A decade or more ago, farmers in the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado began to run out of irrigation water; their wells ran dry as the water table beneath their fields dropped. The solution, after years of court cases and finger-pointing, was an agreement to raise the price of water, says the NPR blog The Salt.
“No one really knew if it would work,” says The Salt. “Turns out, it does: Farmers who had to pay the fees cut their water pumping by 30 percent.” Water rates are three or four times higher than they used to be. “That can be tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars each year for water.”
It was the first time in the United States that a group of farmers agreed, essentially, to tax their water use in hopes that they could collectively stay in business. “We were able to determine that, yes, they’ve been able to reduce their groundwater extraction pretty substantially,” said Kelsey Cody, part of a University of Colorado team that has studied pumping in the valley before and after the higher fees took effect. Reports The Salt: “With aquifers in danger of running dry in many communities in the Midwest and West, the San Luis Valley could provide a model, said Cody.”