Click the link to read the article on the National Drought Mitigation Center website:
March 2025
The Bessemer Ditch is an irrigation canal that serves agricultural areas in Pueblo County. In 2009 and 2010, the Pueblo Board of Water Works acquired nearly one-third of water rights to the ditch to supply the city of Pueblo with water. While necessary to support the city, it simultaneously threatens producers’ livelihoods.
Since 2015, Palmer Land Conservancy, a nonprofit based in Colorado Springs, has been working with the county to help preserve the area’s agricultural identity while allocating water wisely.
As part of these efforts, a “substitution of dry-up” provision was developed and later incorporated into Pueblo Water’s decree. This keeps the most fertile agricultural land in production by enabling voluntary, market-based transactions where less productive farmland is substituted to be dried-up.
Palmer was invited to work with the Pueblo County agricultural community to identify ideal dry-up candidate areas (DCAs) through the Bessemer Farmland Conservation Project. The DCA farms, which are often located along riparian corridors, would be revegetated once dried up, according to the plan—bolstering local ecology.
The project is funded by the Colorado Water Conservation Board of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources and partners.