“Ag” is Code for “Cattle”

The unstated goal of the 2015 Colorado Water Plan was to build more storage, maybe even leading to another big transmountain diversion, and the stated justification for this is that it will “save agriculture.” Both the South Platte and Arkansas basin roundtables claim they could lose their agriculture due to “buy and dry.” But maybe the real driver of the call for more storage is the cost of other sources of water. At $70,000 an acre-foot, what water in the Northern Water Conservancy District is now selling for, it would cost $2.8 billion to purchase 40,000 acre-feet from farmers on the east slope. That is far more than the cost of, say, adding twelve feet of concrete to the top of Turquoise and Pueblo reservoirs. That concrete is all that is needed for the Arkansas River Basin to firm up 40,000 acre-feet of conditional water rights in the Roaring Fork River basin. And if the federal government pays for the dam heightening, the water may be obtained for no cost at all. Before dismissing this as farfetched, remember that is how we have been building water projects in the West for nearly 120 years. But it is worth examining just what type of agriculture the Front Range is trying to protect. In fact, it takes only one word to describe Colorado agriculture: cattle.

Nearly half of Colorado’s 104,000 square miles and over 80 percent of the water consumed in the state is devoted to raising cattle or the hay, alfalfa, and corn they eat. Cattle and dairy sales account for two-thirds of agricultural revenue earned in the state. After adding the corn and hay consumed by cattle, nearly 90 percent of the state’s agricultural revenue relates to cattle production, on both sides of the Continental Divide. The number one maxim in Colorado water law is to divert water from streams and put it to beneficial use. Cattle make this possible. Vegetables, fruit, and potatoes, the crops we eat, made up only 3 percent of agricultural sales in 2012.[1]

Figure 6.1 Economics of Colorado agriculture

Figure 6.1 Economics of Colorado agriculture[2]

Cattle require far more land and water than other meat sources.[3] You could fill a hot tub with the 434 gallons it takes to produce 1,000 calories of beef, less than half the recommended daily food allowance for an adult in the U.S.[4] Animal grazing occupies a quarter of the earth’s land area outside the poles. In Colorado, it’s closer to half. Worldwide, over one-third of all cereals grown are fed to livestock. Again, in Colorado it is likely double that figure.[5]

Figure 6.2 Land and water required by cattle versus other animals

Perry Cabot, a professor of agriculture at Colorado State University and a frequent presenter on irrigation science at water conferences, says Americans are eating less beef, in part because it costs twice as much as the average retail price for dairy, pork, poultry and eggs. Beef production also emits five times as much CO2 as pork, poultry, eggs, and dairy.[6]

Figure 6.3 Carbon footprint of beef versus other meats

The South Platte Roundtable claims it earns far more per irrigated acre than the Western Slope. While true, this is misleading because the bulk of that income is earned by meatpacking plants outside Greeley and elsewhere on Colorado’s eastern plains. In fact, hay and corn account for almost all water consumed by South Platte agriculture. The South Platte grows a lot more corn than the Western Slope, mostly by pumping water out of the Ogallala aquifer in the Republican Basin along the border with Nebraska and Kansas. Corn production is also heavily subsidized.

Figure 6.4 Crops grown in Colorado

Graph updated for 2022 Census:[7]

Here is the graph in black and white:

The U.S. Dept. of Agriculture (USDA) reports that Colorado irrigated 2.5 million acres in 2012 (the 2023 Colorado Water Plan says its closer to  million acres),[8] and the 2022 USDA Ag Census says the total irrigated acreage in Colorado is 2.9 million acres.[9] Over half of all irrigated acres grew hay or alfalfa, and nearly a third grew corn. In all, hay, alfalfa, and corn were grown on 87 percent of Colorado’s irrigated cropland in 2022. Corn is king in the South Platte River basin, and it goes largely to feed cattle or to ethanol plants in Iowa. In the Republican River basin, corn is grown on 77 percent of all irrigated acres. It will go away when the Ogallala Aquifer dries up, 25 to 75 years from now at current pumping rates.[10]

Figure 6.5 Colorado farm subsidies

From 1995 to 2023, 40% of all subsidies went to Republican Basin corn growers. The situation hasn’t changed.

