This year’s record-warm, dry spring is pummeling Colorado farmers amid multiple threats, disrupting the state’s $9 billion agricultural sector and jeopardizing even signature crops such as Pueblo green chiles, Olathe sweet corn and Palisade peaches.
Water scarcity, due to exceptionally low mountain snow and soil-drying heat, looms foremost.
“If we don’t get moisture, I’m not going to plant,” said chile grower Praxie Vigil, who runs along the Bessemer Ditch, a 43-mile irrigation canal that once nourished crops across 20,000 acres east of Pueblo. He was planning to decide this weekend.
“Itap not looking good for any of us. Usually, I just plant and hope for the best. But this year, I’m not going to. This is bad. I can barely water 20 acres,” said Vigil, who works a side job as a pipe-welder to make ends meet.
The dry conditions, compounded by federal policies and turbulence far beyond the Rocky Mountain West, are forcing Colorado farmers to scale back production this year, change the crops they prioritize and question their long-term survival. Grocery shoppers likely will see less locally grown food in produce sections.
First, the Trump administration’s tariffs and war on Iran drove up prices for fertilizer, packaging and other materials. The Mideast conflict also broke supply chains — sprinkler heads and filters needed for those peaches, made in Israel, aren’t available.
Then, Trump’s bombing that began Feb. 28 led to fuel costs spiking to $5 per gallon of diesel.
Meanwhile, the federal government’s crackdown on immigration and state limits on how many hours seasonal foreign workers with H2A visas can work have intensified agricultural labor uncertainty.
“I haven’t had anybody physically taken away. But there’s definitely fear among the workers,” Brian Crites said at , working his family’s 1890s homestead at Avondale, where he’ll leave 750 of his 1,000 acres unplanted due to high costs and lack of water. Even though workers from Mexico on his farm hold green cards, they see information online, Crites said. “I try to keep the morale up. I tell them they’re pretty safe here.”
Other challenges include retailers mislabeling produce as Colorado-grown when it’s not, which degrades the state brand. Lawmakers and Gov. Jared Polis just prohibiting the deceptive trade practice of fake local labeling.
“Agriculture is a big powerhouse of our economy. It is our No. 1 export sector. We do everything we can to support ranchers and farmers in our state,” Polis said in an interview last week. “What the government cannot do is make it rain or snow.”
‘Hit from every direction’
As summer approaches, “everybody’s looking at what their options are,” said peach grower Bruce Talbott, operator of on Colorado’s Western Slope.
His orchards depend largely on the federally run Green Mountain Reservoir, which measured 36% full last week, with streams feeding the reservoir also running low because paltry mountain snowpack had already melted away.
“We want to haul down as little water as possible and stretch what we do have as far as we can. How thatap going to play out is unknown. …We’ve never actually shut off the canals. Right now, we’re running them low,” Talbott said.
“If there’s no more capturable water, then we’ve got enough until Aug. 1.” he said. “Thatap enough that about half the peaches would get harvested. The last half would not. The peaches would be small. And it would be awfully hard on trees. Our chances of having healthy trees headed into next year would be very compromised. We’d probably lose a lot of orchards.”
Hail this month damaged cherries, pears and apricots in the area, and crops that bloomed early in February due to warm winter temperatures need water longer and still are vulnerable to frost through May, director Jessica Burford said.
“We’re getting hit from every direction,” she said. “It’s going to be a very expensive year. Farmers are worried about our peaches being large enough to meet grocery store standards.”
Yet few were quitting.
“We are farmers. We are here to produce food. If we don’t do it, we won’t get paychecks. We would starve, our fields would go to crap, and weeds would take over. So we might as well give it a shot,” said Dalton Milberger, owner of , east of Pueblo. “Chile is our lifeline.”
As Milberger was preparing to plant chile seeds last week, his machine broke down.
A statewide crisis
Farmers statewide are wrestling with similar difficult decisions on whether to plant crops, Commissioner Kate Greenberg said.
The unprecedented warm weather has led to “an incredible lack of soil moisture,” and that, combined with the other “conflating factors,” means that — unless summer brings regular monsoon rain — some farms may die, Greenberg said.
