Who will give up their water? Colorado farmers fear a growing city’s need for more to feed development.

OTERO COUNTY — Spring burst across the Lower Arkansas River Valley in late March, sending farmers and their crews in this swath of southeastern Colorado hustling to prepare for another growing season.

Just-turned fields filled the air with the rich scent of dirt, mixing with the tart smokiness from workers burning weeds in irrigation ditches, preparing for the return of water. Early crops of alfalfa and winter wheat peeked from the ground, hinting at the fields of green to come.

As a worker maneuvered a massive leveler in the fields behind their house, Alan and Peggy Frantz pondered the future of their Rocky Ford farm — and their larger agricultural community strung along the Lower Arkansas River east of Pueblo.

The collapse of it all doesn’t feel too far out, too improbable, Alan Frantz said. Maybe not in their lifetimes, the couple said, but they’ve made sure to send their kids to college in case it all goes away.

“At some point, the cities just have to stop growing,” Alan Frantz said. “If you want a Dust Bowl like the ’30s, go ahead and take all the water, dry this all up.”

Colorado Springs is one of the cities Frantz and many of his neighbors worry most about — and now they fear a proposed 6,500-home annexation to that city will increase pressure on its utilities to source more water from the Arkansas. The farmers use the river to irrigate more than 220,000 acres of farmland, the economic backbone of the region.

Already, Colorado Springs Utilities estimates it will need 34,000 more acre-feet of water — or 11 billion gallons — annually to meet population growth for when the city fully develops inside its current boundaries, estimated to occur around 2070. Every annexation of land into the state’s second-largest city adds to that future gap.

Without water, there is no farming. And without farming, Frantz said, there would be no towns along the Lower Arkansas as it stretches from Pueblo to the Kansas border.

“There’s a fear in the Lower Arkansas Valley that communities here will die off at the rate Colorado Springs grows,” said Jack Goble, the general manager of the Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservancy District.

The Colorado Springs City Council is set to decide Tuesday whether to rescind its Jan. 28 approval of the Karman Line annexation after a successful petition drive forced officials to reconsider. Alternatively, the council could let the city’s voters decide in a special election whether the annexation should proceed.

The controversy around the Colorado Springs annexation is the most recent flashpoint illustrating one of the central tensions in the state: Colorado’s cities do not have enough water to meet projected growth and climate change is shrinking the finite amount of water available. Where should the cities go for more supply? Who will give up their water?

The decades-old battle plays out across the state as growing Front Range communities seek new water sources. Communities on the Western Slope fear more of their water will be routed east across the Continental Divide, especially as the region’s largest river shrinks. Farmers and ranchers in the San Luis Valley successfully fought off an attempt by a company to pipe water from the valley’s depleting aquifer to ever-growing Douglas County. Aurora’s $80-million purchase of Otero County water rights last year rankled water leaders in southeastern Colorado, prompting threats of litigation.

“We all live within finite or even diminishing resources, but the view from city leaders is, ‘If you’re not growing, you’re dying,’ ” said Mike Bartolo, a retired Colorado State University agriculture researcher who grew up in the valley and spent three decades at the Arkansas Valley Research Center in Rocky Ford. “And that’s just such an outrageous view to have. … It’s a cake baked with arrogance and ignorance and iced with a thick layer of greed.”

Historically, some Front Range cities have sourced additional water supplies by buying farmland and repurposing the water attached to the land for municipal use. When done at broad scale, the removal of farm water can desiccate a community’s entire economy — just as water purchases by Aurora and Colorado Springs in the 1970s transformed Crowley County’s farmland into acres of weeds and dust.

“A lot of agricultural communities, like the Lower Arkansas, they’re just feeling like they should be put on the Endangered Species Act,” said Robert Sakata, the Colorado Department of Agriculture’s water policy advisor, noting that the state has lost about a third of its irrigated farmland since 1997. “There’s a lot of doom and gloom.”

About 90% of all water used in Colorado goes to the state’s $47 billion agriculture industry, 7% toward municipal and business use, and 3% for large industrial projects, according to the Colorado Water Plan.

As the state’s population grows, water experts estimate that municipal and industrial water users will need at least 230,000 acre-feet more water annually by 2050 — though the gap could be as large as 740,000 acre-feet. An acre-foot is the amount of water it takes to cover an acre in a foot of water and is generally enough to provide for two families’ yearly needs.

