Growers along the South Platte River in Colorado are becoming more efficient water users and the outcome is the opposite of what most people would expect, says public broadcaster KUNC. It means less water for farmers downstream. Reporter Stephanie Paige Ogburn interviewed rancher Jim Yahn, who says half of the water used to run off his hayfields when he used flood irrigation. Yahn and most of the farmers in his area have switched to center pivot sprinklers and now only 15 percent of the water drains off their fields. Yahn gets higher yields with the new approach and he’s wasting less water.
“In the arid West, that means someone else is getting less,” says KUNC. In this case, it’s the ranchers and farmers in the Julesberg Irrigation District, who are downstream of Yahn and the North Sterling Irrigation District. The Julesberg district now gets about 20 percent less water. As one expert tells KUNC, water that isn’t used upstream becomes a water right for a downstream farmer. “And that’s kind of the lesson here,” says KUNC. “With water in Colorado, when becoming more efficient can actually mean there’s less to go around, there just aren’t any easy solutions.”