The Republican River Basin, part of the Ogallala Aquifer, has allowed irrigated agriculture to serve as the lifeblood of small communities in eastern Colorado for decades. When wells began pumping in the 1950s and 1960s, pivot sprinklers slowly crawled across fields and crops were grown that would flounder without the water. The harvests funded families, schools, rural firehouses and allowed farm and ranch families to do more than simply survive. Farming and ranching are, after all, businesses and businesses have to be profitable.

Few new irrigation well permits have been issued by the state since the 1970s, and irrigated farm ground remains significantly more valuable than dryland. This translates not only into higher yields and more profit at harvest, but also more taxes paid to the various entities that benefit from those dollars.

The Republican River Water Conservation District is the organization ensuring that Colorado is compliant with the Republican River Compact, an agreement between Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska that ensures a certain amount of water flows over the state line. I’ve said before whisky is for drinking, and water is for fighting and I’m still not exaggerating. The lawsuits tossed back and forth between the three states have been numerous and contentious. However, the end goal for all involved is to remain compliant and to keep irrigation water in the communities affected, no matter the zip code. There are young people in every one of these communities who are planning to return to the farm or ranch and join the family business. When feeding consumers is the family business, it is in everyone’s best interest to preserve farms and ranches and keep the food, fuel and fiber flowing.

The District has been at work to remain in compliance with the Compact by incentivizing landowners within the South Fork Focus Zone to retire their irrigation wells permanently. About 66% of the necessary acres in the zone have been retired thus far to meet the 2024 10,000 acre requirement, but another 15,000 acres are still needed by 2029. The District has raised its rates for all users to help fund efforts, and the state has allocated – for the first time – $30 million to the RRWCR for the zone-acre retirement projects in the basin. No one in the basin has been exempted from doing their part.

The state owns about 800 irrigated acres in the Focus Zone. Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the State Land Board both own acres in the area, all irrigated and farmed by local lessees. It appears that the lessee, rather than the owner of the potentially dried acres, would likely receive all or a portion of the financial incentives if the wells were retired. Though the lessee might possibly be farming dryland acres, the blow could be softened by the dollars. According to reporting by Rae Solomon for KUNC, neither state agency has any plans to retire their wells. What is it they say about what is good for the goose is good for the gander?

There is certainly a sense of urgency in finding wells to retire in the zone, and there is a great deal of uncertainty, which was communicated by state engineer Kevin Rein in a 2021 letter to the District. Rein, and his predecessors, have been friends of the RRWCD. In his letter, he reiterated that violating the compact puts Colorado subject to litigation by Kansas and Nebraska, and Colorado could be forced to curtail significant, or even all, irrigation in the basin. Rein can’t possibly know what Kansas or Nebraska might demand if Colorado is not compliant, but the likelihood of economic devastation is very real.

The job of CPW and the State Land Board is to manage their holdings to maximize the returns, be it for wildlife or, in the case of the State Land Board, for school districts. If the state is looking for a return on investment that will pay exponentially, it is retiring the wells on their 800-some acres and allowing the lessee to accept the financial incentives and continue to utilize the ground under the options set forward by the chosen retirement contracts.

If the state stands back and watches wells slam shut and doesn’t play their part in the solution, they’ll suffer far more than the bit of rent they could lose from those acres. The state and agriculture have been locking horns throughout the Polis Administration’s run and they couldn’t buy the kind of press this gesture would mean to agriculture. That’s a lot of goodwill yielded per acre.

Rachel Gabel writes about agriculture and rural issues. She is assistant editor of The Fence Post Magazine, the region’s preeminent agriculture publication. Gabel is a daughter of the state’s oil and gas industry and a member of one of the state’s 12,000 cattle-raising families, and she has authored children’s books used in hundreds of classrooms to teach students about agriculture.