A grown cow drinks about thirty gallons a day. While that’s a lot of water, 3.2 million cattle sold from Colorado feedlots in 2012 consumed 107,000 acre-feet that year, barely 2 percent of the 4.7 million acre-feet consumed in agriculture in Colorado. On the Western Slope, hay and alfalfa consume about 90 percent of water in agriculture. Amazingly, a good portion of the hay and alfalfa grown in Colorado and throughout the West is shipped to Asia. Veteran upper Gunnison River valley rancher and former longtime Colorado River District board member Bill Trampe once said he sold some of the hay he grows to China.[11] Rather than returning empty, container ships delivering manufactured goods like computers from China to American ports on the Pacific Coast are returning to Asia full of hay. In 2012, the U.S. exported over four million tons of hay to Asian countries. Although Colorado supplies about half the Colorado River’s flow and nearly all the flow down the Arkansas, Platte, and Rio Grande rivers, only 3 percent of Colorado’s land area is irrigated.

In Colorado, most cattle are produced in small cow-calf operations, which the USDA defines as farms selling fewer than 100 cattle per year. Small cow-calf operations produce 45.9 percent of all beef sales in the U.S.[12] That’s true on Colorado’s Western Slope as well, as the 3,367 ranchers reporting cattle sales there each sold eighty-one head of cattle on average in 2012.[13] Eighty percent of Colorado’s ranchers sold no more than thirty-four cattle, and most of them have other jobs to supplement their income. Most are true mom-and-pop operations. In typical cow-calf operations, cows give birth in February and March, the calves graze throughout the spring and summer, and they are sent to feedlots in the fall. Cows that are not pregnant are typically culled and shipped to feedlots because it is not worth the cost to let them graze if they cannot produce calves. The USDA finds that small cow-calf operators are less likely to follow specialized breeding programs, or to market their products, or to purchase futures or options to guard against the risk of price drops. They are less likely to hire veterinarians to test whether their cows are pregnant, or to vaccinate their herds.[14] Many cannot afford these practices.

Cattle often graze land that is not appropriate for growing crops, such as vast stretches of the eastern plains that are not irrigated. Richard Vangytenbeek, the Colorado River Basin Outreach Coordinator for Trout Unlimited, says that one advantage of Western Slope cattle ranching is that many ranchers maintain specialty breeds that help preserve genetic diversity. It is easy to strike up a conversation with ranchers if you ask them about their breed, but don’t ask how many cattle they have because that is like asking them how much money they have in their wallet. Cattle are lauded for keeping condos away, but that is also a matter of zoning and tax policies. One way to keep rangelands open would be to extend the agricultural property tax break to all undeveloped land, not just land that has cattle grazing it. Ranchers claim that cattle grazing benefits the land, but that is a nuanced conversation. Montrose, Delta, and Mesa counties are the three lowest-elevation counties on the Western Slope; they are also the top-producing agricultural counties. Montrose County is famous for Olathe sweet corn and Mesa County is known nationally for its Palisade peaches. But only 8 percent of the irrigation water consumed on the Western Slope is devoted to vegetables, sweet corn, and orchards. The rest grows hay and corn for cattle consumption.

It’s hard to turn a profit by raising cattle (slaughtering them is a different story, though). Western Slope agriculture generated $698 million in sales in 2022, about 8 percent of the state’s $9.2 billion total revenue from farming reported by the USDA in 2022.[15] The 2023 Colorado Water Plan says that irrigated agriculture contributes $47 billion to the Colorado economy annually, a more than 5-fold difference. I have been unable to determine the source of this difference.[16] The USDA’s 2012 Census reports the average Colorado Western Slope farm lost $4,113, and that’s before farmers paid themselves for their labor. Nearly a fifth of irrigated farms, 22 percent, received a federal farm subsidy. The average Western Slope farm generated barely a fifth of the revenue that the average east slope farm did in 2012, but that is distorted because sales from meatpacking plants are factored in the east slope total.

Figure 6.6 Farm economics in different counties in Colorado

Farming in Mesa, Montrose, and Delta counties is barely profitable. More than a third of the remaining irrigated farms on the Western Slope receive a federal farm subsidy, but most still lose money.[17] The Front Range knows this, claiming that agriculture produces $1,383 per acre-foot on the east slope, but only $72 per acre-foot on the Western Slope.[18] That’s revenue per acre-foot of water, not acres. And gross numbers like that are misleading as a single company, the meatpacker JBS, earned about 75 percent of Weld County’s $1.9 billion agricultural revenue in 2012.[19] JBS has feedlots in Weld, Yuma, and Prowers counties, and these counties ranked 1, 2, and 6 in agricultural revenue among all counties statewide.

