DENVER — Speaking at the American Water Works Association’s Annual Conference and Exposition conference on June 9, Dixie Poteet, a graduate research assistant at Colorado State University’s water resources engineering, told fellow water workers that irrigators can be “friends for future water supply planning.”
She explained the issue of buy and dry — where water rights are sold away from historically agricultural land, usually to a local municipality — to her largely non-agricultural audience. She also pointed out that stripping the water rights from agricultural land usually precedes it being removed from production.
“The classic picture of that is when a farm field gets turned into multiple houses or a subdivision,” she said. “Typically, this is blamed on growing urban water demands or population,” she added.
Alternatives to buy and dry (and farm goodbyes)
Given the generally negative impact on agriculture and rural communities, many in production resist buy-and-dry strategies. But buy and dry isn’t the only way to temporarily offset a municipality’s water needs, Poteet said. Water leasing, under various names — including collaborative water sharing agreements or alternative transfer methods — is a viable alternative.
“These are strategies and agreements that utilize temporary lease or transfer of water to nearby or interested entities,” Poteet explained. Farmers “can temporarily lease that water to a nearby municipality or party and get paid at or above market value, hopefully, so that they offset the cost of not having that water to produce with and perhaps meeting the water needs of those nearby.”
But these strategies are poorly utilized, Poteet said. As part of her ongoing Ph.D. research efforts, she started by trying to find out why.
“We have a solution, supposedly, but why isn’t it more widely implemented?” she said. “I started my Ph.D. saying: Why don’t we talk to the farmers?”
Listening to the farmers
Through listening sessions and interviews with Colorado farmers and ranchers as part of her research, Poteet found a collection of barriers to the adoption of water leasing programs. These included knowledge issues (e.g. “what is a CWSA/ATM?”), support issues (e.g. “Who do I go to to learn more?”) and trust issues among stakeholders.
“There has to be trust between stakeholders, and there’s often a perceived power imbalance: us versus them, east slope versus west slope, urban versus rural ag, big ag versus small ag, that ditch versus my ditch,” Poteet offered as an example.
But the key Poteet stressed to the audience of AWWA members — water professionals across industries such as water utilities, wastewater treatment, scientists, environmental advocates and irrigation districts — was that working with agricultural water users requires trust and relationship building. That starts with keeping their needs in mind.
“I had someone tell me ‘I had an irrigation leak over the weekend; I don’t have time to think about how much I can sell my water right for if I’m trying to track down a leak and replace the pipe,’” Poteet said. “That is a key thing to think about when proposing solutions; these are people’s livelihoods where their lives revolve around if irrigation turns on.”
She added that, according to her research, there are agricultural water users who are actively interested in temporary water leasing. But working together for water supply planning at the ag-urban interface comes down to listening.
“We’re talking about irrigators as friends,” she said. “Part of being a good friend with irrigators and having key collaboration is to actually listen.”
