opportunity to travel the state, there are really some exciting things going on. I think the best - and no offense to Senator Simpson, but - the best actions are done locally and not at the state level because they really understand what the conditions are and how to move projects forward. The Rye Resurgence example is a great one. In Chaffee County, they passed a sales tax, and they have asked the citizens, "What's important to you?" They said, "Our forest health is really critical because it's protecting our watershed." And they said preservation of agriculture is also important. So they're using those sales tax funds to find out ways that they can help support those two efforts.

The Colorado River District also passed a property tax measure, a mill levy that they are using to help support water projects. The Yampa Valley has the Community Ag Alliance, and this is really a unique idea because it's making that connection. How do we make that connection with what local farmers and ranchers are growing to you, the consumer? And Steamboat has taken a really unique approach; they've actually built a storefront that allows farmers and ranchers to bring their products there to be sold. I wasn't involved in a farmers market at all, but a friend of mine asked me to visit him at a farmers market here at Denver East High School. And the people that he had lined up to help him didn't show up, so I ended up standing there all day helping him. That's hard work at a farmers market all day long, standing, selling three apples at a time, right? When really, he should've been back at his orchards tending his orchard. He got up at 3:00 in the morning to come from Paonia to drive to Denver pulling his trailer, stood all day, and got home at 11:00 at night. So, I like this cool idea of let's build local storefronts where farmers and ranchers can really make that connection with the consumer.

ALLEN: Nathan, is there anything you might want to add to what Robert said about projects that are going on or projects you'd like to see?

NATHAN: I would just like to second that we're not in favor of the politicians doing it. Cleave and I are good friends, but I think Robert hit it, those local sources, you know what you need. And there's too much idea of finger-pointing, and I really like what Robert said: it's not about vilification of either segment. And I think the programs have to be supported from the local needs. Quinoa is not going to sell well in a farmers’ market unless you have a hand grinder and you're going to make your own flour, right?

SARAH: He's not the sales guy. [laughs]

NATHAN: Yeah, yeah. I grow quinoa, just so you know. But, it's a locally driven thing, and I think that's the genius of the rye is they're trying to get the market and then the farmers will come and it'll go, and I think that is the model that has to be replicated locally, whether it's apples or peaches or oranges or rye. Whatever it is, that local drive needs to be supported for what's going to keep that farmer on the ground and make a program that's going to facilitate more involvement.

ALLEN: Sarah, any thoughts?

SARAH: Yeah, I had a bunch. I just got to actually go to the Steamboat Ag Alliance. It was beautiful. And I was also there because I just opened up a mercantile in my free time. Our farm is in between the UFO watchtower and the alligator farm. That's not weird at all, if you've been in that area. And there was an old gas station and cafe that was for sale years ago, and during COVID it shuttered, and it was heartbreaking to see our one town, in Hooper on Highway 17 with all of the Sand Dunes visitors, sitting empty.

So, I pitched it to everyone that would listen, and apparently I was meant to be the owner, so was able to make it work and purchased it a few years ago, and then turned a very kind of lame convenience store into now a farm store where I get to have this full circle of buying back the customers that we sell to. All of these beautiful products use our rye and our grains, and I now get to buy it and sell them at the store. But yeah, that's exhausting. I didn't use government money for that. I did it with my own grit, knowing that we could do this and knowing that I wanted to be able to highlight the beauty in our region and highlight the products made with our grain and to be able to tell the story of that.

It’s kind of like a farmers market. But yeah, it's really hard. We want farmers to also have farm stands and do farmers' markets and do the sales and marketing, and farmers need to be farming. They need to be on the tractors and in the soil. So I think just thinking about what we're asking of farmers and trying to do our best, whether it's buying, telling the story for them, if we're involved in any way.

One quick example: there is a beautiful neck pillow and eye pillow company, Olive & Olds. And instead of using rice, which is very common, rice doesn't grow here, so they use buckwheat and millet in their eye pillows and in their neck pillows. So just one example of like, "Oh, that has nothing to do with ag. That's an eye pillow." Just kidding. It absolutely can affect ag. And so, in everything that we're doing, everything we're putting in and on our bodies, if we realize it has a direct correlation to our soil health and our water use, how amazing can our impact be as consumers?

