The Peachwood Farms groundwater conservation agreement has also prompted water managers in overdrafted basins from California to Kansas to approach Colorado Open Lands for information on how to use similar arrangements to preserve water for their growers.
The stakes are high and mounting: The nation’s aquifers are dwindling due to rising temperatures, drought, and overuse. Many are not replenishable. Disappearing groundwater threatens the livelihood of crucial agricultural regions like the San Luis Valley, which in turn diminishes the national food system, making the U.S. more reliant on imports. The breadth of the problem prompted President Biden’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology to issue a warning in December, calling the crisis “an all-hands-on-deck moment for groundwater sustainability.”
The refusal of some growers nationwide to curb groundwater pumping became evident in May, when Idaho’s water agency ordered limitations on the use of wells serving a half million acres of agricultural land, an action described as “the largest curtailment” in state history.
In southwestern Colorado’s high desert, producers already till fewer acres, tax themselves to fund fallowing programs, and plant less water-intensive crops. Taxpayers are also footing the bill for a $30 million program approved by the state legislature, in which the Rio Grande Water Conservation District uses funding from the American Rescue Plan Act to pay farmers for retiring their wells.
Yet even after growers here cut pumping by a third, in 2022, water in one of two aquifers fell to its lowest level on record, after extreme heat led to diminished snowpack. Throughout the West, the snowpack of the mountains acts as water bank, with snowmelt filling creeks and streams throughout the summer that help irrigate fields and recharge the aquifer. (The San Luis Valley floor receives only seven inches of rain per year.)
To ensure its aquifers remain sustainable amid an uncertain climate future, the Rio Grande Water Conservation District must permanently withdraw up to 60,000 acres of land from irrigation, about 10 percent of the valley’s arable land. After two decades of effort, the aquifers are only a third of the way charged, and frustration with the pace of recovery is high among water managers, producers, and residents.
“The aquifer has not recovered, and we have spent tens of millions of dollars on programs to reduce groundwater withdrawals,” said Amber Pacheco, the Rio Grande Water Conservation District’s deputy general manager, who oversees irrigators in six subdistricts. (A seventh is operated by the Trinchera Ground Water Management Subdistrict.) Some of the region’s subdistricts still haven’t seen any aquifer recovery and, she added, they “are in a fight against Mother Nature.”
Easements Ain’t Easy
Most of the water-saving programs in the valley so far have focused on short-term drying up of land. None have created perpetual groundwater savings or allowed people to keep farming by reducing irrigation over their entire property.
Enter groundwater conservation easements. These are legal tools that restrict pumping on a certain piece of property, and in the arid West and Midwest, they present innovative solutions to aquifer depletion.
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Publish date : 2024-11-03 20:33:00
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