About 3.2 million cattle were sold in Colorado in 2012, about 10 percent of the cattle sold in the country. Feedlots in the South Platte and Arkansas basins sold most of this. Only 11 percent of cattle sold in Colorado were raised in the state. The Colorado cattle business is basically an east slope business. Most cattle producers in Colorado are in a perpetual bind: do they continue to raise calves on their property, or ship them to market so they can avoid the cost of raising them? Are they better off feeding the hay they grow to their own cattle, selling it to neighboring farms, or shipping it to Asia?

For small ranchers, it’s a business of diminishing returns because the value of each added pound keeps dropping as a calf gets heavier.  While ranchers may fetch 75 cents for each pound of gain from 300 to 400 pounds, the return drops to as little as 25 cents per pound for gain from 700 to 800 pounds.[20]

Wayne Shoemaker, who together with his wife Sonja ran the Bar A Ranch near Toponas in Routt County, talked to a reporter at the Steamboat Pilot & Today in April of 2013.

“We’re seeing some good prices compared to what they were five or six years ago, but we’re also facing a huge increase in production costs,” he said. “At the end of the day, I don’t know if these prices will cover our costs: tires, fuel, gas, fertilizer. It’s inflation. You name it, it’s up there.”[21]

Wayne and Sonja Shoemaker are not alone.

“We went through (summer) 2011 and everybody was doing great,” said Kyle Monger, according to the same story in the Pilot. Monger ranches in Hayden.

“We had surplus hay, and we were selling it in Texas and New Mexico,” he said. “Fast-forward to 2012, and it turned out horrendously bad. We had no snow on the ground in the fall of 2011, and the surface of the hay meadows froze. What little snow we had that winter didn’t percolate into the ground when it ran off. Calving season was good because of the lack of moisture, but we didn’t have any rain to help with the spring grasses nearly until June.”

Fickle rain and snowfall, early or late frosts, changing input and commodity prices that are set far away by national markets—this could have just as easily described ranching in 1890 as in 2013. It’s the age-old story of agriculture, and it explains why the average rancher’s age is going up by nearly one every year in the West. The kids are just not interested in inheriting the business. Meanwhile, the amount of water we devote to ranching on the Western Slope is, unbelievably, nearly 6 acre-feet per cow sold.[22] That’s equivalent to flooding the Denver Broncos football field with 5 feet of water—to raise a single cow!

Someone is making money in the cattle business in Colorado, and it is the big feedlots. Nearly 75 percent of agricultural revenue earned in Colorado comes from the sale of cattle, and much of it from meatpacking operations and commercial feed lots in Weld and Prowers counties that used to be owned by Dick and Charlie Monfort. The Monfort brothers sold their meatpacking operations to ConAgra in 1987, which sold it to Swift & Company, which sold it in 2007 to what is now JBS USA, a Brazilian meatpacking company. Today the Monfort brothers own and run the Colorado Rockies baseball team.

Most Americans have never heard of JBS, but it is the largest beef meat packer in the world, generating 25 percent of all beef sales worldwide. Its U.S. headquarters are in Greeley, where it is the town’s largest employer with 4,500 workers. JBS is a remarkable Horatio Alger success story of a small company gone global. Seventy years ago, JBS was a small butcher shop in Brazil owned and operated by Juan Batista Sobrinho. He turned 80 in 2014.[23] Two of his sons have aggressively grown the business in the last twenty years by acquiring other meatpackers that fell on hard times. After the U.S. Immigration Service fined Swift’s plant for employing 1,200 undocumented workers, temporarily shuttling the operations, JBS purchased Swift’s U.S. meatpacking operations in 2007 for $225 million and by assuming its debt.[24]

Wesley Batista, JBS USA’s CEO, says the company, which trades on the Brazilian stock exchange, is still run “a simple way,” using a management model without “a lot of layers, not a lot of fancy things, not a lot of time spent on PowerPoint presentations.”[25] Information about JBS is hard to come by. Most information here is from a 76-page PowerPoint the company prepared for Wall Street brokers titled JBS Day New York.[26]

