Platteville – As a gabbling auctioneer sold off nearly 30 years’ worth of accumulated farming equipment, men in sagging blue jeans and sturdy work boots studied the rows of tractors, plows, cultivators and other equipment displayed on what used to be part of Steve Weigandt’s first crop of alfalfa.
There won’t be a second crop on his land this year. There isn’t enough water. Like hundreds of other South Platte Basin farmers in Adams, Weld and Morgan counties, Weigandt can pump only 15 percent of the water in the farm’s shallow well. That’s not enough to sustain 80 acres of beans, corn and alfalfa.
“You can’t even irrigate your lawn with that,” observed Mary Dean, who spent more than 30 years running a well-dependent vegetable farm in Brighton.
The Deans, like the Weigandts, are giving up farming. Other farmers are grimly hanging on but wonder whether the same fate awaits them. Farming families whose names even city folks recognize – Sakata, Palombo, Petrocco – are worried about watering their crops.
Most are cutting back on production and switching from vegetables to more profitable crops. Farmers who once supplied produce to Front Range supermarkets instead are planting an ethanol corn strain that brings double the price of sweet corn.
“This year I think there’ll be fewer producers at the farmers’ markets, and those who’ll be there will be in serious straits,” said Tom Cech, executive director of the central Colorado water conservancy district. “It’s going to be a bad year. For some, real bad.”
Thousands affected
More than 3,000 irrigation-well owners are reeling from the first strict enforcement of a 1969 water- rights law that has closed 440 wells entirely and restricted an additional 2,600 irrigation-well owners to using 15 percent of their water. Farmers fortunate enough to own a share of supplementary surface ditch water watched the price of water soar.
“We paid $15,000 per share for five shares of ditch water in 1997, and sold two shares in 2005 for $140,000 apiece,” said Greeley farmer Glenn Bad ley. The Badleys used the income to pay off the mortgage on his 80 acres, along with pumping-depletion fees dating back to the 1960s.
The Badleys own one well, which they are not allowed to use. Three shares of ditch water cannot water the crops of corn and sugar beets they once grew. Now their land only grows pasture grass.
Gov. Bill Ritter called the situation “a water-supply crisis.” He appointed a task force to investigate the irrigation problems facing the state’s farmers, but that work won’t start until May, well after the April planting deadline.
“Up and down the South Platte, the irrigation-well situation is affecting everyone – not only small farmers, but bigger farmers too,” said Terry Wiedeman, co-owner of Kreps- Wiedeman Auctioneers & Real Estate. “Fifty percent of the auctions this year are related to well situations, and it’s going to get worse if things don’t change.
“This affects everyone – implement dealers, fertilizer dealers, people in town the farmers buy from, the people they employ, the folks who depend on farmers for fresh produce. No water, no produce.”
“Another Dust Bowl”
Currently, the law requires irrigation-well owners to replace every gallon they use by putting it back into the South Platte River. Even farmers lucky enough to have both well- and ditch-water irrigation find that task nearly impossible. Many pay thousands in fines for pumping too much water from the wells that Colorado encouraged farmers to drill in 1938. Then, state officials hoped to avoid a repeat of the 1930s droughts that resulted in dense clouds of dust destroying farms from eastern Colorado to northern Texas.
“They’re talking about another Dust Bowl now,” said Claudia Farrell, who runs the popular U-pick Berry Patch Farm in Brighton.
She and her husband are spending $10,000 to dig a pond for supplemental water. They also pay for supplemental ditch water, and they count their blessings when they consider the well-reliant farmers who can’t pump enough water to sustain ground cover, leaving their land vulnerable to wind.
“I was at a water meeting where a farmer said they have huge issues in Morgan County, dust storms where they can’t see across the road,” she said. “The thing is, when we bought this farm, our well had unlimited use. We believed we bought the water rights with the well. Now, suddenly, you don’t get what you paid for.”
Between steeper water expenses, severe production cutbacks that diminish profits, falling crop prices for what farmers can grow, sharp price increases for petroleum-based fertilizer, and debt carried over from previous years, farmers here rarely have seen harder times, said Ben Gutfelder, an octogenarian born on the farm he maintains near Platte ville.
Abandoning the land
“It’s almost to the point where it’s not feasible to grow crops, like we used to,” he said. “We’re going to have to have the land lay idle. Even if we do plant and the water plays out in the river, why, we’re just going to have to abandon it, that’s all. With no water, this could become a ghost area.”
Another likely scenario is that lawns and houses will stand where crops once grew. The Deans’ farm is so close to a new Brighton housing development that they saw thieves scuttle into their fields to steal corn and uproot pepper plants. Some swiped the Deans’ irrigation pumps to sell for scrap metal.
Driving through Weld County, Weigandt resentfully eyes the burgeoning clusters of new two-story homes, each fronted by a bright green lawn. Some yards sport tiny decorative windmills. He is fully aware of the irony that the water denied to a farmer growing alfalfa is readily available once the same land is annexed by a city with senior water rights.
“We’ve got a lot more people in the state than we did 20 years ago, when nobody cared when you turned on your well,” he said. “It’s a shame, because this farm can raise darn good crops. You could feed a nation on the crops we could grow with the water you’re using on grass down there in Denver.”
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-954-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com.
