Facing devastating dry-up, Lower Arkansas farmers hope striking visuals can help tell their stories

Next to her computer at the history center in Crowley, population 153, Annette Barber keeps a black and white photo of her father,

As a curator of a community’s victories and losses, Barber at times has wanted to know more about the expression on her dad’s face, in a 1962 picture snapped in Southern California, where he had chased her mom to Santa Ana.

“I said, ‘Mom, Dad looks happier here than he’s ever looked,” Barber said. 

Annette Barber’s parents Ruthie, center, and Rollie, Adkinson, right, in Santa Ana, California in December 1962, just after Ruthie told her husband they could move back to Crowley. (Adkinson family photo)

“Well,” her mom conceded, “I had just told him that we could move back to Crowley.” 

The promise and the grin launched what Barber calls a magical childhood, with her family’s return to the tiny Lower Arkansas River farm town when she was 3. Her father, Rollie Adkinson, helped run his family’s thriving grocery and hardware store. She walked from her house, and donned the personalized butcher’s apron her grandpa gave her at age 4. 

Barber dusted and weighed pinto beans on an antique scale. Some farm customers counted their change with three fingers, the others lost to machinery accidents. When Barber learned to write, she marked wax paper parcels with a grease pencil. 

And then, when Barber went off to college in the late 1970s, the magic vanished, along with Crowley County’s water. Speculators bought up the irrigation water, and sold it to Aurora and Colorado Springs for suburban home taps. There’s another photograph now — a satellite view of Crowley County fields before and after the dry-up. Lever the electronic slide and the line moves across acreage like a guillotine, cutting off the county economy to a barren future bleeding a dusty brown. 

“I miss the farms just to the north,” Barber said, telling her family story at a Nov. 4 water summit in Rocky Ford. “Where I’d ride my bike to see my friend, just over the canal. … The smell of the farm is gone.”

Since her return years ago to her beloved county, Barber has crafted a life of story-gathering, taking oral histories from figures who towered over a tiny spot on the map. 

“But sometimes,” she admits, “it gets really hard to just sit with what we’ve lost.”

Workers in the 1920s digging a canal to divert water from the Arkansas River in the lower valley, launching decades of farming and the buildup of farm communities. Without the water, local leaders today struggle to find other uses for the land. (Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservancy District)

Moving from victimhood to equal player 

Leaders in the five Colorado counties making up the Lower Arkansas River Valley are no longer content to “just sit” as their water lifeline disappears like dark magic. After decades of seeing their farm economy dried up by sales of water rights to booming Front Range suburbs, they want to tell new stories in order to fight back.

Their water summit Nov. 4 unveiled a “story map” packed with tiny depth charges of economic impact. Losing water from the Colorado Canal or the Catlin Canal or the Fort Lyon Canal is not just a sad epilogue to relentless urban progress, their story map argues. It’s billions of dollars in economic destruction to a way of life once vital to Colorado’s autobiography.

“The dry-up of approximately 100,000 acres has resulted in the loss of an estimated $142 million in economic outputs every year in the Lower Arkansas Valley,” according to the report, from a detailed economic analysis by The Freshwater Trust and commissioned by the Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservancy District.

Tractor by tractor, drip by drip, bushel by bushel, the intricate river basin analysis conducted by the trust can tell Lower Arkansas leaders what happened after the loss of each and every irrigated acre. And more importantly, it gives those leaders the tools they need in tense negotiations with city water buyers to seek fair compensation for every acre lost tomorrow and the day after.

“When I shared those numbers with county commissioners, one of them asked, ‘Can we just have one year of that back? ‘” said Jack Goble, manager of the conservancy district. “Another commissioner said he’d rather have the county back the way it was before the water left than receive any amount of money. I think those comments really illustrate what these communities have lost.”

Swipe to see landscape changes from above the Colorado Canal and Arkansas River surrounding Crowley between 1986, left, and 2020, right. (Google Earth images from the StoryMap “When Water Leaves: The Story of Buy-and-Dry in Colorado’s Lower Arkansas Valley.”)

Good story, but not the whole story, suburbs say 

Aurora and Colorado Springs are named villains in the Lower Ark’s new “story.” One of the report’s starker illustrations is a color-coded map of who now owns water rights to 46,600 acres once irrigated by the Colorado Canal in Crowley County. Red is Colorado Springs Utilities, Yellow is Aurora Water. 