Inside meat packing plants, meatpackers cut costs by speeding up.[27] At its Greeley plant, JBS slaughters 5,400 head of cattle daily, over 1.9 million cattle a year.[28] By itself, JBS accounts for at least two-thirds of all cattle sales in the Front Range counties covered by the South Platte and Arkansas basin roundtables.[29] Two-thirds of the cattle that JBS finishes and slaughters at its Colorado feedlots come from outside Colorado. Colorado is well suited for feedlots since the drier climate allows mud and cow poop to dry out faster so the cattle aren’t standing in muck up to their shins. That is why so many feedlots are in Colorado, Kansas and western Texas. When Coloradans speak of food security and supporting the food-to-table movement, JBS is not often mentioned. Front Range water providers who claim we need to divert more water from the Western Slope to save east slope agriculture are not telling us just what agriculture they’re trying to save. It isn’t the vegetables we eat, because vegetables are grown on only 1.6 percent of the Front Range’s irrigated acreage. And it isn’t the cattle sold from feedlots, because 3.2 million cattle drank only 2.3 percent of the water consumed by agriculture in 2012.[30] Every one of JBS’s feedlots and meat packing plants is located on a rail line that could easily ship corn from Iowa and other corn belt states, preferably ones that do not rely on the Ogallala Aquifer. JBS does not need any more water from the Western Slope to preserve its business. No, the crop that some Front Range water buffaloes are apparently trying to protect is the final crop, the sale of water from farm to city to support relentless population growth. The more they can divert today from the Western Slope, the more they can devote to endless sprawl tomorrow.

Agriculture by far consumes the most water in Colorado and the West. But western water law largely drives agricultural practices, rather than the other way around. The myth of “use it or lose it” drives farmers to grow hay, not a robust agricultural economy paying top dollar for it. To protect water rights, farmers have to divert water from streams and grow hay. Most farmers lose money doing this but if they quit, they fear they may lose their water rights, although that is unfounded.

They’re stuck. And so our rivers are stuck with less water. And yet many participants at Colorado Roundtable meetings are very vocal in their support for agriculture, emphasizing food security and that we ought to support the “food to table” homegrown food movement. But Collbran rancher Carlyle Currier, who has served on the Colorado Roundtable since 2005 and as the Colorado Farm Bureau’s president, also once said that the market for Colorado beef is international, not dinner tables in Colorado.[31]

The farm-to-table movement and farmers’ markets account for a tiny percentage of Colorado agriculture. Colorado imports into the state over 90 percent of the food we eat, and exports a like amount of the food produced here, primarily beef meat cuts, outside the state. The agriculture that the 2015 water plan exhorts us to protect is an international beef export industry.

Colorado's top five agricultural products are cattle and calves, dairy products, corn for grain, greenhouse and nursery products, and hogs, at least in terms of revenue generated.[32] Conspicuously missing is hay, yet 54 percent of all irrigated acres in Colorado grow hay.[33] Hay is the West slope’s main agricultural crop, yet it accounts for just over 0.1 percent of Colorado’s $306 billion economy.[34] And since Colorado water law permits ranchers to dry up streams with impunity in Colorado, hay is responsible for drying up countless river reaches, especially at higher elevation valleys that have seen little development and where trout and outdoor recreation could thrive.

The 2015 water plan does not describe agriculture in these terms, it just says we must protect it. I’m not opposed to protecting irrigated agriculture, despite my clear-eyed review of how it works in Colorado’s economy, talking points aside. But we’re going to have to invest in growing hay with less water by modernizing irrigation systems.

How much agriculture is worth varies widely in the state. Consider the following table from the Arkansas Roundtable’s 2015 Basin Implementation Plan:[35]

Table 6.1 Farm economics in various Colorado river basins

Region

Farm gate receipts relative to regional GDP

Economic activity generated per acre of irrigated land

Typical crop

Arkansas

31 percent

$350

Forage

Republican

37 percent

495

Corn – alfalfa

Rio Grande

48 percent

1,127

Potatoes - barley

East South Platte

2 percent

690

Corn – alfalfa – sugar beets

Farm gate receipts refer to the money farmers earn from the sale of agricultural produce shipped from the farm. The Arkansas basin has the lowest per-acre productivity on the east slope. Its main crops, hay and corn, just won’t grow in the Great American Desert without irrigation. At the 2024 C9 conference of roundtables in Crested Butte, the state’s Agricultural Water Policy Advisor Robert Sakata reported that for each dollar Americans spend on food, only 7.9 cents goes to the farmer.