We are all involved in ag with our eating, with what we're wearing, with what we're drinking, and we can make or break the system. It's really up to us. But we're not asking for much. I'm asking you to drink whiskey. I'm asking you to eat pizza and eat beautiful potatoes and eat cookies and brownies. So the choice is up to us, but do the right thing!

Colorado River Record of Decision

ALLEN: Anne, let's go back to the Colorado River Basin very explicitly. The Record of Decision announced by Interior last Friday is best understood as an incremental approach. What kind of longer-term solutions do you see? Is there anything that you might want to call out?

ANNE: Well, the Record of Decision that was entered, and as I said, it's under challenge already, but we're going to be living with that for some period of time. It calls for significant reductions in deliveries to the lower basin states, Arizona, California, and Nevada. Those three states had agreed and proposed a specific reduction program, and their offer was taken up by the federal government and is part of the directive, this record of decision that was just issued.

But it's not enough. The reductions that have been proposed don't fill the gap between supply and demand, and it's recognized in the federal government's directive that more may be required. Talk about uncertainty, the record of decision says, "If more is required, we'll consult with you about future actions needed to save the reservoirs and meet that gap between supply and demand."

It provides very, very little reliability for those states and for all the water users in them. It's a start, but it's not enough. And I think it's been so hard, I'm sure you've read in the news that everyone was hoping for a seven-state agreement that the federal government could adopt, and that would be the operating regime going forward, and that hasn't happened. And it's because it's so difficult. The gap is so big, and the reservoirs are so low that it's very, very difficult for any one state to say, "This is basically our share of the burden, and we're going to step up and take that."

The reductions in the Record of Decision are all in the lower basin. There are no mandatory reductions in the upper basin, and that has to do with the federal government's lack of authority in the upper basin states. It's just a very different regime here than it is in the lower basin. But we also know that 90 to 95% of the water in the system is sourced here in the upper basin, and I think, ultimately, we will have to look at reductions here as well, in addition to what hydrology provides.

The upper basin states have been very persuasive in saying, "Look, we only use what we get. We don't have these big reservoirs above us like the lower basin states do." But at the same time, there's so much less water in the system that I think every state and every basin and every sector are going to have to do more.

ALLEN: A follow-up question before we get to the Q&A. You mentioned Brad Udall earlier. He gave the keynote at the Getches-Wilkinson Water Conference in June in Boulder, and he had a lot of interesting things to say, but the most interesting thing to me was when he said, “We're going to have to buy agriculture use. We're going to have to put money on the table.” And I think what he said was that farmers like to farm. That's what they do. They like to farm. They don't want to quit farming if they don't have to. So, you really have to raise the price, and states by themselves don't have the money. They don't have the treasury to be able to do this.

And he said that what we need to do, the federal government built this vast infrastructure, the Colorado River Basin, and it cost a lot of money over several decades. He said, "The federal government's going to have to help solve this with its treasury, buying out the farmers' rights." And he said, "It's going to take a lot of work, it's going to take a lot of time, and it won't be easy." I wonder what you thought about what Brad had to say.

ANNE: It is absolutely true that the federal government has made a lot of investment in the West in water projects since the early part of the 20th century, and they've been very successful. The idea was, we're going to put some federal money into these water projects, and if we build it, they will come. And we came. Here we all are, and the water projects have allowed the development of the West.

But we're in a different climate now, and we need that kind of support to help us transition to the water flows and the water quantity that we have available to us now. We got a ton of money out of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, and that has been very helpful. But I also think - and Brad made this point at the conference that you talked about, Allen - the gap between supply and demand is so large that I am concerned - and I think Brad was articulating this - that conservation measures in ag and in municipal water providers aren't going to be sufficient.

And we do have to look at the possibility of taking ag land out of production. Nobody wants to talk about that. It is such a third rail. But the river just isn't allowing us to keep the same number of acres in production in the same way, and that transition is going to be very, very difficult.