Only 3,100 of those acres are still irrigated for farming, and those dwindling green fields are surrounded by Dust Bowl-like sand drifts and once-thriving towns whose commerce these days runs more to dollar stores and postage stamps. 

The “poster child” for damaging farm water buy-ups in Colorado is the sale of Colorado Canal water to a private investor, and then to Aurora and Colorado Springs in the 1970s. Lower Arkansas leaders feel they can regain control of some of their land uses by carefully mapping who owns what, and where valuable resources went. (Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservancy Districdt “Story Map”)

Both Aurora and Colorado Springs acknowledge that city interests did Crowley County wrong. They couldn’t buy water the same way now even if they wanted to — a 2026 law signed by Gov. Jared Polis requires buyers at the very least to revegetate southeastern Colorado farm land they dry up when acquiring the water rights.

But the cities and suburbs have some notes about the way Lower Arkansas leaders portray them in the storybook. Major economic changes have swept all corners of Colorado since the Arkansas River canal buy-ups began in the 1970s, they note, not just the evaporation of farm culture. 

Sugar City’s beet processing factory closed in 1967, abruptly ending an entire market. A private speculator started buying up water shares in the Colorado Canal. The Crystal Sugar plant in Rocky Ford shuttered in 1979, leaving the Rocky Ford Ditch system vulnerable to an investor. 

It’s the farmers who approach Aurora Water first, not the other way around, says the utility’s assistant general manager, Alex Davis. Colorado’s legal framework for water, and more importantly, the culture of property rights, allows farmers to secure their families’ futures by selling their greatest asset, Davis said. 

Without extra irrigation water, dryland farming in the five Lower Arkansas counties is marginal at best. (Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservancy District)

Aurora Water is putting final touches on new water rights negotiations with historic Arkansas Valley farms that will keep 100-year-old family operations in place, tilling the land, she said. Still, she argues, Front Range cities should not submit to a sentiment that simplifies water debates to farm-use-good vs. city-use-bad. 

“The idea of water moving from one area of the state from one use to another use by itself is not a negative,” Davis said, after reading through the Lower Arkansas story map. “What does Aurora do with the water that we have? We support national defense. We have Buckley Space Force Base. We support almost 100,000 defense-related jobs that are well-paying jobs, that support families. We support colleges. We support schools. We support Anschutz Medical Campus, which is a world-renowned medical center.”

What the city does with its water “is extremely beneficial to the state of Colorado, to people in this state, and to and to the citizens of Aurora,” Davis said. “What the Lower Arkansas is doing, they’re trying to elevate one use over another use. Now the economic value of how we use water may dwarf how they use water. Does it make it right or wrong, better or worse? I would say no.”

The map shows the progressive decline of irrigated farmland in the Lower Arkansas Valley by water court decree over time. It also includes irrigated acreage for water that has been acquired by municipalities or water speculators, which has not yet been decreed for new uses but will likely be dried up.

What they don’t want: Tenant farming for big cities 

The Lower Arkansas district’s story begrudgingly acknowledges that more recent water rights negotiations with the cities have resulted in leaseback arrangements that in theory could support local agriculture. Colorado Springs, for example, has negotiated with Bent County water rights owners to only take water rights for the unirrigated corners of circular fields served by center-pivot systems. 

Aurora Water is set to reveal this week the details of agreements with prominent Rocky Ford-area farming families, the Hirakatas and the Hanagans, that they say will encourage the families to continue producing watermelons, cantaloupes, chiles and other crops as leaseholders. 

Eric Hanagan speaks to a customer at Hanagan’s Mary’s Farm Stand on Sept. 2 in Swink. (Cheney Orr, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)

Goble and his staff, for their part, prefer to point out how Aurora and Colorado Springs are always scouting for yet more water rights in the valley, to slake their relentless housing growth. The story map cites Colorado Springs growth plans calling for 34,000 more acre-feet of future supply. 

“These projections make one thing clear: the pressure to acquire additional water in the Lower Arkansas Valley will continue,” the story map says. 

Colorado Springs Utilities is finishing up an agreement with Xcel Energy for water rights from  a power plant planned but never built near Las Animas. Colorado Springs officials said in interviews the great majority of that water will stay in the community as leases to farmers. Goble counters that words like “guarantee” are rarely used. 