Already, the agriculture industry does not have enough water to produce at its full potential. The water plan estimates that, on average, about 80% of annual agricultural water demand is met.

The state water plan calls on Coloradans to realize “the reality that water in Colorado is not available in quantities to meet all needs at all times. Meeting increased municipal water needs must be balanced with maintaining agricultural uses and maintaining streamflows for environment and recreation use.”

Even if Colorado Springs rescinds approval for Karman Line, people along the Lower Arkansas River fear another proposed annexation will pop up. The Colorado Springs council in August rejected a 3,200-acre, 9,500-home annexation by some of the same developers, but then it approved Karman Line.

“It’s kind of like a game of whack-a-mole,” Goble said.

More water needed amid growth

The Karman Line annexation would add 1,900 acres and about 6,500 homes east of the city, though the bulk of the development would not touch current city limits and would be concentrated nearly four miles from the city border. The development would need about 1,672 acre-feet of water a year, according to Colorado Springs Utilities.

The utility — which is governed by the City Council — has enough water to meet current needs and Karman Line’s potential needs, said Lisa Barbato, its chief systems planning and projects officer.

But any addition to the city increases the amount of water it will eventually need to meet future growth.

The council, not Colorado Springs Utilities, decides when and whether to expand the city’s footprint. Average annual water use in the city totals about 70,000 acre-feet — less than the 95,000 acre-feet of water the utility can reliably provide now. But the utility estimates it will need to provide 129,000 acre-feet of water to the growing city when it is fully developed inside city limits, not including any annexations.

Part of the plan to secure another 34,000 acre-feet of water to meet that future need is to add between 15,000 and 25,000 acre-feet of agricultural water from the Arkansas River basin to its supplies, according to Colorado Springs Utilities’ long-term water plan. The water could come from temporary leases or permanent water rights purchases, the plan states.

When asked if there is a point when it doesn’t make sense for the city to continue expanding, Barbato talked about how the city has been able to consume the same amount of water even as it grows by increasing efficiency and conservation.

“At this point, we’re confident that we’re going to be able to meet our customers’ water needs,” she said.

Just as it needs water, the growing city also needs housing, Karman Line developer Doug Quimby said. Much of the undeveloped land inside city limits — the 24,000-acre Banning Lewis Ranch on the city’s eastern edge — is owned by one developer and sets up a monopoly dynamic, he said.

But some Colorado Springs residents are skeptical that the Karman Line annexation is smart growth. After the council approved the annexation in January, more than 18,000 city residents signed a petition forcing officials to reconsider the decision. Residents’ worries included burdening the city’s emergency services, increased utility costs and the development’s water needs, said Ann Rush, one of the organizers of the petition campaign.

“I think a lot of people just want City Council to just take care of what’s already going on in the city instead of adding on,” she said.

If the council or voters were to nix the Karman Line annexation, the company behind it would still try to build in unincorporated El Paso County or create a new municipality, Quimby said. The biggest obstacle would be finding another source of water, he said, but other options exist.

“It’s certainly not just Karman Line. It’s the whole Front Range where these issues have to be addressed on a larger basis,” Quimby said. “Water is a real issue, I don’t want to downplay it. The best thing we could do is now that we’ve had 22 years of drought, if we could have 22 years of monsoons, that’d solve the problem for another 50 years — but that doesn’t seem likely.”

Cities for years have become more efficient with their water. Now, agriculture needs to do the same, he said, since it is the sector using by far the most water in the state.

“That change is going to come, it’s inevitable — it has to,” he said.

Is a win-win possible?

Colorado Springs Utilities leaders hope to expand its agricultural water supplies in a way that is a win-win for the city and the farming communities, said Kim Gortz, the water supplies resources manager.

The problem does not necessarily need to pit urban growth against agricultural needs, she said. Cities have learned to do more with less water; could they help agriculture do the same?

“How do we think differently with agriculture as well?” she said. “Does the future look different? It’s not always ‘versus’ — can they learn from us and can we learn from them?”

Colorado Springs Utilities has pursued several ways to share water between the city and Lower Arkansas River farmers without permanently drying up farmland. One project finalized in 2018 allows the utility access to agricultural water for five of every 10 years, while farmers get the water the other five years.

