Survey provides insight into on-farm challenges & decision-making

A recent edition of Fresh Water News, the Colorado Water Education Foundation’s well-regarded periodical about Western water issues, led off with an article entitled, “Report: Colorado’s farm water use exceeds national average, despite efforts to conserve.” As someone who has been around Colorado irrigation a good deal of my career, I found the title annoyingly provocative and had to immediately read the article. 

If that was the intent, it worked to perfection. 

The article’s first few paragraphs seemed to cast the industry in a rather bad light, furthering my annoyance. I’ll expand on that because my ersatz agricultural economist union requires it, but to minimize my negativity, it’s worth noting the remainder of the article did a good job of explaining where this assertion came from and included some thoughtful responses by people in the agricultural, irrigation and environmental businesses. 

The very title of the article, however, is misleading. Colorado’s climate and cropping patterns are not the same as that in other states, so whether Colorado’s farm water use is below, equal or above the national average is meaningless. Also, it’s difficult to measure the success of water conservation measures in reducing usage in a system that uses a lot of surface water administered under the prior appropriation doctrine. Success under this “use it or lose it” system is best measured at a regional level rather than at the farm and may be demonstrated by increased reliability for junior water right holders and those benefitting from upstream conservation measures. 

Colorado’s climate and cropping patterns are not the same as that in other states, so whether Colorado’s farm water use is below, equal or above the national average is meaningless.

So, farm-level statistics may be doing a good job of documenting the adoption of labor, energy and water-saving technology, but the benefit from the water portion of this investment is often an indirect measure in Colorado. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service recently released Irrigation and Water Management Survey, updated through 2018, provided the bulk of the data for the Fresh Water News article. A graphic summary of the high-level data is shown on page 36 of this issue. My initial negativity while diving into this data set changed when I unwittingly spent several hours “nerding out” over what it contained. 

Although the expected documentation of irrigated acres by region, type of system and water source is there, it also contains valuable information toward the back of the survey addressing factors affecting adoption and use of newer technologies and services. State-level information includes methods used to decide when to irrigate, technical assistance received for irrigation and drainage improvements, barriers to making improvements to reduce energy use or conserve water, and sources of information relied on for reducing costs and conserving water. These latter tables can excite economists because they provide the baseline information used to develop predictive models of irrigation technology adoption and future water use, plus they point to factors that might slow down or accelerate future scenarios, such as the use of financial incentives.  

Far from simply academic, these models have high commercial value for both the private sector, such as the irrigation manufacturing and service industries, as well as government planning and resource agencies. At this point, I’m pretty positive about the survey and grateful to the Colorado Water Education Foundation for provoking me into to giving it a serious look.  

George Oamek, PhD, is an economist with Headwaters Corp. and is also on the staff of the Platte River Recovery Implementation Program’s executive director’s office.