Rural economies tied to water

“We have to understand that agriculture is the fiber of the state. We’re challenged as a state with agriculture as to how we preserve that tradition for our children.”  - Colorado Governor Ritter at 17th Annual Governor’s Forum  on Colorado Agriculture

Water politics

Water Politics from the Ground Up
A new report from Western Progress with a new report [pdf] authored by water law experts Denise Fort and Lawrence MacDonnell and informed by a bevy of water and policy experts.  This article contains an eight-point set of solutions to the problem.
New West Politics: Voice of the Rocky Mountains
“More and more, [...]

Future of water in the west

New York Times article October 2007
“. . . . The biggest issue is that agriculture consumes most of the water, as much as 90 percent of it, in a state like Colorado. ‘The West has gone from a fur-trapping, to a mining, to an agricultural, to a manufacturing, to an urban-centric economy,’ . . [...]

Republican River Basin Issues Subject of March 5 Conference

Mike Petersen, formerly NRCS Soil Scientist, who helped the Yuma Conservation District with its Water and Nutrient Management Project, is slated to speak at this conference. 
From the McCook Daily Gazette:  “Making Cent$ of Every Drop … ” is a conference geared toward area producers and business people looking for a greater understanding of what’s going [...]

Pipeline for the Republican River Compact

Robbing Peter to pay Paul . . from a non-renewable resource and funded by irrigated farmers
From the Sterling Journal Advocate Sat., Feb. 12, 2008
“On Jan. 22, RRWCD (Republican River Water Conservation District) signed the second of two contracts to purchase designated ground water rights that will produce nearly 15,000 acre-feet of water per year for a [...]

(Book) Blue Covenant: The global water crisis

“The thing that I’m trying to establish with the first chapter, which is called “Where Has All the Water Gone,” is that what we learned in grade five about the hydrologic cycle being a closed, fixed cycle that could never be interrupted and could never go anywhere, is not true. They weren’t lying to us, [...]

Ethanol Boom

Newsweek article on Ethanol in Yuma County
. . . . In the arid regions of the American West, water has always been a precious, liquid gold. But in Adamson’s home of Yuma County, Colorado, two hours east of Denver, the stakes just got higher. Thanks to the boom in ethanol production spurred by green-energy concerns, corn [...]

Republican River Basin Pathway Project - Pilot Farms

In the book, Ogallala Blue, author William Ashworth says that we are not going to dry up the Ogallala Aquifer. But he says we will dry up parts of the aquifer — including eastern Colorado.  The question is how soon? And to prolong the life of this part of the aquifer, according to Ashworth, will [...]

Turning the West into a desert?

From Gristmill
Observations have shown that the hydrological cycle of the western United States changed significantly over the last half of the 20th century. We present a regional, multivariable climate change detection and attribution study, using a high-resolution hydrologic model forced by global climate models, focusing on the changes that have already affected this primarily arid [...]

SB 119 - Cisterns for rural residents with exempt wells

SB119
Rural residents with exempt wells for watering livestock, lawns and gardens would be allowed to begin legally storing rainwater in 5,000 gallon cisterns under a proposed law being considered by the Colorado Senate this week. Senate Bill 119 also would allow the Division of Water Resources to authorize 10 pilot projects statewide to determine whether [...]