I want to start by talking about the history of the Republican River Compact. John, can you tell us how we got here?

John Tracy: One of the interesting things about the compacts Colorado entered into with its neighboring states, primarily to the east — so this includes the South Platte compact, the Republican compact, and the Arkansas River compact — is that these compacts were entered into many years after irrigation had started on these streams. What had happened during that period of time is that irrigation was not completely efficient, so a lot of the water applied to grow crops ended up being more water than was needed. So, there was a lot of water that ended up recharging the alluvial aquifers that are connected to these rivers, and then there were flow in the rivers and eventually the downstream states said, “Hey, we want to make sure we get our fair share.” Colorado, having used the compact mechanism before, said instead of litigating, let’s negotiate this politically, and they came to an agreement. And so, the Republican River compact came into being in the ’40s.

One of the issues that isn’t talked about much in Colorado, or the other states is that, in essence, Colorado sold itself a little short in terms of the actual water available because it wasn’t just the water flowing in the river. There was also all that water that recharged the groundwater making its way back to the river. So, in essence, what they agreed to was a situation where there was more water than would have been there naturally. Then they split it up with Kansas and with the Republican River. Then there was this thing called centrifugal pumps — similar to a Jacuzzi pump — and suddenly groundwater pumping became very efficient. Irrigators in the late ’50s and ’60s started putting in pumps to pump groundwater, and that started impacting the entire balance of the stream flow. Not only was there not that recharge coming to the groundwater, which eventually made its way back to the river, but now they were taking groundwater, which was actually taking water out of the river, and this led to low flows not just in the Republican, but the Arkansas and the South Platte also. 

Then Kansas noticed this as well as Nebraska, and said, “Hey, we kind of agreed in a compact, this is how much water we get, and we think you’re taking too much.” That’s when the dispute started, and then they entered into a different agreement saying, “Well, you’re right, this groundwater is connected to the surface water, and our groundwater pumpers are impacting your ability and your allocation of water under the compact.” That’s what eventually led to this agreement to modify the compact, and there’s a variety of ways it was modified. One of the ways was that Kansas and Colorado agreed that if 25,000 acres of irrigated land from groundwater was retired in a specific area of the Republican River basin, then Colorado would be in compliance. That’s how we get to the point of needing to retire 25,000 acres of groundwater irrigated land to come back into compliance with the compact.

The farmers near the south Fork of the basin have two programs that they can sign up for. One pays them to switch to dryland farming or grazing, and the other one pays slightly more to basically stop all agricultural activity. How common is a program like this, especially one of this scale?

Tracy: To provide a little context, across the western United States in irrigated agriculture this is not that unusual of an idea. There was a program in Idaho called the Bell Rapids (Irrigation) Project where the state paid farmers to retire 24,000-plus acres of irrigated farmland. Not exactly the same reason as here, but they needed to stop irrigating the land because it was creating problems, so the state water control board came up with funding to buy them out, paying them to stop irrigating.

The Westlands Water District in California, which had caused a serious environmental problem at Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge — there was a buyout program there, both from the federal government through the Bureau of Reclamation and the state — that retired maybe 20,000 acres of land, which again were buyouts that paid people to retire land. If you go across the western United States, whenever these types of problems come up, there has typically been some type of either one-time-buyout or one-time-payment to retire lands. It may seem odd to some, but this has been fairly standard practice across much of the irrigated west.

Jordan Suter: Taking ag land out of production to promote conservation or ecosystem service provision actually does have a fairly long history ramping up in the ’80s and ’90s with the Conservation Reserve Program. It does seem like a blunt force instrument to use to reduce groundwater use, but I think the advantage is that it’s verifiable. It’s easy to see what land is being irrigated and what land isn’t, whereas many areas don’t necessarily have the gauges on pumps to gauge how much water is being used per year. But we can easily observe how much land is being irrigated. So, that has often been the metric that we’ve used to try to record reductions in water use.

Why is it critical that we retire these acres? Is there no other solution?

Tracy: There have been various programs over the years that I’ve been involved with that go back several decades, and there have been attempts to say, “Well, we’ll just be more efficient with our water.” But the reality is the amount of water being used for agricultural production is the evapotranspiration from the crop being grown. So, if you actually want to save that water, you have to retire the land. End of story. That’s it. Anything else, it’s like — no, your crops are still growing and using the same amount of water. You’re not saving any water from the stream. It comes down to a retirement of land. It’s the most effective tie-in to the amount of water that is going to be used in that area, making it probably the most effective mechanism if what you’re after is to use less water. Everything else is smoke and mirrors, and you’re not really saving the water you think you’re saving. When you retire the land and you’re not applying water on it, you’re not growing crops, you’re saving the water.

You’ve been tasked with studying the economic loss to the region should Colorado fail to meet the 2029 deadline. Jordan, what specifically will you be looking at?

