Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):

February 25, 2024

Colorado Water Center’s John Tracy said we’re in a new phase of understanding water. It’s not building dams or canals. It’s not new technology. It’s something else.

In January, when John Tracy began his lecture at the Colorado Farm Show in Greeley, he had a modest-sized audience.

Outside of the meeting room, in the central exhibition hall at Island Grove Regional Park, concessionaires hawked everything from paintings of wheat harvest and other flag-draped farm scenes to the latest in technology products.

John Deere had implements. I crawled inside the cabin of a chemical applicator. It was full of computer screens and, I surmised, air conditioned. I inquired as to the cost: $900,000. This wasn’t the John Deere my grandfather drove.

Thinking about water and agriculture has also changed dramatically since I tagged along in the early 1960s after my grandfather amid his fields of corn, sugar beets, and alfalfa in northeastern Colorado.

Tracy, who directs the Colorado Water Center, a small research enterprise affiliated with Colorado State University, characterized that shift as analogous to what happened in energy.

“Back in the ‘80s, there was this rhetoric that we need to produce more energy,” he said. “We’re going to need to mine more coal, get more hydropower online, you name it.”

In the Columbia River Basin, where he was, the push for new energy generation resulted in heavy investment in nuclear plants. They, he said, were an economic disaster.

Finally, Bonneville Power Administration said just put in some simple conservation and energy efficiency programs.

That idea wasn’t even novel then, of course. Amory Lovins in his 1976 Foreign Affairs essay, had described conservation as the soft path. It took utilities decades to embrace the idea. They kept wanting to build bigger and bigger coal but also natural gas plants.

Tracy described something similar happening in water. “The rhetoric out there right now — that we need to find more water — just doesn’t match reality,” he said. “It’s not only that we’re using less water. Our gross domestic product keeps going up.”

Since 2000, agricultural productivity – both irrigated and dryland – has grown 20%. “Even with a decline in irrigated agriculture, our agricultural productivity across the nation has been increasing.”

That’s water used for agriculture. How about urban use? Colorado’s Front Range, metropolitan Phoenix, Southern California, the metroplexes in Texas – surely they’re using more water.

“Well, their water use kind of increased until about 2005, and it’s been on a decline since then,” he said. “Municipal water use is actually declining.”

Tracy described inertia as a problem in thinking about water. “It takes us a while to get out of the way we are thinking (that gets in the way of how we need to think) in order to address the coming challenges.”

Colorado, he suggested, still remains mired in old ways of thinking about water. He cited Thornton’s long-standing bid to export water from the Poudre River Valley. The city’s water planning assumed a per-capita need of 170 gallons a day, when 120 to 130 gallons is possible.

”When you think of how efficient ag has become, it’s decades ahead of where municipalities are,” he said. `

Tracy also faulted the Colorado Water Plan, which defines a water gap between supply and demand.

Dams and then technology

How did we get here? Tracy described several phases.

Physical interventions came first. Water was diverted from creeks and rivers, dams were built and, beginning in the 1930s, tunnels were bored to bring water across the Continental Divide. Massive amounts of infrastructure resulted, continuing through the 1960s.

“For the most part, the era of big dam building was done by the ‘60s.”

Some want to link the end of that era to the 1976 collapse of the Teton Dam in Idaho. Had that dam not failed, that era had largely reached its limitations, he said. “We hit marginal returns on this approach.”

Although Tracy did not mention it, the formal end to Colorado’s era of big physical infrastructure is best described by the veto for Two Forks, Denver’s plans for a massive import. There have been expansions of existing transmountain diversion projects since then, but not new ones.

Technology interventions came next, in Tracy’s telling. The centrifugal pump was a major one. Developed in the 1940s, it came on strong in the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s and even the ‘90s. These new pumps allowed drafting of groundwater in the Ogallala and elsewhere. “A lot of this water was used to support irrigated agriculture.”

A twist on this was to improve efficiency of the technical interventions. Instead of using the groundwater for flood irrigation, it was spread with center-pivot sprinklers. Then the center-pivot sprinklers were modified to reduce evaporative losses.

That approach has now arrived at the stage of marginal returns.

Agronomic intervensions

Now comes what Tracy called agronomic interventions. It’s a form of ag water management. “When you said you were working in ag water management, people assumed you work on irrigation systems, on canals or ditches and so forth.”

Now when he talks about water management, he’s talking about crop selection and evaporative and transpiration needs.

“Your decisions on managing under water stress are not related to the highest efficiency irrigation system,” he explained. They’re related to what crop are you selecting? What type of agrochemicals are you applying? What type of soil management are you doing?

This has led to predictive crop water-demand tools, development of drought and salt-tolerant crops and other pursuits of the Colorado Water Center. “We’re not talking about pumps.”

What else falls under the heading of total water management?

Try cowpeas. The legume tolerates sandy soils and low water and can provide forage for cattle. Research is underway to answer whether this crop from Africa might be useful in Colorado in some areas reliant on declining groundwater supplies.

Crucial will be whether the crop can find a viable market. That includes, he added, whether cowpeas could be a replacement for beef in the so-called fake meat products.

As for the Ogallala, the efficiency of irrigation in some areas is “mind-blowingly ridiculous. I mean, they’re north of 90%. Whereas if you think of somebody watering their lawn, if they get anywhere near 50% it would be a miracle.”

Guided by water decisions should be a clear understanding of value derived. Agriculture, for the most part, has been doing so for the last two decades, if not longer.

“Do we have enough water? Yes, we have enough water. Do we have enough water to grow corn in areas where the productivity of the Ogallala Aquifer isn’t what it used to be? No, we do not.”

That, he said, requires agronomic decisions.

The Colorado Water Center has research underway at several locations in Colorado, including at Akron, on the edge of the Ogallala Aquifer, and at Fruita, along the Colorado River. The research attempts to get a better understanding of how much water crops are using. “There are a lot of areas on the West Slope that still use flood irrigation,” he said. The efficiency of that water use can be improved, but given the demand for the water, “sometimes the infrastructure investment isn’t worth it.”

Water Center staff has also been working with ranchers to better manage forage on pasture land in ways that may reduce water use. The Fruita station also did a winter crop of legumes that required no irrigation. “And they brought in a crop, which just kind of amazed me,” said Tracy.

The mixed bag of climate change

Tracy also talked about climate change, calling it a mixed bag. The warming climate allows growing of corn into Canada now. But this has been accompanied by greater variability. “It has expanded the growing season on average – great. But it means you have higher probability of a freeze in June – not good. As for weather, he sees improved forecasting that will help farmers. “I expect that in the next couple of years there will be some products that give a much better idea of when we expect deep freezes, high-precipitation events, droughts and what have you in the three-to six month timeframe. Those pieces of information will be incredibly useful in helping make beginning-of-season decisions.”

As for water policy, he argued that Western states in general, but Colorado in particular, has an over-reliance on technical interventions.

Building infrastructure will not solve the problems. These physical and technological interventions are reaching the point of marginal returns,” he said. “So how do you go about dealing with water challenges and growing populations? He cited emerging information technology that will aid in understanding exactly how much water is needed to bring a crop to market.