(water burbling) (soft piano music) - "Are we past tipping points?"

That is a very big question because what I see is that humanity, especially right now, we have been very bad at living within our means.

I think that question really depends on people.

It doesn't really depend on how much water there is or isn't in Colorado.

- Growth is going to continue in the West.

Water for municipal use is much more valuable than water for agricultural use.

I think that's why you're seeing a lot of buy and dry, where they're buying up farms and moving that water to the city.

You can support much more humans on an acre-foot of water, than you can with agriculture.

- There's a lot of pressure on agriculture to change and to move, there's a lot of pressure just in terms of people wanting those resources, both the land and the water for a different purpose.

- We in this community in Denver, need to understand that we've been drying up farms that produce food and fuel to sustain our life, so we can plant bluegrass, because bluegrass uses about the same amount of water as crops.

If you came from outer space, and saw society doing that, you'd say these people are stark raving mad.

- When I thought to myself as a young person, what is the most important job that there is?

Farming was the first thing I came to, because you're growing food and you're growing products for people to use, but that conversation that I had within myself is not something that we're having on a national level.

Farmers are having to rationalize why they're important.

- We're all in competition.

So the problems of meeting everyone's demand and having a quality of life that continues, creating a place where people want to live and where we have agriculture, where we have strong and healthy streams, where we have thriving communities, those problems are complex and complicated.

(light music) - [Narrator] Colorado's cities, villages, towns, ranches and farms were built on the richest soils with the greatest resources: they hug river corridors, are enveloped by mountains, nestled in valleys and resting on Plains.

"Welcome to Colorful Colorado" the sign says, alluding to an array of hues on the color spectrum.

It is often said there are two Colorados.

It started as a fundamental delineation of geographical areas.

As more people were born, individuals came together to form groups and self-organized.

Some of these small settlements grew into what we now call cities, corresponding with a shift from one way of organizing labor to another.

Media commentators continue to lament the growth of an "urban-rural divide," illustrated by more than a patchy political map.

Town and country represent different economic realities, different connections to the surrounding world, different opportunities.

Perhaps it is a simpler narrative to tell, because it isn't nuanced.

At what point do we describe this relationship in another way?

(train chugging) - [Man] This is the land of the Arapaho and the Cheyenne.

When the Gold Rush of 1859 kicks in, that influx of people forced the Native Americans out of this region and no access to land or water after that, consider the culture and society and the mindset of the Western Europeans coming out here.

That's the way they felt things should be, it's that manifest destiny attitude.

How did the farmers obtain the the oldest water rights and maintain them today?

Well, it goes back to those gold miners who turned to irrigation.

Benjamin Eaton was one of the earliest water developers in our area.

He obtained his money from investors from London.

There were developers that came out from Kansas.

There was T.C.

Henry who came out to Colorado to develop irrigation systems to make money and make it rich.

And so, his idea was to develop communities on the West slope and along the Front Range based on irrigated agriculture.

A lot of other irrigation systems were developed by just a group of farmers in an area that put their labor together and dug the ditches together and then divided up the shares, it was a combination of local control, local farmers and then outside international investors.

So the Greeley and Fort Collins irrigators got together, worked with the state legislature to get in the Constitution of Colorado in 1876, the doctrine of prior appropriation "First in Time, First in Right".

And that's what continues today, those senior water rights that they obtained by going through the state of Colorado, transferred or turned over through the years to next generations of family.

Typically, the sons of the families that wanted to continue to farm.

Basically, the water rights stayed within the community that settled the area in the 1860s.

That slowly changes as urban areas develop.

- [Narrator] Population centers in Colorado have drastically shifted since the 1940s.

Today, about 85% of the state's population lives along the Front Range, a connective string of towns and cities spanning over 200 miles from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs.

The state's population has grown by more than 1.7 million people in the last 20 years, with the vast majority moving to the urban corridor.

If the next 20 years are anything similar, the state's population is projected to be nearly doubled.

Transferring water from farms to cities is not a new practice.

