From The Pueblo Chieftain (Chris Woodka):
Agriculture, lately treated like a damsel in distress by the state’s water community, became the belle of the ball at this week’s Colorado Water Congress summer convention.
“I believe that agriculture is a cornerstone for the state’s economy, for the nation’s economy,” Colorado Agriculture Commissioner John Salazar said Thursday.
“The state has always planned on developing water for growth. We have to start thinking about land use planning. When you put people in apartments you save water. Build up instead of out.” It was a strong statement in a dialog that has repeatedly referred to taking more water from agriculture as the default option to serve growth.
But Salazar served up a plate of statistics too big to digest in a short time during a panel discussion on agriculture. Farming is a $40 billion industry in Colorado, providing 170,000 jobs. In 24 counties, one of every 10 workers is on a farm or ranch. About 47 percent of the state’s land is in agriculture. “When we lose ag land, it has consequences,” Salazar said.
But the numbers don’t tell the whole story. Others on the panel were passionate about keeping ground in farms. “It’s the heritage,” said Marsha Daughenbaugh, of the community Agricultural alliance that serves Northwest Colorado. She cited the 24 Centennial farms that will be honored at this year’s Colorado State Fair. “Think about everything they worked so damned hard to put together. We have a lot of young people who want to farm.”
Terry Fankhauser, of the Colorado Cattleman’s Association, said fewer farmers with fewer resources are producing more food. “Agriculture doesn’t deserve to be saved, but it does deserve the opportunity to survive,” Fankhauser said.
From Steamboat Today (Michael Schrantz):
Dan Keppen, of the Family Farm Alliance, gave a presentation Wednesday about a white paper that seeks to calculate value of irrigated agriculture and show how siphoning off its water for industrial and municipal uses will have large consequences. “The Economic Importance of Western Irrigated Agriculture: Water Values, Analysis Methods, Resource Management Decisions” was prepared by resource economist Darryll Olsen for the Family Farm Alliance and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Water.
Olsen’s report states that the impact of irrigated agriculture in the West on personal income is $156 billion. The report also shows the gap between food production and projected demand increasing over time. The cost of food in the U.S. as a percent of disposable income has consistently dropped since 1945, the report states, and was only 6.7 percent in 2011. “If you start doing things that tweak with that curve … and all of a sudden that percentage starts to go up, it does huge things to our economy,” Keppen said. “It’s a security issue.”
But while Olsen’s report shows the value of irrigated agriculture in the West, it’s not getting the same treatment as municipal and industrial uses of water, according to Keppen.
A report from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation about the Colorado River Basin shows a loss of irrigated agriculture land by 2060. Between 2015 and 2060, the report states, irrigated acreage will shrink by 300,000 to 900,000 acres.
Models used by government agencies assume that when municipal demand grows, agriculture shrinks, Keppen said.