In 2022, the utility inked an agreement with Bent County that allows it to use up to 15,000 acre-feet of water annually but restricts the utility from permanently drying up more than 3,125 acres of irrigated farmland. In return, the utility will pay the county millions of dollars in addition to any payments the utility will pay those selling their water.

Utility officials hope to gain some of that water through a program that helps farmers install more efficient center-pivot sprinklers, which water a field in a circle. The utility will then use the water that would have been used to irrigate the corners of land parcels.

“We’re looking at it as a long, learning-by-doing process,” Gortz said. “We’re not saying that what we’re doing today is perfect. We’re going to learn from it and might do something a little bit different tomorrow.”

While residents of the Lower Arkansas Valley said they are subsidizing the city’s growth through their water, Barbato says Colorado Springs provides the farming communities with health care, higher education, and arts and culture.

Quimby, the developer, said he sympathized with the farmers’ and ranchers’ concerns. His grandpa raised cattle and his dad grew up on a ranch. But it’s unfair, in his view, for the farmers to point their fingers at Colorado Springs when they’re the ones selling the water.

“Colorado Springs can’t steal their water,” Quimby said. “They own it. They have to decide to sell it. So if they don’t sell it, we can’t buy it.”

A tricky spiral

But things aren’t so simple on the Lower Arkansas.

For many farmers, their land and the water attached to it are their savings and retirement accounts, said Goble, the conservancy district manager. They sell when times are hard, there are debts to pay or when they have nobody to take over the business. Big cities can also often pay many times over what another farming family could.

In Rocky Ford, even those who don’t sell face the repercussions of those who do.

Alisha Knapp — part of the the fifth generation of her family to work on Knapp Farms — must think carefully about the water she uses on the chiles, tomatoes and other produce she grows. The water quality in the Arkansas River has degraded over time, requiring many farms to treat their water before spraying it on human food. Declining water quality means farmers must pay more to treat their water; if they don’t treat it, their crops become less healthy and prolific.

“It’s scary, it’s really scary,” she said of the future of farming in the valley.

When Colorado Springs buys agricultural water from the Lower Arkansas Valley, it doesn’t wait for the water to travel to the farmland it was once attached to before taking it for city use. Instead, the city is able to take the water directly from Pueblo Reservoir — upstream of the valley’s agricultural fields.

That means less Pueblo Reservoir water, which is generally considered clean, mixes with effluent entering the river from Fountain Creek. The reservoir water is crucial to dilute the natural salinity of the river system and to offset the polluted water from the creek. On March 25, as Knapp prepared chile seedlings in her greenhouse, about two-thirds of the water in the river in Rocky Ford was Fountain Creek water and one-third water was from Pueblo Reservoir.

Fountain Creek runs south through Colorado Springs before joining the Arkansas in Pueblo, dumping sediment, oil, heavy metals, E. coli, pesticides, PFAS and other pollutants into the river. The pollution became so bad that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state sued the city in 2017 for violations of the Clean Water Act, eventually prompting a settlement.

The different waters are visible from space — satellite imagery from Google shows the brackish brown of Fountain Creek mixing with the deep blue-green of the Arkansas River, eventually making the entire river brown after the confluence.

“Even if farmers never want to sell, they’re still getting worse and worse water,” Goble said.

It’s a tricky calculus for the farmers that remain, said Alan Franz, the Rocky Ford farmer. If they wait too long and the water quality degrades too steeply, their land and water will lose its value.

“If we can’t grow crops, we’re going to have to figure out what to do with hundreds of acres of dirt,” he said.

Farmers leaving means fewer jobs, which means fewer people patronizing local businesses and restaurants. The tax base will shrink and public services like schools will suffer, said Franz, who also sits on the local school board. Fewer businesses and public services could then push even more farmers to leave.

Although Colorado Springs’ council voted in favor of the annexation, Frantz hoped the regular citizens of the growing city would side with him if they knew what was at stake farther south. They would need to understand the cost of growth — quickly.

“We don’t have time for a slow education,” he said.

Frantz and other farmers along the Lower Arkansas know exactly what happens when a farming community loses its water.

One county to the north — a dozen miles from Frantz’s fields — still bears the scars.