Urban centers throughout the West, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Los Angeles, to name a few, were grown by human-engineered systems.

About 50% of the Denver Metro area's water supply comes from the Colorado River, delivered through a network of tunnels and ditches that move water from west to east.

- 80 plus percent of our economic activity in Colorado, happens in the Front Range.

85% of the water is held in the rural areas.

- Colorado has some of the most expensive water rights, especially on the Front Range.

Even taking a Western US perspective, it's very high priced water.

The value of water is a complicated question, mostly what we're targeted at is the market value of a water right.

So the value to the seller and the value to the buyer.

- Buy and dry is generally when a municipality or a developer representing a municipality, will go out and purchase senior water rights from a willing seller, from an irrigator.

And when you do that the land has to be no longer irrigated.

It's dried up.

In this arid environment, that means land that had been irrigated for 100 years growing corn or whatever, now is reverted back to dry land, which in some cases can be weeds.

What does that do to the value of the land?

The tax base goes down, less money for schools, for roads.

You lose a farm family, they move away so your population goes down.

That's one example of buy and dry.

Another is when a developer wants to build a bunch of houses, condos, whatever on the fringe of a community.

They'll acquire the farm, the water rights, transfer it to the city for their water requirement in order to develop the property into a residential area.

It's one of the most affordable ways for municipalities to obtain water rights.

And if you're a mayor, in city council or a community water board, and you're representing your residents, are you going to look for some of the least expensive options to obtain water for your community?

Water is a human right.

Everyone has the right to water to drink, to clean, to bathe.

The next tier then is the right to use water to generate wealth, which could be irrigation, develop property, those sorts of things.

To me that's not a human right, that's an opportunity.

How in the world do you determine factors of fairness and equity and wealth, in a way that makes sense and are acceptable to the majority of society?

- [Narrator] Demand exceeded supply long ago: farms, cities and industries use more water each year than Colorado's rivers provide.

What already exists melts into declining reservoirs, flows down over-allocated rivers or is stored in overdrawn aquifers.

Climate change is making a tenuous situation worse; Colorado is experiencing the beginnings of a warmer, drier future.

Declining snowpacks and diminishing streamflows is a certainty; models show flows in the Colorado River could drop by as much as 55% by 2100.

The supply and demand gap continues to widen.

- The supply and demand gap is an issue that people in Colorado and the modern world had been looking at for a long time.

We don't have enough water to meet the demands that we've projected.

Are we going to be able to get all the water that we think we need?

We don't know.

- A lot of the demand comes from development, so expanding the footprint of where we live expanding into areas that need to pull entirely new water supply into that region.

When you have an increase in temperature, you have increased evaporation from the soils, things get hotter, plant communities have to work harder to do the same.

Science is really showing us a very clear temperature direction globally, there's certainly a warmer future.

And that means that we're going to have more variability in our climate patterns that we historically see in Colorado.

So there's going to be an increase in both frequency and intensity of a lot of our major hazards, such as floods, droughts, and wildfire.

The general track of the Western US is that our arid regions are expanding.

The question is what can we actually do in real time?

And you come back to, "Well, we can't create more water."

Who is at risk?

Can we make sure our farmers and ranchers and cities have enough water to get them through to the next winter season?

And it's strangely always with the hope that we're just going to have a great winter, right?

(mellow music) - Every city I know has a plan, a vision of what they want their city to look like.

You have to meet that vision, we're looking at needing to acquire another 40 to 45,000-acre feet of water over the next 50 years.

A lot of it will come from agriculture.

Buy and dry is going to continue, and it is continuing because there's not enough options available yet, and the cities need certainty.

We need to be able to say to our citizens, you will have water.

- [Narrator] While there's always been risk and uncertainty involved in farming, the stakes are higher than ever.

In many regions fueled by agriculture, the number of farms has declined.

Family ranching operations have been disappearing from the Colorado landscape for decades, succumbing to the trends of high land values, labor shortages and fierce international competition.

Financial and climatic forces are aligned against agriculture.