The Arkansas basin got a boost when Congress funded Reclamation’s Fryingpan-Arkansas project, but much of the water that formerly irrigated farms along the Arkansas River has been sold to Colorado Springs and Aurora. Today, half of all Arkansas basin farm revenue comes from its four counties along the eastern border with Kansas from farms sucking up water from the Ogallala Aquifer in the southeastern corner of the state. [36] They also rank among the top-ten subsidized counties in the state.

Figure 6.7 Farmers on east slope collect the most subsidies

Ranchers and farmers in the rest of the state receive a fraction of the subsidies that Ogallala Aquifer pumpers receive. For eighteen years between 1995 and 2012, ranchers and farmers received $342 million in the 3rd Congressional District extending from Colorado’s Western Slope through the Rio Grande basin and east to Pueblo. Below is a list of the top subsidy recipients from 1995 through 2012 in the 3rd Congressional District.

Figure 6.8 Top ten ag subsidy recipients

These ten farmers received over $12 million, about four percent of the total subsidies paid in the 3rd Congressional District. Only 1,140 of the 11,400 farmers in the district, 10 percent, received 69 percent of the total subsidies. That pattern is repeated nationwide, as the wealthiest farmers receive the most subsidies. Today the USDA subsidizes farmers across the country with farm price supports, paying some to grow crops, and others not to grow the same crops.

How can Western Slope ranchers afford to operate at a loss? First, the subsidies help. Second, most farmers find other occupations to supplement their farm income, as over half of the 10,769 farmers counted by the USDA on the Western Slope say that farming is not their primary occupation. Third, irrigation water is likely their most valuable asset. The graph below shows why Colorado ranchers and farmers divert as much water as possible from rivers or underground aquifers—it causes land to triple in value.

Figure 6.9 Value of irrigation v non-irrigated land

Although irrigating cropland triples its value in Colorado, average farmland in Iowa is worth seven times more than average farmland in Colorado (the green bars). Irrigated land in Colorado is worth half the average farmland price in Iowa where it regularly rains during the growing season.[37] We do not irrigate land in Colorado because our farm produce is so valuable. We irrigate land because it triples land prices.

It is not just Colorado farmers who lose money—it’s true in every Western state across the Colorado River basin. When you exclude California, 65 percent of the farms in the entire Colorado River Basin lost money in 2012, the same percentage of farms that lost money on the Western Slope. Overall, the average net cash income, what the average farmer had to show for a year’s hard work, was $22,220 for all farms in the Colorado River Basin states excluding California in 2012. That’s barely above the 2024 federal poverty line for a family of two.[38] And that amount is before the owner receives any wages, because owners typically do not pay themselves wages.[39]

Figure 6.10 A majority of farms in the broader Colorado River Basin lose money

This is what John Wesley Powell was trying to tell us, that the West can only support limited agriculture and a limited population. We have spent a century trying to prove him wrong. Like Colorado, most of the irrigated land in the entire Colorado River Basin, Mexico included, grows alfalfa, hay, or other forage for livestock. When you hear that Colorado River water produces the nation’s lettuce, remember that only 8 percent of irrigated land in the Colorado River Basin grows vegetables. The remaining 92 percent grows cotton, wheat, alfalfa, and hay in one of the driest, and thirstiest, regions in the world. The Upper Colorado River Basin uses 2 acre-feet of irrigation water per acre on average, while Arizona in the Lower Colorado River Basin uses 4.4 acre-feet per acre.[40] Of the world’s remaining deserts that also support a sizable human population, only the Middle East is drier.[41]

Figure 6.11 Crops grown in Colorado, where hay is king

Taking farmers’ water is not the solution. But Western ranching practices are devastating rivers and the species that depend on them, and the system needs institutional reform. We can start by taking a hard look at the following policies and practices:

Table 6.2 Policy Choices in the West

Policy Choices in the West

Problem

Solution

Irrigators divert water from streams solely to prove up their water rights.

