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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org, nmgreens@yahoogroups.com
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  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Water: A New Cash Crop
  • Date: Sun, 04 Jan 2004 13:05:46 -0700


The answer may not be obvious to Aschermann but it is to me.
--------------

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-admn-water4jan04,1,1133997
.story?coll=la-home-nation

Water: A New Cash Crop

By Seth Hettena
Associated Press Writer

January 4, 2004

ROCKY FORD, Colo. — Ron Aschermann could barely eke out a living raising
melons, cucumbers, tomatoes and other crops on his 300-acre farm. But
quitting
the business will earn him more than $1.2 million.

Aschermann and scores of other farmers on the high plains of southeastern
Colorado are selling water, which once produced melons, to the Denver suburb
of Aurora. The prairie will retake land that has long known the plow.

"Yeah, it's not a healthy thing to do for the area, but let me tell you:
Farming is not that great anymore either. These rural communities in almost
any state you want to go into, they're all getting smaller," said
Aschermann,
60, whose family has farmed in the area since 1911. "The best dollar for the
asset right now is the water."

The same thing is happening across the West as the nation's fastest-growing
region shifts more water from farms to thirsty cities. Billions of gallons
changed hands last year in eight Western states, and even more will flow in
years to come. California recently approved a 75-year shift of water from
desert farms to San Diego.

Colorado's Arkansas River Valley serves as a cautionary example for the
West's
burgeoning water market. For a onetime payment of $18 million, Aurora bought
water to flush toilets and grow flowers in new homes, and a faded farm
region
will be dealt another blow. What was once the town's pride, a 13-mile ditch
that settlers dug by hand shortly after the Civil War, will be nearly
drained.
When the water leaves, more jobs and local businesses are expected to dry up
as well.

"Westwide, over the next 25 to 50 years, you will clearly see additional
examples of what's happening in the Arkansas Valley," said Bennett Raley, a
Denver water lawyer who is now the Bush administration's point man for
Western
water issues.

Across the Arkansas River from Rocky Ford, Carl McClure, 65, president of
the
local farmers union, offers a tour of what happened to a neighboring county
that sold most of its water to Colorado Springs and other cities.

McClure noses his pickup past Crowley County's closed railroad stations,
empty
storefronts and a shuttered car dealership. An alfalfa field has disappeared
beneath the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility, a medium-security state
prison. McClure retired after working there 12 years to supplement his farm
income.

"This is what replaces farms when you take the water away," McClure said,
gazing at the prison's floodlights and chain-link fence.

Down the road is the newer Crowley County Correctional Facility. Together,
the
two prisons house more than 2,000 male inmates, a group that has grown to
represent nearly half the county's population.

"It can be very depressing," McClure said. "Crowley County is a prime
example
of what shouldn't happen."

It's a fate that California's Imperial Valley, the state's poorest region,
hopes to avoid. In October, the desert farm region, the largest single user
of
Colorado River water, narrowly agreed to ship some of its supply to San
Diego
for $3.5 billion over 45 years — the biggest sale of its kind in U.S.
history.

Imperial found itself under extraordinary and unprecedented pressure to
sell.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation threatened to take away some water that it
deemed the desert farmers were wasting.

The water sale is designed to give Imperial and its $1-billion-a-year farm
economy a measure of financial security, but many worry about the future of
the valley tucked in California's southeastern corner. Valley farmers flood
desert fields to produce huge amounts of alfalfa, a thirsty, low-value crop.
The question on many minds is whether growers will be tempted to farm water
rather than farm the land.

"It's much easier to go the mailbox and pick up a check than it is to go out
there and put in a 60-, 70-, 80-hour week," said John Pierre Menvielle, a
third-generation farmer in Heber, Calif., who has been raising crops in the
valley for 32 years.

Farm towns in California have gone under when they lost their water to
cities.
The Owens Valley, in the high desert east of the Sierra, became a dust bowl
when Los Angeles quietly acquired its water and flushed it down an aqueduct
to
the city 90 years ago. The 1974 film "Chinatown" was loosely based on what's
been dubbed the "water grab."

"Whoever brings the water brings the people," wrote William Mulholland, the
aqueduct's legendary creator.

Modern-day water speculators still stalk the waterways of the West.

Denver investors bought up Rocky Ford's sugar beet refinery and sold the
water
associated with it to Aurora 20 years ago. A decade later, brothers Lee and
Edward Bass, oil barons from Houston, quietly bought up Imperial Valley land
and then tried unsuccessfully to sell the water out from under it. Recently,
another Arkansas Valley canal has attracted interest from investors in
Denver
and New Orleans.

So what's the answer for the 450,000 farms in the West? Squeezed by rising
equipment prices, depressed crop prices and a brutal drought, farmers are
finding it harder to hang on. Farms use as much as 95% of the water in some
areas of the West. Growing cities will continue nibbling away at
agriculture's
share.

Many believe water markets offer a way to get water to cities without
completely wiping out farms.

Over the last decade, Northern California's rice farmers have sold smaller
stakes of their sizable water supply to Los Angeles. Instead of viewing it
as
a threat to their survival, growers say selling water offers them a
financial
cushion in case the price of rice collapses.

"I truly believe that it could be a beneficial part of a farmer's mix at a
small level," rice grower Don Bransford said.

Similarly, a market has evolved for water of the massive Colorado-Big
Thompson
Project, which brings Rockies water to northeastern Colorado through a
series
of dams, tunnels and pipes. Cities have paid as much as 6 cents a gallon for
Big Thompson water, some of the state's and the West's highest prices.

Towns in Texas lease large amounts of Rio Grande water through
well-functioning markets; developers have set up a system to buy Truckee
River
water for new homes in and around Reno, and Albuquerque has been buying up
middle Rio Grande water rights from farmers, according to the Water
Strategist, a California publication that tracks sales.

Brent M. Haddad, associate professor of environmental studies at UC Santa
Cruz
and author of "Rivers of Gold," takes a different view of water markets.

"The bell tolls when you create water markets, because all this is going to
do
is shrink the number of farms," he said. "What we're talking about is a
means
of moving from farms to cities."

Turn on the tap in Aurora and out comes water that once grew crops.
Three-fourths of the water that helped the sprawling suburb east of Denver
vault into the ranks of Colorado's biggest cities was acquired from farmers.

Over the last decade, most of the city's new water has come from the
Arkansas
River Valley, according to Doug Kemper, Aurora's water resources manager.
Once
the Rocky Ford water sale is approved by a judge, water that once went on
the
Aschermann farm will start flowing into the city.

"They're going to drink it. They're going to have parks. They're going to
grow
flowers. They're going to have baseball diamonds and football fields.
They're
going to have all those things," Aschermann said. "When you can't make it on
the farm, what else do you do?"

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times








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