However, there's a deep sentimental value attached to these generational homesteads; selling their water means selling their past and their future.

- I always say that we didn't cross the border, the border crossed us.

So, basically, my family was Spanish settlers, and they never moved, they just stayed in one place.

You feel that connection, especially to the Hispanic heritage because it really was so part of how they lived and their lifestyle with the sheep, how they irrigated.

I'm not just talking from an economic standpoint, but also from a spiritual and an emotional standpoint.

Those are part of the cultural identity of these communities.

My grandfather was always on the point of foreclosure, one time his sheep were having babies and the bank came and loaded them up into a trailer because he had defaulted on a loan.

My grandfather struggled on this farm financially and emotionally, it was really hard for him.

He was offered a million dollars once for his water, all his water and he said, no, a farm is nothing without water and he refused to sell, I really felt that connection to my grandfather of like we have to keep the water and the land tied together, we have to make sure that this farm stays a farm.

- [Narrator] Water investors continue to eye the San Luis Valley, an agricultural community separated by mountain ranges from the Front Range.

This valley is one of the driest places in Colorado, receiving less than seven inches of rain annually.

Farmers rely on groundwater when rivers and streams can't adequately deliver.

This underground bank account has been over-pumped and under-filled, leaving water users under legal pressure to bring the aquifer back into balance within the next decade.

This makes the notion of moving even more water out of the depleted region particularly difficult.

- Renewable Water Resources is a project that is proposing to export 22,000 acre-feet, while retiring 35,000 acre-feet here in the Valley.

That water will be pumped from wells, 2,000 feet underground and then piped up to the Front Range of Colorado.

And so, this will go to help make up some of that 500,000 acre-feet shortfall that the residents along the Front Range are experiencing.

The conversations that I've had with farmers and ranchers that are wanting to learn more about the project, or wanting to explore the option of selling a portion or all of their water rights, they're buried.

When you have commodities going up and down, that makes for instability.

So, we need to diversify our economy here in the San Luis Valley.

Water is one way we can get there.

We're proposing to retire water closer to $3,000 an acre-foot.

What we've found, some people are intrinsically opposed to exporting water from one basin into another to benefit the metropolitan area.

Who am I to tell my neighbor, they can sell their house or not sell their house, or sell their water rights or not sell their water rights?

It's a property right here in Colorado.

The humans will always win; the residential will always win in those economics.

- We are a small population, I mean, there's only 40,000 people in the valley and the Front Range is millions of people, even though we've been farming here for six, seven generations, some families have been here for that long.

When it really comes to push to shove, we're just little tiny voices and a really, really big issue.

If somebody decides to sell their water, it doesn't just affect that one farmer, benefit that one farmer, it has ripple effects to the whole community, if you suddenly take out a whole bunch of water, the water slows down, and then you don't even get as much water as you used to.

I have seen the potential for losing something so precious, and it goes beyond money.

Obviously, I'm not making millions of dollars doing this, I'm doing this because it's part of who I am.

- [Narrator] The decisions made about land and water use today will shape what Colorado will look like in the years ahead.

The housing boom on the Front Range has led to soaring wholesale water prices, which are now some of the priciest in the American West.

Housing prices have more than doubled in the Denver Metro area since 2010, as a result of developers spending more on limited water supplies.

Increased competition for resources also adds to the pricing frenzy.

- It almost seemed like there was a competition for all the small communities to grow, and too, everybody wanted to move out and see the open spaces, see the agricultural land.

It was so beautiful to see the crops growing.

And so that competition for the resources really drove up the prices of both the land and the water in this area.

In the early 2000s, my parents and I, we've had this conversation about 15 years ago, whether to move from the Brighton location because we saw the growth coming so strong and the challenges that we would face.

If I wanted to expand the operation here right now, I couldn't because land and water values are so high.

I couldn't afford it with what I'm making on fruits and vegetables.

The margins are very, very tight, labor costs have continued to escalate, that's one of our biggest costs, actually is labor because it's such a labor intensive process and too, the risk of investments are so big, when you're investing over $1,500 an acre and all of a sudden hail takes it out in one second, that's a pretty big pill to swallow.