And money can help. We can use federal money, state money, philanthropic money to help make that transition to a lower water use future. Sarah has given us such a great example of one of the ways to do that. But I think we have to acknowledge that some of that is going to be necessary in order to have the political will to talk about how we're going to address the problem and justify federal funding to make it happen.

And we've got great examples. I think in the Rio Grande Valley in particular, those folks recognized a number of years ago that their compact, the Rio Grande compact with New Mexico and Texas, was going to require deliveries at the state line that were going to be really difficult. And they got together and figured out internally in the Rio Grande, in Colorado, how they were going to deal with that situation. We haven't done as much in the Colorado River to address that kind of future possibility, and I think that's one way that federal funding can help.

ALLEN: Thank you. Now James will give us some questions from the audience.

Audience Questions

JAMES: We've got a number of great questions here. We'll lead off with one that cuts across this last theme of conversation about incentivizing conservation in agriculture, or just outright buying it, as Brad was suggesting might come to pass. This is for you, Sarah: when you save water by growing rye, do you use it elsewhere or leave it in the stream or on the ground? And if so, do you risk losing consumptive use credits?

Just to unpack that for the non-water folks in the room, the value of your water right is your consumptive use. It's not how many cubic feet per second you get to divert at a head gate. It's the actual amount of molecules that the plant takes up and consumes that is the value of your water right. And if you diminish that by leaving the water in the stream and not growing a crop, or growing a different crop like rye that takes less water, what happens to those molecules of water that you have conserved that now are in the system benefiting other water users, other water right holders, reservoir contents, et cetera?

Are you getting any credit for that? Is kind of a second part of the question. So, how do you look at that water that you're conserving when you switch to rye?

SARAH: Yeah, great question that I'm going to let Nathan tackle.

NATHAN: That is a very adept description of the difficulty. In Colorado, we have that. The slang is “use it or lose it.” Something specific about the rye and your on-farm production is anytime you use less water, it goes into your record, and then that record is analyzed to say what is your consumptive use.

And so you walk a fine line there of conserving. In an instance, if you're using groundwater, because the subdistricts are conservation plans, you're not really taking a negative hit by leaving water in the aquifer. Your well has an allocation. It has a decree. They're adjudicated for a flow, and that's dependent on aquifer health, in this instance, in the Rio Grande.

And so growing rye, when the Joneses leave water in the aquifer, it doesn't diminish their ability for future use, and it does leave water in the aquifer for the health of everyone around them. That's not always the case, especially with river water. If you don't pull it out of the river, it goes down to the next person, and that is a very difficult one when it goes against your consumptive use analysis.

So then, as a farmer trying to hold on to the value of your water right, there are a lot of decisions to be made, and there's not a silver bullet for it. But overall, if you're using groundwater and the way it's working in the Rio Grande with our subdistricts and trying to manage it, it's a win for the deal.    

ANNE: Part of the problem that Nathan is describing stems from the way our water laws arose. Our water law that started to develop in the 1800s was designed for exploitation of water. That was the whole deal. We wanted people to be able to use water and know that they could rely on it, and that's where “use it or lose it” comes from. If you weren't using it, then we wanted somebody else to use it.

We have a different situation now where we want to incentivize conservation, but we don't recognize that conservation as what's called, in the legal term, a “beneficial use.” And because of that, we've got problems with diminishing the water right over time, and we also have problems with, if Sarah conserves a bunch of surface water, then that stays in the river, but the next person down the line could take it. We're not helping the river system in that way. We're not creating any more water or addressing that gap between supply and demand. We could call conservation a “beneficial use.” We probably need legislation to do that, and we need to empower the state engineer to, what we call “shepherd” that conserved water to where we want it to go, to a reservoir, to the state line, wherever we want it to go.

And those two things would help us a lot, and our other sister states have done that. Utah passed laws a couple of years ago saying conservation for the purpose of dealing with these kinds of low-flow situations is a “beneficial use.” So, we know how to do it, but I think we need some changes in state law to make it happen.

JAMES: Thank you. We have a question here. I'm going to flip it a little bit. The question is: "Are there lessons from the Colorado Basin that could make Rio Grande conservation more effective and less divisive? Example: balancing supply and demand, encouraging cooperation over competition."

