Food vs. Water: High Commodity Prices Complicate Aquifer Protection in Colorado’s San Luis Valley
SAN LUIS VALLEY, Colorado — At an average altitude of 2,350 meters (7,700 feet), Colorado’s San Luis Valley is the nation’s highest agricultural region and one of its top potato producers. Almost by definition, water dictates the patterns of life and land.

With it, valley farmers have turned this sunny, high-desert rift between the Sangre de Cristo and San Juan mountain ranges into one of the most densely irrigated expanses of farmland on the planet. Soon, though, a confrontation between rising global commodity prices, which are pushing production to meet demand, and shrinking water supplies, largely linked to climate change, could cause a number of growers here to do without.

Like heavily irrigated areas in California’s Central Valley, in India’s northern regions, and in the North China Plain, the San Luis Valley has a groundwater supply problem. Since government-subsidized electricity arrived in the 1950s, farmers here have readily pumped from the two aquifer systems that soak up snowmelt like a sponge. Now, those decades of withdrawals have combined with recently lower-than-average river flows to affect water-rights holders along the Rio Grande River, which cuts through the valley before eventually becoming the Texas-Mexico border.

Simply put, the San Luis Valley no longer has enough water to support the abundant farm production that is becoming increasingly supercharged by rising prices for the crops grown here.

There may be a way out. Water officials in the region’s six counties are working with the federal government on a voluntary plan that would pay farmers to take land out of production. If things turn out as planned, up to 16,000 hectares (40,000 acres) of the valley’s roughly 240,000 irrigated hectares (600,000 acres) will not be farmed.

Though it is still being negotiated, the plan has a significant obstacle: the explosive rise in food prices, which are making the sums offered by the water-conservation program less enticing. Prices for the valley’s mainstay — potatoes — have increased 25 percent in the last five years. Wheat, alfalfa, and barley prices have done even better, more or less doubling over the same period.
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