In 2019, we lost 80% of our onion crop and it's three years later, and we still haven't recovered from those losses.

If I were to sell out, I don't think the City of Brighton economically would be hurt because there was plenty of other industries that would be happy to move in.

I wouldn't sell off just the water, I'd sell it all.

It would be hard to see the land dry up, especially when you knew what it used to be, just picturing a plant shriveling up and dying.

One time I joked and said, you know what?

The city should just buy my farm and I'll manage the farm for them.

And that way they can have the opportunity to use the water off of that farm if they need to.

I think it's going to take somebody that is not steeped in the traditions that we're currently in, understands the historical past and how we've gotten here.

- [Narrator] Crowley County, once a bountiful agricultural region along the Arkansas River in the Eastern Plains, is an example of how short-term choices can lead to long-term consequences.

Through the 1970s and into the early 2000s, more than 90% of the irrigated acreage was dewatered.

Buyers were looking and sellers were willing.

Farmers in neighboring communities felt similar pressures and experienced first hand the ripple effects of what could happen.

- I grew up and spent all my life in Rocky Ford and I farmed here for 40 years plus.

It was a family farm, raised cattle and vegetables, made a living.

There was a time when there were a lot of family-owned businesses, a lot of family-owned packers, those businesses, they're history now.

There are fewer farmers today than there were 50 or 60 years ago.

One farmer can feed a whole lot more people today than he could back then.

From even the 1950s to today, the production of a lot of these crops has more than tripled.

In July the 20th in 1990, I remember that date pretty well; that stuck in your mind, I could hear that hailstorm coming.

It was the afternoon, and I could see the clouds to the west, to see that all gone in 15 minutes is pretty heartbreaking.

The next year, I had been harvesting cantaloupe for maybe a week.

The news, somewhere down in South Texas came out that beware about eating cantaloupe, because there's salmonella in the cantaloupe.

And it had nothing to do with cantaloupe that was raised here.

But the buyers said, "Cancel all my orders.

I need no more cantaloupe.

We can't give them away in the store."

So, I had two hits in two years in a row.

It was not a tough decision for us to decide to go ahead and sell the water.

It was somebody who wanted to give me something for what little I had left.

What did it feel like when I sold the water?

It was a funny feeling.

I mean, I knew what I had done.

But I'll tell you one thing that I tell a lot of people, the day I decided to quit farming and buying seed and fertilizer and putting a crop in the ground, that's the first time that I could sleep during the growing season.

The water, yeah, it was gone.

And yeah, I had a decent bank account.

I didn't have to worry about paying the bank back and paying a lot of dadgum bills that made you worry.

It's wonderful, but money is nothing but the root of all evil.

The before was irrigated crop and high productive land.

The after is it's been revegetated.

It does not blow when the wind blows.

It's not a dust bowl, some grazing for livestock.

It's not development land, developing cities here, developing much of anything, it's just like Eastern Colorado prairie.

What's been most misunderstood about the sale of water out of the Arkansas Valley is probably how tough it is to make a living off of an irrigated farm.

It's just a hard living.

And it's very evident out there, that there are not many young people coming back to the farm.

You'll find that across this nation.

- [Narrator] Our societal challenges are complex and dynamic.

The answer to them isn't solely an engineering or a social equity solution.

Or only an economic or conservation-based approach.

It needs to be all of those things.

To manage this scarce resource, we must find the radical center and figure out how to live within our means, individually and collectively.

While the state's population has increased dramatically, overall household consumption continues to decrease.

Municipalities are stretching every drop of water through improved technologies, conservation incentives and education.

Water resource management alone isn't enough; thoughtful land use planning needs to happen in tandem.

- If you want to preserve both agricultural uses and serve the need of providing housing for people, you have to conserve water in the municipal setting.

We are a high prairie desert.

And our vegetation should hopefully be complementary to that.