I'd actually flip those. Whenever I'm talking to Senator Simpson or any of your colleagues from the San Luis Valley, and I'm whining about the Colorado River and the state of its situation, they say, "Hold my beer," and sometimes quite literally, because the reality is that the Rio Grande's on daily compact administration. We just fret about it on the Colorado River. They've been living it in the Rio Grande. Reservoir contents at Elephant Butte and the other big reservoirs on that system are even worse. It’s hard to believe, but even worse than Lake Powell and Lake Mead. So I would flip that a little bit if it's all right, I’ll take a little prerogative there. Are there lessons from the Rio Grande that could help the Colorado River navigate the territory it seems to be headed?

NATHAN: I don't presume to know everything on the Colorado River, but yes, you could learn a lot of lessons from living in daily curtailment. I think it's a well-known fact that there was a big division between the north and the south of San Luis Valley for a long time because of the different river systems.

The Conejos has the more senior water rights and would be curtailed while the Rio Grande was diverting water, and it caused a lot of heartburn. It took a lot of court, a lot of litigation for all of us to understand how we were going to navigate that curtailment. And so one of the lessons I would say is, rather than fighting each other on any basin or on any tributary or any river, get your butts to the table, and no disrespect, but do not let the Division of Water Resources be the only person determining how this will be administered.

They're going to make it so it's easy to administer. They're not going to make it so it's productive for ag. And so you do not miss the opportunity to be at the table constructively, not throwing darts, not spitting at your neighbor. You get to the table, and you find out how we can make this work for our basin and our river, if that's where it goes.

And you talk about Elephant Butte, which for the Rio Grande is the tail that wags the dog. It's at 1%. That's significantly less than Lake Powell and Lake Mead. The chances of that recovering to make our system work are farther off, but we've got 50 years of living in this condition. So, I would say do not bother fighting your neighbor. Get together and figure out how you're going to move into the future of what the water is going to supply.

JAMES: Wise words. The federal plan for the basin would have renegotiations occurring every two years for 10 years. Who would be at that table?

ANNE: This was a really unusual Record of Decision and directive about our operating regime. I think originally the hope was we would all figure out collectively a consensus solution, seven states, federal government blesses it, it'd be for like 20 years, so we'd know what we were doing, we could rely on it, we knew when the flow was this, here's how much water each state would get…it's not what we have.

What we have is a 10-year what they call “decision framework” that just sets the outside boundaries of what the federal government can do in terms of reductions in deliveries to the lower basin states and the operation of Lake Powell and Lake Mead. But those bookends are so broad that it also calls for making decisions about an operating plan every two years. And we have, as of last Friday, the operating plan for 2027 and 2028, but it calls for that to happen every two years, just as it happens coinciding with the elections in state and federal government that will also occur at that same time every two years, which is not ideal.

But the people in the room have been primarily the principals appointed by the governors for each of the seven Colorado River basin states. Our principal in Colorado is Becky Mitchell. She's the commissioner for Colorado to the Upper Colorado River Commission, and every state has the equivalent. So, those have been the people in the room. And I'll just say, editorially, that there are major water users and major interests in each of these states that would also like to be in that room. And the way it's supposed to work is the state principals are talking to all of their state constituents and bringing to the table those interests, and I think they're very good about doing that. But it's also true that they haven't been able to reach agreement. And so I think there's a lot of sentiment in favor of changing that up to see if we can create a better process that will come to a solution that can provide some certainty.

We've talked about mediation, and the Upper Basin states have proposed engaging a mediator for the future, and I think there's some pretty good likelihood that that will happen, but I also think we need to consider how we want this process to work in the future in a way that is more conducive to getting to yes.

JAMES: All right. Thank you, Anne. We've got time for one last question. There are 22 questions in the queue. We've only gotten to four of them. Please don't think that your question's gone into the ether, never to be seen again. We'll make sure that there's time for you to hopefully approach the panel after the event and have your question answered because they're great questions.