Eliminate the abandonment rule, so irrigators who let water run down the river will not lose their water rights.

Ranchers continue to run cattle on their ranch because they get an agricultural tax exemption that lowers their property tax bill.

Provide the reduced property tax rate to ranchers who keep their land as open space, whether or not they run cattle, and make them recapture the tax savings if they later subdivide, like Vermont does.

Some irrigators work the land because the federal government gives them subsidies.

Direct subsidies to irrigators who let more water run down the river.

Irrigators do not adopt efficient irrigation systems because, ironically, it means they will use less water, which can decrease the future potential value of their water rights, and thus their land.

Adjudicate Western Slope river basins so that farmers know what their water rights

are, once and for all. We’ve basically already done that at the website OpenET.

Farmers do not upgrade irrigation systems or change their crop types because they do not want to be charged with changing their use. They cannot farm any other land because it’s too expensive to go to water court to pay lawyers and engineers to prove that the changed use will not injure someone else’s return flow.

Reform water court. Determine consumptive use based on acreage—engineers developed formulas to calculate this decades ago, and it averages about 2 acre-feet per acre in Colorado. Establish water rights once and for all so that they can be easily transferred or left in the stream.

Irrigators think they “improve rivers” by diverting water out of them that comes back as return flows in late summer and the fall.

Bring beaver back to high mountain meadows so their dams will yield return flows like they did from the last ice age until the mid-1800s when beaver were all but driven extinct.

Even a little money earned ranching is better than no money at all.

Preserve agricultural zoning. We owe it to future generations to save enough land to feed ourselves.

People will not pay to improve stream health.

We pay for roads, schools, health care, housing, food, movies, cars, and nearly everything else that contributes to our quality of life—why not rivers?

Notes

[1] “Colorado Agricultural Statistics 2014,” footnote 2, pgs. 6, 11, and 24-25.

[2] This graph is produced from Colorado county agricultural data provided by the USDA in its 2022 Ag Census, 2022 Census by State, Table 1, https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2022/Full_Report/Census_by_State/index.php.

[3] Kunzig, R., “Carnivore’s Dilemma,” Nov. 2014, National Geographic, pages 121-130.

[4] The average US man (5’10”, 154 pounds) needs about 2,400 calories and the average woman (5’4”, 126 pounds) needs about 2,000 calories, but it varies based on age and how active the person is. See “Estimated Calorie Needs per Day by Age, Gender, and Physical Activity Level,” USDA. But Americans eat more than what we need; Livestrong.com estimates the average US man consumes 3,300 calories and woman consumes 2,231 calories daily, an increase of 20 percent since 1970. Cespedes, A., “The Average American Daily Caloric Intake,” May 2, 2015, Livestrong.com, http://www.livestrong.com/article/347737-the-average-american-daily-caloric-intake/.

[5] “World agriculture 2030: Main findings,” 2002, FAO Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. This is not necessarily interfering with human nutrition, since people would not eat most grains consumed by livestock. See also, Leahy, S., 2014, Your Water Footprint, pg. 19, Firefly Books. In Colorado, hay, alfalfa, and corn are the dominant crops, almost all of which are used to feed cattle.

[6] “Carnivore’s Dilemma,” footnote 3, page 130.

[7] This graph is created from the USDA 2022 Agriculture Census.  Pasture land is from Table 8, potatoes are from Table 1, and all remaining acreage is from Table 24, Selected Crops Harvested: 2022.

[8] Colorado Water Plan, CWCB, 2023, pg. 46.

[9] USDA, 2022 Ag Census, Table 24.

[10] The Republican Basin receives at least 88 percent of its irrigation water from the Ogallala Aquifer. “Planning for Balance: Republican Basin Water Management for Resource and Economic Sustainability,” 2013, Upper Republican NRD, https://www.nrdnet.org/sites/default/files/downloads/urnrd_water_management_update.pdf.

[11] Conversation with Ken Neubecker, former environmental representative to the Colorado River Basin Roundtable.

[12] “Small-scale U.S. Cow-calf Operations,” Apr. 2011, USDA, pgs. i, 1.

[13] 2012 Census, USDA, Table 1, calculated by dividing the number of cattle sold by the number of farms with cattle sales.