Elaine Adkinson, left, born in 1920 and her twin sisters, Eleanor and Evelyn, born in 1921, shown eating watermelon on a porch near the Crowley hay mill. (Adkinson family photo)

Tri-State Generation, meanwhile, holds 50% of the shares in the Amity Canal, currently watering 16,000 acres between Lamar and the Kansas border. That proposed power plant also won’t be built, but the future of the water right hasn’t been written yet. 

Local governments in the valley are often tempted to accept paltry compensation from water utilities in recent intergovernmental agreements, Goble said. Dealmaking is far different in Otero County than in, say, Weld County. The economic activity from a farm near Greeley or Brighton or Erie can instantly be replaced by even more lucrative commerce from a new data center or shipping warehouse. The equation has factored out differently over the last 50 years in southeastern Colorado, Goble said. It’s been farming, or weeds. 

Bent County, for example, agreed to take millions of dollars in upfront mitigation payments from Colorado Springs, and then $675,000 a year to support local economic development efforts. The Freshwater Trust modeling shows that losing that water will drain $15 million a year in economic activity from the county, Goble said. 

City negotiators like to call the new arrangements “water-sharing,” Lower Arkansas leaders say. 

“The terminology may have changed,” the story map says, “but the fundamental economic and community impacts of drying up irrigated farmland in the Lower Arkansas Valley have not.”

Swipe to see landscape changes from above Rocky Ford Ditch between 1986, left, and 2020, right. (Google Earth images from the StoryMap “When Water Leaves: The Story of Buy-and-Dry in Colorado’s Lower Arkansas Valley.”)

What happens next, and who has the power to make change? 

The rural and urban forces at play in the Lower Arkansas Valley agree that they are respectful if often adversarial parties in the current chapter of Colorado history. Aurora Water is negotiating with Crowley County officials on decades-later mitigation for the environmental wrongs begun with the Colorado Canal dry-up. 

Colorado Springs Utilities says it has given some water back to valley farmers in the worst of the current drought to augment their wells and allow them to keep pumping. And the well users, CSU adds, were better off than surface water users when a city of Pueblo sewage accident spilled more than 4 million gallons of human waste, tainting the Arkansas for hundreds of miles. 

“We’ve really focused our program on how to sustain agriculture,” said Colorado Springs Utilities general manager for planning Abigail Ortega. “That’s the Lower Ark’s mission, and that’s our mission as well. We don’t want our city to grow at the expense of agriculture.”

Yes, Colorado Springs may take control of more water flowing through Bent County when its pact with Xcel is complete, Ortega said. Local farmers will control 70% of Xcel’s water right under the new deal. Bent County officials have told Colorado Springs the Xcel-watered land has been declining in production value, “because who’s going to invest in land when you don’t know if you’re going to get a lease the following year?” Ortega said. “And what that agreement does is it puts the water back in the hands of local control.”

Farmland near Swink, where corners not covered by pivot-point sprinklers is left fallow, is shown in this July 2, 2024 photo . Opponents of recent water sales to entities like Aurora and Colorado Springs say the sales threaten agricultural interests in the lower Arkansas valley.
A screen bubbler helps filter water for pivot irrigation operations like this one near Rocky Ford. Farmers in the Arkansas Valley draw water to irrigate their crops from the Arkansas River via a system of canals and ditches. (Photos: Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun)

It may take years to earn back any faith after the decades of reckless dry-up, she said. 

“I don’t think that the Lower Arkansas District will believe us until we have 10 years of production,” Ortega said. “And that’s fair. They want it to be data driven, and I can’t disagree with that.”

The current status, with urban pitted against rural, and river basin fighting river basin, would seem to cry out for statewide solutions. But ancient ghosts are hard to pin down. The “first in time, first in right” prior appropriation law of water was enshrined in the Colorado statehood constitution in 1876. Those who claimed water rights first, more than a century ago, maintain their senior place in line to use the water or sell the right for as long as they employ it “beneficially.” 

When southeastern Colorado pitched its seemingly no-brainer revegetation requirement after city buy-ups, various forces made sure it applied only to the Lower Arkansas, as a test. 

More recent “water sharing” negotiations are well-intentioned, said Pat Wells, supply planner for Northern Water that delivers to dozens of growing communities from Denver suburbs to the Wyoming line. And yet too many sections of fertile ground are now, or are about to be, dust. 

“We’ve really had trouble as a state translating high-level policy and conceptual ideas down to an on-farm or local level,” Wells said. 

When rural communities have asked cities for fairness, the conversations play out on two different scales, he said. 

“I believe we’re missing those numbers by orders of magnitude.”