The one I'll pull out is - this is going to sound like a high and tight pitch. It's not intended as such; I see it as more of a softball, so let's see how you hit it - the GDP of Colorado is $584 billion. Agriculture makes up $47 billion, less than 10%, so that's where this question is kind of setting the premise. Yet agriculture uses 75 to 80% of the available water. This appears to be an unsustainable division of resources. Does it make sense to continue to farm in a region which is on its way to becoming a desert? That's the high and tight version. The reason I like this question, the reason I'm asking it as a producer to producers, is to explain why it's really an amazing and high-value use for agriculture to be using that percentage of the state's resources.

NATHAN: I was hoping you were looking at Rob. [laughs]

So, what makes Colorado, Colorado? Is it Denver? Is it Aspen? Is it Alamosa? Or is it the deer, the moose, the elk? Is it the ability to raft, to fish, to ski, to snowboard, to hike? That doesn't happen without water. And while it's true the vast majority of your water is owned by agriculture users, the benefit is statewide, even if it's not being applied to your specific front yard.

We provide the habitat for wildlife. We provide a lot of those return flows, a lot of those successes. I would say growing food is necessary. We all showed up for breakfast, right? It does require some modification, probably. I'm not trying to say, “it's ours, back off.” But I am saying what makes Colorado, Colorado is because of the agricultural component, whether it's the high meadows that have the irrigation, like Robert said, that creates those return flows, or whether it's the fishing access.

All those things that make us what we are, are supported foundationally by Colorado's agriculture. I think one of the things to keep in mind when we start talking about the use of it is the amount of water I put down. If you look at it on its face value, everybody gets that knee-jerk like, "Holy cow, what's this guy doing?" But I don't cut my lawn and then throw it away. Just think about that. I cut my crop and it makes the food you had this morning. Even if it's Colorado and it's not that big, it's absolutely essential to the whole of the thing. So anytime you start segmenting and breaking it up, I think you're on a path to destruction.

ROBERT: I totally agree with Nathan. And also, I think there are different figures that are floating around because the most recent study I saw was it was actually - and it depends how far down the chain you go - how agriculture is supporting the economy is closer to $200 billion.

But as Nathan said, I like to research facts and figures. As farmers and ranchers, we're managing almost half of the surface area of the state of Colorado. And as he said, everybody appreciates the environment that we're in. And there's some concepts out there right now that maybe we should be paying agriculture an “eco services” payment because it's getting harder and harder economically to earn a living farming while we're managing all this open space for the citizens of Colorado.

JAMES: All right. I'm going to kick it back. Just like Mother Nature bats last, Allen bats last. So back to you, Allen.

Alfalfa Crops in Colorado

ALLEN: We're nearing the end of our morning session, and there were a lot of good questions from the audience that won't get asked, and I have some good questions here that probably won't get asked either.

But let's quickly move to alfalfa. You don't have to go very far where people are saying, “we're spending too much water growing alfalfa,” as my grandfather did. And we have panelists here that grow alfalfa. Nathan, do you want to take that one on?

NATHAN: Heck yes, I do. I want you to think about what alfalfa is to you. Don't look at the water use, but it is the caramel in your Snickers. It's the cheese and the dough on your pizza. It's the ice cream in your shake. It's all those things. It's not just this high-consumption crop. It is one of the most intense, high-energy crops you can grow.

Society says we have to do more with less. Nothing does that like alfalfa. It's only rivaled by corn for making energy. So a farmer, a feedlot, a producer can take lower quality grasses and feedstocks, blend it with alfalfa, and get the full nutritional requirement of that animal. The thing about alfalfa is we just look at that consumption, but rye is awesome, and like I said, I'm growing rye, but there's no crop out there that's miraculously going to make a profit without water.

And so then if I can be efficient growing alfalfa and make a profit, as long as the market is there, think of all the segments of society it touches, and it justifies its use any way you figure it. For the water consumption, it justifies its use because it touches every part. The tortillas on the burrito, the cheeses, all the things that come from any of the dairy or any of those other synthesized products come from that production of alfalfa, the beef, all of it.

