Colorado’s family farms and ranches — forever fighting to stay afloat — apparently don’t face enough challenges to satisfy the Democrats who run our state legislature. So, last year, ruling Democrats heaped another burden on the people who provide all of us our food.

They passed a law effectively unionizing farm and ranch hands. That’s right — collective bargaining, binding arbitration and even the threat of strikes are now the new normal for Colorado’s ag workers. As if they were longshoremen on the New Jersey waterfront.

At a time when inflation is spiraling in Colorado and nationwide for the first time in decades — and just as Colorado and the rest of the country appear to be heading into a recession — the new mandate on our agricultural economy is sure to make matters worse. It stands to push already-rising food prices even higher by driving up labor costs. Consumers in Colorado’s metro areas will be picking up the tab, starting at the meat counter and the produce section.

Now, a coalition of Colorado farmers and ranchers is suing to stop implementation of some of the new law’s provisions. Parts of the law, they say, are unconstitutional.

As noted in a Gazette news report last week, Colorado’s new law is based on one adopted in 2018 in California — that go-to for model legislation among Colorado Democrats, who seem to have developed an inexplicable policy crush on the long-tarnished Golden State.

California’s law already has been narrowed by a successful court challenge. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down a portion of it that allowed labor organizers to traipse on farms and ranches at will. The court found that the right to “invade (a) growers’ property…constitutes a per se physical taking.”

Colorado’s version of the law is even more sweeping. It grants wide-ranging access to farms and ranches for not only labor organizers but also a host of other service providers who presumably will minister to workers’ health care and other needs. Even lawyers offering legal services — to farm workers who now will be able to sue their employers, perhaps for overtime disputes? — can come on in.

Which is why Colorado farmers and ranchers have brought a lawsuit of their own. The action, filed in U.S. District Court in Denver, challenges the right of “uninvited parties” — the aforementioned army of labor organizers, lawyers and the like — to enter the plaintiffs’ farms and ranches. The plaintiffs maintain that’s a violation of their Fifth Amendment rights. The access provisions “impose an easement” upon the plaintiffs’ properties, and deprive them of the right to exclude “uninvited parties” from their farms and ranches. That nearly-unlimited access without compensation becomes a taking under the Fifth Amendment, the suit says.

Constitutional rights aside — as important as they are — the underlying policy that is at issue stands to cripple Colorado’s agricultural economy. That’s bad for the producers, of course, but also ultimately for all consumers. At least, those of us who eat.

All of which is an abstraction to the urban-suburban Democrats who rule the roost in Denver. It was a foregone conclusion they would take agriculture for granted and leave it in the dust when it comes to policy making. After all, rural Colorado is simply not their constituency; organized labor is — and it’s a major Democratic campaign donor, of course.

What’s noteworthy, though, is that the Democrats who control the legislature and all statewide government offices at the Capitol would forsake the average Colorado consumer, as well — just to please Big Labor. The courts may be the only hope farmers, ranchers — and consumers — have left to stop the mandate’s enforcement.

Colorado Springs Gazette editorial board