Suter: The big concern here is that if the 25,000 acres are not retired, then the state engineer may need to essentially turn off all the wells in the Republican basin, something like 3,000 groundwater wells. As you can imagine, irrigated agriculture is a critical part of the region’s economy, so when you take away that irrigation, it’s going to have significant economic impacts, and that’s what we want to understand.

I’m going to ask you both to kind of look into your crystal ball here, because I know you’ve just begun your research, but how likely are we to meet this goal and what could the impacts be if we fail?

Suter: One thing we do know is that agriculture plays a critical role in this part of the state. It really drives the economy, and a big part of that is irrigated crop production. Almost all irrigation in this region comes from groundwater. If you were to take that away, it would have significant economic impacts. Obviously, there are some things that we don’t know that we’re going to be working on in the study. Part of that is to understand what folks will do. We don’t assume that if they’re not able to use irrigation, that that land is just going to go completely fallow. But it’s not clear exactly what land is suitable for dryland crop production, what land might be used for grazing, etc. Some of the work that we’ll be doing will be to try to get a better understanding and make better predictions in that regard, so that we can more fully understand the economic impacts of something like this if it were to occur.

Tracy: And in terms of what the consequences would be retiring the 25,000 acres versus a couple hundred thousand acres — while it always comes down to the specifics of the area you’re looking at, we do have some analogs out there. For example, looking at the 25,000 acres, that’s almost exactly the number of acres retired in the Bell Rapids project. The manner in which they were retired, with economic compensation, had an impact locally, but even within the region it was pretty insignificant as the resources that the farmers were paid were reinvested in other types of activities.

It comes into the manner in which you retire the land. If you just shut it off, that would be one thing versus compensation. We can also look to the Southern Ogallala Region in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. Over the last several decades because of declining water levels, they’ve had well into the hundreds of thousands of acres retired simply because those wells are nonproductive. It is interesting to see the impacts at the local level. There are some communities that have really suffered, but it’s also been interesting to see the continued economic growth in Amarillo through the Lubbock region and how that ended up transitioning into other crops that are more water efficient. For example, moving from corn and alfalfa to cotton; that was a big one. When you start looking at these types of things, the overall impacts become really specific to the region, hence the need for the study. Because you can look at that and say it’s interesting because there were a lot of local impacts in the southern Ogallala, but not as many regional impacts, even though you’re talking almost the same order of magnitude of land retired. 

But it’s not quite an analog because, for example, you cannot grow cotton in the eastern plains of Colorado, at least not yet. But there’s research going on that is trying to move the cotton belt all the way up to Nebraska. So, who knows? It’s interesting to see how these agricultural systems adjust. A big part of why we’re doing this study is to understand that and try to provide some perspective for state lawmakers, the regional water managers, the state water managers to make sure that the incentives are in place to retire the 25,000 acres. Because if that happens, I guarantee that the consequences of retiring those 25,000 acres will be much, much, much, much less than having to shut down all the wells. Maybe there’s some things we can find out that may provide better incentives or paths forward for the communities and the region to make sure that those economic impacts are minimized.

It sounds like there are a lot of unknowns right now.

Tracy: One of the problems with the compacts is that they tend to be very prescriptive in who gets how much water. That’s become one of the challenges with working within these compacts simply because the climate has changed, and the predictability of river flows has really gotten difficult. Telling either an upstream state or a downstream state that you get so much water when you’re relying on an unreliable climatological system has become problematic. In the larger picture, this study’s focus is pointing out the consequences of not meeting this compact requirement. But I do think there needs to be a bigger discussion taken on soon to talk about what we are going to do in terms of looking at these compacts in the future. Because prescribing the amount of water each of the states is going to get doesn’t seem to be a feasible way moving forward simply because it is so unpredictable right now. You cannot do that on a year-to-year or even decade-by-decade basis anymore.

It’s interesting because we don’t know what the flows are going to be in any of these rivers next year, but we have an understanding based on past history on the variability in these flows. And the problem is, is that we don’t even have that understanding of the variability anymore. That makes it even more difficult because if you said, we know it varies by this much, we could put a probability on how much flow will be there next year. Now we’re shrugging our shoulders. We had the two lowest flow years in the Colorado River the two previous water years, and then we ended up with a gangbuster year this year. Would anybody have predicted that? When you’re flying that blind, it’s difficult to agree to commit to so much water going in various places because you can’t allocate water that doesn’t exist.

Jordan, from the producer’s perspective, how are they reacting to all of this?

Suter: Producers hate uncertainty, and there is a massive element of uncertainty that’s lurking out there. They want to avoid that at all cost — having these impacts on their operations, but even more than that, on their communities. The producers that we work with are obviously very interested in maintaining their own viability for their operation, but they also want to see their communities thrive and not lose population. They want to be able to pass down a viable farm operation to their kids. When uncertainty like this exists, it makes it harder to imagine that future and to imagine that community being there in the long run, which is obviously hugely concerning to all the folks in the Republican basin.