- How do we build a community that has a wonderful lifestyle, but doesn't need a lot of water to do it?

That was the genesis of Sterling Ranch.

What you put on the outside is lost forever.

So, manage where you put your grass.

You do need parks, you do need athletic fields, but you don't need big yards.

And if you are going in your yard, use plants that don't use a lot of water.

It's switching your mindset from supply, let's go get more, to demand, let's use less and still have high quality.

We have to put our residents in control of their water demand.

They're not.

In many jurisdictions, you get a bill the end of the month, what do you do with it?

Here, we've invested in the technology where you have two meters in every home, an indoor and an outdoor; and they're different prices, different rates.

- [Brock] It's based on a budget.

So, you kind of get a certain amount based on your lot size that you get to deploy.

And if you want to put it in grass, you can get small strips of grass.

If you want to save it and use it for trees, you can do that.

- [Harold] Rather than cutting grass, you're out walking and seeing nature.

That's how we grew up in Colorado, that's what we wanted.

- Denver Water estimates that their typical consumer, 50% of that water utilization is outside and Sterling Ranch is running about 33%.

Denver Water has almost doubled the amount of customers they have on their system and water demand stayed the same since the '70s.

So, the Front Range is adopting it.

- [Narrator] There are a lot of questions about the future of agriculture as our population and climate continues to drastically change.

The agricultural community in the San Luis Valley recognizes the need to fix a massive water imbalance they have created internally, although bringing the aquifer back into balance is no small task.

This effort has sparked a range of conservation methods, including innovative agricultural practices and water sharing agreements with nearby municipalities.

This opens the door for collaborative solutions that serve multiple needs.

- I kind of realized that coming home and trying to change things from within the context of our own culture is a lot more powerful because a lot of colonization and oppression has come from that idea that we know what's best for somebody else, but one thing I realized is that we don't do well, especially in our culture, we don't recognize the limitations of the natural environment, one thing that I really felt strongly was that agriculture should be regional, and it should be acknowledging the natural system that you live in.

We were in a situation recently where we were about to lose part of the farm and we had to make some choices, financial choices to make sure that the farm stayed together.

One of them was a water right rental to the City of Alamosa.

The City of Alamosa was so willing to work with us, and they respected us.

We were sitting at the table and there was never this dynamic of like, "You're beneath us and we need your water."

So, we were able to come up with a water deal that didn't take the water from the farm, but instead of being used for crops, more of our water is going back to the groundwater to help other farmers and also to help our ecosystem and the river, I love that as well.

One of the big things that we believe on this farm is we are stewards of this land, and we have to make sure that it's taken care of, and that it's cared for and that it's better and improved for the next generation.

We came up with a solution that I think respects the natural environment and also helped our farm out of a dire situation.

- [Narrator] We're not just managing for our own resources, but for all of the states and countries that rely on water that falls here in the headwaters.

How we use and share the water has implications that ripple hundreds, thousands of miles downstream throughout the Western United States.

It will require a fundamental shift in how we adapt in the climate space.

- Cooperation and sharing, as sometimes silly those words sound in conversation, that really is the future.

There's not a lot of options that don't involve agreements around sharing of water resources, and cooperative discussions around how to all exist with very different economies and lifestyles using the same water.

Rural communities need somewhere to sell, the resources and goods that they're producing, urban communities rely more than they know on those open spaces.

And so you look at these webs of imports and exports, and there is not a boundary there.

We're also learning finally, hopefully, that the dollar is not the fundamental value that everyone shares.

- What's at stake?

It's the future of the Colorado we all love.

It's the Colorado that we've grown up with or that we've moved out here to be around.

You know, we love going to the mountains and seeing a mountain stream.

We love recreating on our rivers and reservoirs.

We love having an adequate water supply in our homes and our communities.

- We know that we need farming and we need agriculture.

There are numerous processes to try to answer water supply and demand gap questions in a way that raises all boats.

And they are slow and difficult and contentious and so necessary because we all want Colorado to be a place that will live forever.

And water is the key to that.

(mellow music)