“It’s hard to pinpoint if and when we lose farmers and what exactly the tipping point is,” she said. “Folks are now pivoting from their plans. Maybe it means cutting back on acres, maybe not growing so much. Maybe the conversation is that this is the year when we turn in our gloves and call it good. We’ve got a lot of those conversations going on right now. The combined pressures on farming and ranching families are not alleviating. It’s possible they could force out family agriculture.”
Taking a year off generally isn’t an option, “because there are payments to be made,” said Mike Bartolo, who helped develop resilient green chile seeds over 32 years of work as a research scientist for the and serves on the board of the .
Bartolo was born and raised in the Arkansas River Valley, where water rights sell-offs to Front Range cities in the 1970s decimated farm fields and towns. Aurora and Colorado Springs officials, seeing the Colorado River Basin’s water shrinking, again are pressing for control over stressed farmers’ water rights, Bartolo said.
Planting crops now — “one of the most troubling times in agriculture I’ve witnessed in my lifetime” — means taking “a tremendous amount of risk, on top of existing risks,” he said.
“Unless there’s some miraculous turnaround, we face an era of uncertainty. We don’t know what to do. You’re kind of backed into a corner. What do you do? This is your livelihood. How do you sustain yourself? In Colorado’s rural communities, we are looking at survival.”
‘Hoping to get through this year’
State leaders say they’re committed to supporting farming and rural communities. But climate change impacts “will get worse,” Polis said, anticipating “a world of scarcity of water” where “in addition to the reduced supply, there’s also increased demand” due to population growth.
Federal immigration and foreign policies aren’t helping, he said. “If you start a war with Iran, you know that prices are going to go up a lot.”
Climate warming sets off cascading changes, such as increased pests, for which a state in Palisade breeds insect natural enemies that can be deployed to manage those pests.
But worms, mites and beetles still gnaw at the crops in Olathe, where farming has become “crisis management,” said owner David Harold, who decided last week he’ll be “cutting way back” on sweet corn.
Instead of planting corn on 1,600 acres, he’ll plant on just 100 to 300 acres. That will make it harder to find the Olathe sweet corn in supermarkets, and Harold said he’ll shift to direct sales to people who pre-order online.
Tuxedo is also “losing some workers to other areas” where migrants can work more hours, despite giving them “all the extra hours and overtime I can afford,” he said.
“We are very off balance. Fertilizer prices. Diesel prices. Transportation. I cannot get equipment in and out of here like I need to. The whole thing has been coming apart. We don’t have a clear path right now,” Harold said.
“I’m not going to put the money into these crops and then hope the bugs don’t get me, hope there’s enough water, hope there’s enough truck drivers, hope the consumer can afford it. It’s been a rollercoaster. What are we going to do? Can we take the risk? We’re struggling. Big changes are here right now. I am hoping to get through this year.”
Crop-switching and reduced planting
Along the Arkansas River east of Pueblo, farmers last week were meeting with irrigators and leaning toward a strategy of prioritizing high-value crops, such as the green chiles, while reducing corn and alfalfa.
But “it’s touch and go,” said fifth-generation farmer Rocky Musso, operator of , eight miles east of Pueblo. Musso had his fields plowed and was headed to meet with a neighbor “before we make a decision” to find out who might be able to spare unused shares of water.
“We don’t want to plant too conservatively. We will cut down to about 60% to 75% of our chile planting,” he said. “We were always taught to farm every season. You get discouraged. But it does us no good to get discouraged.”
At , established in 1890, water levels in the Bessemer Ditch were roughly 70 cubic feet per second. That’s less than half the typical spring flows during planting season, due to the low snowpack in the mountains west of Leadville above the headwaters of the Arkansas River.
The family operators produce a variety of foods, including pinto beans, onions, squash, tomatoes and pumpkins — in addition to Pueblo green chiles.
While they’re facing “the worst year in recorded history,” they made some smart moves, such as anticipating the impact of tariffs and stocking up early on fertilizers before prices went up, Jayme DiSanti said.
“We’re still going to plant. We’re going to cut back on other things and focus on vegetables,” DiSanti said. “We are not going to cut back on green chiles. That’s our thing. We’re going to be short on water. But chiles like it hot and dry. So people can probably expect hotter chile.”