Sisyphus of the valley

Tractors lumbering between fields once slowed traffic on Crowley County roads, but these days it’s more likely that a county-owned front loader with a bucket full of tumbleweeds brings cars to a crawl.

On windy days, the dirt — untethered without plant roots — blasts across the county and stings any uncovered skin. The dirt piles high enough on roadsides that barbed wire fences become completely hidden under drifts of dust and tumbleweeds. Some days, the roads are so full of dust from the surrounding dried-up farms that workers from the Colorado Department of Transportation must plow and sweep dirt off the road.

For farmers in the Lower Arkansas Valley, Crowley County is a warning — or foreshadowing — of the impacts of exporting water to Front Range metropolises.

“Crowley County is a poster child,” Bartolo said. “That community is just one of the most impoverished and destitute in the entire state, and that’s just hard.”

Massive water buys by Colorado Springs, Pueblo and Aurora in the 1970s and 1980s slowly dried up much of the farm fields in the county. The number of irrigated acres in the county plummeted from 24,128 in 1982 to 1,994 in 2022, according to data collected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Without proper revegetation, many of those former farm fields desiccated into swaths of weeds and barren dirt. While Otero County, just a few miles south, smells of sweet-turned-earth in the spring, Crowley County smells like nothing — there is very little farming left.

“You can still see the irrigation ditches,” said Susan Jordan, one of the few remaining farmers in the county, while driving between fields. “They’re just full of dirt instead of water.”

When the farms went, so did much of the business and social life in the county. White signs outside the town of Crowley advertise a deli, two beauty shops, a liquor store, and the Fiddle Bow Saloon and Restaurant.

But only a coffee shop and the post office remain.

“We can’t even keep a liquor store open now,” Susan Jordan said with a short laugh.

Just outside town, the industry that replaced farming looms: prisons. The state-owned Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility and the privately owned Crowley County Correctional Facility now provide more than 500 jobs.

More and more farmers left as water became less available following the big cities’ purchases. Work became more difficult for those who remained.

The dirt and tumbleweeds are Dave and Susan Jordan’s constant foe. As the number of farms in the county dwindled, the Jordans absorbed more and more responsibility for taking care of the system of canals and ditches that bring water to their fields on 5J Farms.

Every spring, the couple must clean dirt, weeds and debris out of 12 miles of ditches so that irrigation water can flow — tasks once shared among all the farmers who used the system. The weeds have gotten so bad that the Jordans now need a backhoe to clean out the ditches.

With less water coming down the system, more of the Jordans’ water is lost as it seeps into the ground. While they used to grow melons and other produce, they now mostly grow cattle feed. Lately, it’s usually only enough to feed their own herds.

Stubbornness has kept the couple going, Susan Jordan said, but now they’re trying to sell. Their kids aren’t interested in taking on the work and, in their own words, they’re “too damn old” to keep going themselves. They hope to sell to someone who will keep farming the land, but that hasn’t proved easy.

Crowley County never recovered from the municipalities’ water buys decades ago, Bartolo said.

“There’s no such thing as economic development,” he said. “It’s just a trade — one place loses.”

Negotiating a future

The Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservancy District would love to be able to buy water rights from farmers when they come up for sale, Goble said.

The district could then keep the water in agricultural use. But with an annual budget of about $2 million, the district can’t compete with larger purchasers like cities, he said.

Goble hopes to strike an agreement with Colorado Springs Utilities that would create guardrails for future water buys. He’d like a hard limit on the total amount of agricultural water they take out of the district, which covers Pueblo, Crowley, Otero, Bent and Prowers counties.

But the utility has been resistant to that idea, he said.

Goble also would like to discuss ways the utility could help create new economic opportunities for the region should it buy more water there. Could the utility, perhaps, help jump-start the installation of a solar farm?

“If we don’t have an agreement, we’ll expend our resources fighting against them,” Goble said, though the district would rather spend its time and money working with the utility to find long-term solutions.

Water managers in rural areas across the state have reached out to Goble since the Lower Arkansas Valley farmers started taking a stand against the Colorado Springs annexations, Goble said.

“The rural agriculture community is banding together,” Goble said. “It’s a David-versus-Goliath situation, but I expect you’re going to see more and more of that.”

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