Report addresses water conservation

DENVER --To preserve water for agriculture and meet population growth in the future will require additional storage to capture water in a time of plenty to use in times of scarcity.

That is the key to a paper developed by the Colorado Ag Water Alliance that was released Thursday during the 2008 Governor's Forum on Colorado Agriculture at the Double Tree Hotel in Denver.

Don Shawcroft, vice president of the Colorado Farm Bureau, who farms in the San Luis Valley, released initial findings of the alliance during a forum session. The alliance was developed from a meeting at a November 2005 ag water summit and was organized in February 2006.

"It's vision is to empower Colorado ag producers to make informed and viable decisions about ag water," Shawcroft said.

Agriculture, he said, uses 86 percent of the state's water, but since the drought of 2002, Colorado's future growth will require creative water supplies. That, Shawcroft said, will come from a mix of conservation and other areas.

Agriculture can create some of those conservation answers, but farmers will need to be paid for those efforts, Shawcroft said, as some of those measures can be addressed by reducing acreage, going to shorter growing season crops, eliminating field evaporation, switching to different crops, and using different irrigation methods.

But all those can lead to other problems that can effect not only specific river basins but water compact entitlements, water aquifers and how conserved water can be transferred to other uses.

"That's the challenge we face," Shawcroft said.

The report

The complete report by the Colorado Ag Water Alliance is available at www.cwrri.colostate.edu