Farmers, Cattle, and the Colorado River Crisis
This post was written by David Rosenbloom as a part of his 2025 O’Shaughnessy Global Food Fellowship.
This summer, I traveled to Colorado as a Global Food Fellow to speak with those working on the future of agriculture in an increasingly water-scarce West. With an agricultural sector dominated by beef and dairy, Colorado embodies how water-intensive agricultural sectors along the Colorado are navigating today’s challenges and tomorrow’s uncertainties. I set out to learn how policymakers are balancing environmental concerns with the economic self-determination and cultural legacies of agricultural communities, what conservation initiatives are taking root on farms, and how different stakeholders view the future of Colorado agriculture.
—
A storm is brewing over the Colorado River. Its sources are many: chronic overuse engendered by a 1922 compact that allocated water among the seven basin states on the basis of unusually wet early-20th-century data; explosive population growth across the arid West, placing some forty million people dependent on the river today; a run of exceptionally promising snowpack in the 1980s and early 1990s that gave the illusion of abundance one last breath; interim management guidelines adopted in 2007 that did little more than delay an inevitable reckoning with scarcity while water levels continued to decline; and, above all, a twenty-five-year, climate-change-intensified megadrought, the most severe in the basin in over a millenium, that has reduced flows by 20% from their long-term average. The result: there’s no longer enough water to go around – allocations still promise about 15 million acre-feet a year, but the river now delivers barely 12, and projections warn of an additional 20 to 30 percent decline by mid-century.
The 2007 guidelines are set to expire after 2026, and representatives from the seven basin states have been convening to decide the future of water in the region. At the heart of these negotiations lies agriculture. The most detailed accounting of the Colorado’s water use to date, a 2024 article published in Communications Earth & Environment, found that irrigated agriculture consumes 52 percent of the basin’s total supply and 74 percent of all human use. Of the river’s agricultural share, nearly two-thirds are devoted to crops, such as alfalfa and other hays, used to feed beef and dairy cattle.
In Colorado, one thing became immediately apparent to me: everything – or almost everything – revolves around seniority. Colorado follows the prior appropriation doctrine, which means water rights are not tied to land ownership but to who first diverted water and put it to “beneficial use.” In times of shortage, the State Engineer and local water commissioners administer water according to priority: senior users can call for water, and junior users upstream must reduce or stop their diversions until the senior right is satisfied.
Colorado farmers, in general, hold 19th-century or early 20th-century rights; in contrast, transmountain diversions supplying Front Range cities usually have mid-20th-century rights, making them junior. The upshot: if there isn’t sufficient water in the river to satisfy all users in the state, the priority system dictates that urban centers like Denver, Boulder, and Colorado Springs would be among the first to be cut off.
Facing an increasingly uncertain water future, I discovered that these municipalities have thus been incentivized to engage in “buy and dry” schemes: purchasing farmland and/or senior water rights and taking the land permanently out of production to ensure enough water is available for the cities. But farming communities tend to be resistant to these types of initiatives. Philip Womble, an attorney and hydrologist specializing in water policy and water markets, underscored to me the nature of this opposition: “these concerns must be understood as concerns around the social and cultural impacts on these communities [...] of external actors resulting in less and less agricultural land being farmed.” For Brian Richter, president of Sustainable Waters, a global water education organization, this is completely understandable: “Paying a bunch of farmers for their land or water rights [...] starts to tear at the fabric of rural communities. Because if you have a third of the farmers no longer growing crops in a place like Grand Junction or, you know, Yuma, then you don't have as many people showing up in the restaurants, you don't have as many people buying new cars. You know, there are, there are good examples in the west of how small rural communities got decimated because too much reduction in agricultural water use took place. And so the agricultural communities are very defensive, very resistant to allowing that to happen.”
The reality, though, is that water is unlikely to be turned off to the big cities any time soon. As Douglas Kenney, Director of the Western Water Policy Program at the University of Colorado Law School, put it to me: “you're not going to be growing alfalfa in western Colorado while Denver runs out of water.” As alternatives to “buy and dry” scenarios, then, stakeholders in Colorado have been increasingly turning towards initiatives that improve water conservation on farms without infringing upon the social and economic foundations of rural communities.
One such initiative that kept on coming up in conversations is the System Conservation Pilot Program, run by the Upper Colorado River Commission in partnership with the four Upper Basin states. First implemented between 2015 and 2018, the program compensates farmers for voluntary and temporary reductions in water use, primarily through producers fallowing parts of their fields.