While it does use a lot of water just on its own, it also is a desert crop. When we have the shortages, it's a great crop to sit back and it'll just wait. We don't always have to demand the water to it. In agriculture, it gives us that buffer, as Robert brought up about Denver Water having that buffer on those lawns. We have it in alfalfa as well. It's sometime portrayed that we are just out there just hammering it out like it's factory. It's not. It’s a crop that will adapt to the water we do have and still make a profit. So, it's worth the money because of the energy it provides to the entirety of the food chain that it touches.

ANNE: But we also export a lot of alfalfa to other countries, and we're exporting our water by doing that. And it's a global market, but it's something we need to think about. That's not so true in Colorado, but it's very true in southern Arizona, southern California, northern Mexico that gets Colorado River water. So, we need to keep that in mind.

ALLEN: Anne, do you happen to know what percentage, how much?

ANNE: I don't. It depends on what area you're talking about. And like I said, this isn't a Colorado issue, but it's more than 10%. It could be as high as 30%. It's a lot of water.

Tribal Representation and Innovation

ALLEN: I have another question for Anne. This has to do with the tribes on the Colorado River. There are 30 tribes, including two in Colorado, the Southern Utes and Ute Mountain Utes. The question is are tribal representatives being included sufficiently in discussions about the future of the Colorado River? And more broadly, in what ways can we ensure that Native Americans do not get exploited as they really have been quite often in the last 120 years?

ANNE: Due to the efforts of the states and the state principals like Becky Mitchell in particular, to ensure that tribal voices are included, that tribal interests are considered in the Colorado River negotiations, it's a lot better than it used to be. And we have seen very considerable efforts to ensure that tribes are included, and I think their interests have been very much more taken into account than in previous iterations of coming up with new operating regimes.

Is it enough? No. I think that we need to do more to recognize the interests of the 30 sovereign tribal nations in the Colorado River Basin, but it's going in the right direction. I was interested in Nathan's description of how the Winter Flow Program works best without a formal agreement. I would say for tribes, we really need a formal agreement that describes their participation in these decision-making processes. And the reason I say that is because some people, like Becky, are very committed to ensuring that the tribal voices are heard, that the tribes are at the table, but if she gets hit by a truck tomorrow, or just the people sitting in the chairs at the table change, you want to make sure that that participation doesn't get lost in the process. And the Upper Colorado River Commission, the upper basin states have started this. There is an MOU about tribal participation, but I think we need that more broadly.

New Opportunities

ALLEN: As we go about the water conversation, we hear an awful lot about how we need to augment our water supply with weather modification. There was a session last week in Steamboat about weather mod. We've been doing it in Colorado since the 1970s, particularly after the 1977 drought. Vail Resorts had cloud seeding in operation the next year. That's one element for an effort to augment the amount of water supply we have. I'm not sure the science has caught up to show that it actually works sufficiently, but it's sort of a gamble. How could we not throw a few hundred thousand dollars at that?

Meanwhile, at this last session a month ago, we had a panelist from Las Vegas who said, "Desal is the answer." Pat Mulroy, and she's been on that bandwagon for quite a while. In fact, we do have desal that works. San Diego is taking ocean water to make water for San Diego that reduces the amount of water that comes out of the Colorado River.

And then at Colorado Water Congress last week, we had a fairly strong theme of people, political candidates and others saying, "We need more storage." Well, storage isn't working so well in the lower Colorado River, but the question for me is, I don't know, frankly, what the role of storage will be.

Does anybody want to take on any of those things? Do we have a role for more storage? Do we have a role for desal? Robert, do you want to start perhaps?

ROBERT: I think we shouldn't eliminate anything. I think we should keep all the options open. As I said before, I think each basin is unique. As I've participated in all the different nine basin roundtables, each one is unique because of the infrastructure, water delivery, the historic consumptive uses, and the personalities in the basin. So, you really have to analyze all of those things when you figure out what's going to work for that particular basin. Personally, though, as a farmer, I don't like messing around with Mother Nature. So, we'll see, but we'll have to look at the science and see what's there and what's going on.

ALLEN: Anybody else want to talk about any of this?

NATHAN: I would say we need to approach storage carefully. I think it has a place. Ask anybody operating their budget without a savings whether they think storage is good, and I think it has a place if we can find out how to manage it. I think for us in the West, I don't think it's going to be the whole answer, and Anne said it best, I don't think it's the full answer, but I do think it's a piece of the discussion we need to stay on top of.

