Essay by Phil Doe
Water – January 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
WHEN I WAS A BOY we rented seven acres near what is now the intersection of Littleton and South Federal boulevards southwest of Denver. There, we raised garden vegetables for the roadside stands that then dotted South Santa Fe. Child labor, in the form of my two brothers, twin sister, and me — and a smoke-belching, child-resistant, two-wheeled garden tractor that only my father was strong enough to direct unerringly between the crop rows — fueled this sleek operation.
My father would sometimes abandon the mechanical monster, which one of my brothers once unforgettably drove off of a bridge and into an irrigation ditch, to help his children in the dull monotony of hoeing cucumbers, lettuce, onions, and sweet corn. Or my father would join us in the handpicking of tomato worms, which we tossed into Folgers coffee cans. These he would ritualistically cremate in a bath of lighter fluid, fearing that if we merely stomped them into the ground they would multiply, hydra-like.
In reward for our labor, we got Mason jars, wrapped in burlap and filled with water, which we kept shaded at the end of the work field. My father would almost always remark, after taking a “slug” of water from one of the burlapped jars, that he couldn’t understand how they could make it so good and, yet, so cheap; whereas we would howl in dismay at a homily that was so often repeated that we could recite it in mocking unison. But we never doubted that he was right. Only years later did I come to realize how mistaken my father had been.
Here in Colorado irrigated agriculture uses nearly 90% of the state’s water. Yet, according to the state’s official web site, agriculture contributes only 1% of the state’s economic product. In fact, in many recent years, agriculture would have been a negative contributor were it not for the buoying and masking effect of the federal crop subsidy program. Corn, over 1 million acres of it, leads the list of cash crops grown in Colorado. As recently reported in the New York Times, well over a barrel of oil, in the form of chemical fertilizers, is required to raise an acre of corn. Here in the arid west, each acre of irrigated corn also requires water equal to the annual domestic needs of at least 30 people.
The corn, in breathtaking defiance of economic common sense, sells for 50ยข a bushel less than it costs to produce, without regard to the foregone value of the water. With the addition of water, Colorado corn farmers produce an average of 175 bushels per acre, outstripping what is produced per acre on non-irrigated farms in Iowa. The deficit math, when extrapolated over a million acres, should be gulp-inducing.
The puniness of the state’s agricultural sector in relationship to the water resources it engorges underscores the need for a thorough public debate on the monopoly irrigated agriculture holds over the water resources of this and all other western states and whether other alternatives such as land retirement might better serve the common good. But that debate is forestalled by several muffling factors, not least of which is the new $190 billion farm bill out of Washington. Why review current agricultural practices when Congress and the President have basically told us, through their actions, that the old ways will do?
Stasis also favors the private interests of powerful elected officials who participate mightily in this inexcusable farming of the Treasury. For example, Colorado State Senator Jim Isgar received almost $250,000 in subsidy payments between 1996 and 2001. During this period, the brother of Colorado Attorney General Ken Salazar, John T. Salazar, himself newly elected to the state legislature, received $100,000 in federal payments for managing the Salazar family’s 1,000-acre potato plantation. And then there is the case of U.S. Senator Ben “Nighthorse” Campbell. Craftily, he received no direct payments, but his wife did, about $42,000 worth.
THESE POLITICAL ELITE are to be found among the 3,000 Colorado recipients who received two-thirds of the $1.6 billion lavished out to the state’s landed wealthy in federal crop subsidies between 1996 and 2001. The fact that a small knot of people in Colorado’s posh skiing communities of Aspen and Vail received over $1.5 million in subsidy payments during this same time frame, more than the combined receipts of the people in Boston, Philadelphia, and Detroit, only further confirms the program’s elitism. Indeed, this whole nasty business gives new meaning to I.F. Stone’s observation that what we have in this country is a welfare system for the rich and private enterprise for the poor.
Would anyone be surprised to learn that the politicians and gentlemen farmers named above are also the firmest proponents of the thoroughly benighted Animas-La Plata water project here in Colorado? If built, the project will surely cost well over a billion dollars, almost all of which, thanks to Senator Campbell’s recent legislation, is to be paid for by the public. That water, once diverted and stored, would pass from public into private ownership, furthering a growing trend that we should all be gravely concerned about, for as John Wesley Powell cautioned years ago, those who control the water in the west will control the west.
Phillip T. Doe is Chair of Citizens’ Progressive Alliance and lives in Littleton.