Despite some promising figures from this first trial – 64 projects implemented, an estimated 51,000 acre-feet less of water used by participating farms – the program’s raison-d’être wasn’t entirely clear. The water conserved by participating farms was not taken out of use entirely: as a policy expert at the Colorado River Water Conservation District told me, “Ideally, if you are going to do a program like this, you would want to put this water that's conserved somewhere so that you can use for compact compliance…But the Pilot Program doesn't do that. If someone conserves water, that water continues to go downstream. Someone immediately downstream from that person can use that water for whatever they want.”
Chuck Cullom, Director of the Upper Colorado River Commission, admitted to me that these are valid concerns, which is why UCRC has taken a different approach for the second iteration of the program, which launched in 2022. Rather than fallowing their land, farmers in the program are now encouraged to invest in new tools for drought resiliency that they likely wouldn’t otherwise attempt trying. As he explained, “Farming is a risky endeavor because of the vagaries of markets, costs and hydrology … but if you can offset their risk for new endeavors, new approaches, new crops, then you'll have a lot more takers.” With over 60 contracts agreed to in 2023 and over 100 in 2024, Cullom believes his team has demonstrated not only the “appetite for producers to develop their own local drought resiliency tools,” but also the untapped potential of on-farm conservation initiatives: some farmers decided to take a field out of production tor rehabilitate infrastructure, others tried new alternative forage crops like triticale, while still others opted to try out different soil health treatments.
Unfortunately, though, Colorado producers have not been able to participate in this new iteration of the program. In 2021, the Colorado River Water Conservation District put forth an argument that conservation was not a “beneficial use” of watering, and soon after the State Engineer concurred. The result, as Anne Castle explained, is that “in Colorado we have adopted the legal position that conservation of water is not a beneficial use,” meaning farmers risk their rights if they accept payment to use less.
But the SCPP – which has been halted since its reauthorization bill stalled in the House this session – isn’t the only mechanism through which Colorado farmers are being encouraged to explore conservation initiatives. Kate Greenberg, Colorado's Commissioner of Agriculture, has been pushing for investments within the state that recognize the need to adapt to the times: the STAR soil health program, first launched in 2019 and now expanded through the federally backed STAR Plus initiative, pays producers to adopt practices like cover crops, reduced tillage, and crop diversification; the state’s Drought and Climate Resilience Office, created in 2021, coordinates agencies and provides planning tools for water-scarce regions; agrivoltaics research and demonstration projects, supported by a $500,000 state grant program in 2023, tests, for example, how solar arrays can be paired with grazing systems and crop production; and the Climate Smart Market Expansion Project, launched in 2025, helps producers who invest in climate-friendly practices reach new markets through grants of up to $90,000. These initiatives reflect, as
Commissioner Greenberg told me, that those in Colorado’s Department of Agriculture are committed to “looking for ways to keep farmers on the land, to keep folks in production…providing incentives to produce in a way that's more environmentally sustainable and meets the real environmental conditions of our time.”
Some, however, argued to me that the problem is too large to be solved by these types of initiatives. Richter, for example, pointed out that since the Inflation Reduction Act, the federal government has been paying roughly $1.3 billion per year for farmers to temporarily fallow fields or reduce water use, and that even at that scale, it has only covered about one-third of the conservation needed to balance water demand with supply. “The temporary thing,” Richter told me, “is untenable. It’s an unworkable solution. We’re not going to keep approving more than a billion dollars a year…There has to be new strategies put on the table, and they're gonna be very difficult for the agricultural community to swallow and agree to. But there's no way in the world you can save the river system and prevent catastrophe without doing it.”
Kenney agrees. In our meeting, he emphasized that changes in technology, in terms of net consumptive changes, doesn’t make nearly a big enough difference. The tradeoff, between, on the one hand, taking serious steps for conservation by taking land out of production, and, on the other, the devastating cultural, economic and social impacts that this has, was the focus of our nearly hour-long discussion. If the river system isn’t to be completely decimated, “agriculture is not going to come out of this happy,” he told me. Ultimately, for Kenney, the question is whether in the interest of conserving the river, “we as a society are comfortable with the effects that moving away from water-intensive farming sectors will have.”
–
The storm over the Colorado is only growing darker, and the future of agriculture in the West lies directly in its path. As Richter warned me, “this could very likely turn into the biggest water crisis in human history, and it's coming at us at a frightening speed.” Whether the seven states summon the will for serious reforms or continue to defer the hardest choices remains to be seen. But, as I learned this summer, when the reckoning arrives, the agricultural landscape of the West will be profoundly transformed.