SARAH: I was just going to say my initial thoughts, and seconding what Anne is saying again and again. In ag, there are too many straws in the glass, and a lot of us know that. Not everyone knows that. But I think the desalination… last time I checked, being from San Diego, that's still a trek; we're not near an ocean, so that seems really hard and really expensive.

Like Robert said, it's not a no.  But if we're waiting for that or that's our best idea, we don't have time for that. We need change yesterday. We, as a farm, have cut back our water use by 50%. Nathan and I were talking about this, my husband and I, since moving down, have spent close to a million dollars in surface water rights on our farm. So, although the Rye Project is fun and hopeful and a common ground, we as a farm have been making major, major changes and diversifying and being agile over the last 15 years.

To throw alfalfa a quick bone, potato farmers in our area dumped over 100 million pounds of potatoes this year. That's insane, and no one is talking about the water that got thrown out with that, and that was due to a change in demand from GLP-1s. There are all different reasons, but 100 million pounds of beautiful russet potatoes were dumped, and no one is talking about the water that was used.

So we do need change. We do need change in ag. We do need some accountability, and I don't think we should be waiting on desalination to fix it, because I think we're going to be forked by then.

ANNE: I'd just say in the Colorado River Basin, I think desal is one of the tools in the toolkit. And there's a saying that there is no silver bullet that solves this problem, but there is silver buckshot. And desal is one of the little shots. It works on the coast. It's very expensive. It's not a solution for ag, because you just can't pencil it out. But it could reduce the water demand of cities, and then they are able to take less water from the Colorado River. And the cost of desal is coming down. The energy use of desal is coming down. I think that'll continue. It's much less expensive to desalinate brackish groundwater than it is to take seawater. But those are things that are actively happening, particularly in Southern California. So, I think that will continue, and that'll be part of the solution.

Closing

ALLEN: One final question, and that has to do with how do we keep land in ag? That's part of the question. But then there's another question that's related. If you could make one thing happen, what would it be? Would it be a policy, a market shift, a change in public perception, or something else entirely different? Anybody want to take that one on?

ROBERT: I think now is a great time. We can't let any disasters go to waste, and I think really right now the public's interest in water is so important, and I think venues like this are doing a wonderful job, and we need to educate the public more about this and be more involved in our communities about what we want our state to look like.

SARAH: Mine, I think is pretty fun: buy San Luis Valley-grown rye. Buy Colorado-made and grown beef and rye and wheat, and really know where our food comes from. Keeping it local. That's so cliché. Buy local, what does that mean? It literally means when you're at the store or you're at the market, knowing that it's grown in Colorado and how it's grown.

So the very specific is buy San Luis Valley rye, buy San Luis Valley little potatoes, which use half the amount of water, preferably organic, preferably from Whole Foods - that's where our farm sells to, so you would be supporting our farm, which is very important for our family.

And then, really focus on community over commodity. So the definition of commodity, which we have been so good at in America, at setting up our food system with commodity, right? It's efficient, it's inexpensive, it's nameless and it's faceless and it's heartless, and it is having a huge cost on our health, on our communities, on our soil, on our farmers. So for me, community means buying from farmers where you know their name, you know their face, you know the name and the variety of the grain and the product that you're buying, and that's one of the most powerful things we can do. Commodity is really having a negative impact.

Lastly, I think Nathan and I are on the same page, and we were going to talk about this, but we didn't have time. The one-for-one water plan in Subdistrict One is huge, but we are pro for that. Water is our most finite resource, and the sin tax, unfortunately, is not working. It's one of the least expensive things in our area right now, and it's our most finite resource. Knowing we could turn on the sink any day and literally not have water is brutal and heartbreaking. But that is something that can be passed, and that is in court right now. And that moment of yes or no will really make or break our community and our subdistrict and the state of ag in Colorado.

ALLEN: With that, I would like to turn the mic over to Max Neumeyer, who will wrap us up.

MAX NEUMEYER: Thank you. Please join me in thanking our panelists and our moderator. Thank you all for being here.