[14] “Small-scale U.S. Cow-calf Operations,” footnote 10.

[15] C:\Users\KenRansford\Dropbox\Colorado's Water Future - KBR\Chapter 16 - Agriculture\[USDA 2012 Irrigated Cropland Table 1 & 10.xlsx]Table 1, Cell O18.

[16] The USDA Colorado County Summary Highlights 2022, Table 1, reports the total market value of farm products soldin Colorado in 2022 was $9.2 billion. The 2023 Colorado Water Plan says that irrigated agriculture contributes $47 billion to the Colorado economy annually (CWCB, Colorado Water Plan, 2023, pg. 192), a more than 5-fold difference. The author has been unable to determine the source of this difference.

[17] After excluding Mesa, Delta, and Montrose Counties, there were 2,825 farms with irrigated acreage, and 960 received subsidies, 34 percent. However, USDA statistics do not categorize farms that receive subsidies based on whether they are irrigated or not. 2012 Agricultural Census, USDA, Table 1, footnote 10.

[18] “South Platte SWSI 2010 Basin Report,” page 1-3, South Platte Basin Roundtable page maintained by the CWCB, downloaded August 23, 2014.

[19] The author has estimated this figure.

[20] Childs, D., “Even With Record Cattle Prices, Value of Gain is Key,” May 2005, the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation.

[21] Ross, T., “Testing the waters: Routt County cattle ranching dealing with struggles in continued drought,” Apr. 21, 2013, Steamboat Pilot & Today.

[22] Colorado consumes about 2.4 million acre-feet of the Colorado River. Western Slope cities consume about 100,000 af, and another 500,000 af is diverted to the east slope. Hay irrigation consumes about 89 percent of the 1.8 million remaining acre-feet; when divided by 272,401 cattle sold by Western Slope ranches in 2012, that equals 5.9 acre feet per cattle sold. USDA 2012 Agriculture Census, Table 1, Cattle and calves sold in Colorado in 2012.

[23] Gruley, B., “Brazilian Meatpacker JBS Wrangles the U.S. Beef Industry,” Sep. 19, 2013, Bloomberg Business.

[24] Flynn, D., “Bad Day At JBS Brings Tragedy To Its Victims,” Sep. 16, 2009, Food Safety News, http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2009/09/last-mothers-day-14-year/#.VI4o0yvF91Z.

[25] Forero, J., “Brazilian company JBS dominates world beef industry from farm to fork,” Apr. 21, 2011, The Washington Post, http://en.mercopress.com/2011/04/21/brazilian-company-jbs-dominates-world-beef-industry-from-farm-to-fork.

[26] JBS Day New York, 4Q13 and 2013 Results Presentation, March 25, 2014, JBS Company.

[27] The typical line speed in an American slaughterhouse in 1975 was about 175 cattle per hour. Schlosser, E., “The Chain Never Stops,” July-August 2001, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2001/07/dangerous-meatpacking-jobs-eric-schlosser. When he published Fast Food Nation, Schlosser reported that meatpacking houses were butchering 300 to 400 cattle an hour, twice as many as anywhere else in the world. “Modern Meat Interview Eric Schlosser,” Apr. 18, 2002, Frontline, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/meat/interviews/schlosser.html.

[28] In 2013 JBS had 55,610 employees in the United States; JBS Day New York, footnote 54, Slide 41. Gruley, B., “Brazilian Meatpacker JBS Wrangles the U.S. Beef Industry,” Sep. 19, 2013, Bloomberg Businessweek.

[29] The South Platte Basin, where JBS has most of its operations, accounts for 69 percent of all cattle sold in Colorado in 2012. The USDA 2012 Agricultural Census reports that 3,211,467 cattle were sold in Colorado in 2012. Of this, 2,220,104 were sold in counties in the South Platte Roundtable area, 635,801 in the Arkansas, and 355,402 in all the other Roundtable Basins combined.

[30] Vegetables were grown on 23,133 acres out of 1,423,250 irrigated acres in 2012. At 30 gallons per day, 3.2 million cattle consumed 107,000 acre-feet, 2.3 percent of the 4.7 million acre-feet consumed by agriculture in a typical year. USDA Ag Census 2012, Table 1..

[31] CBRT Roundtable meeting, July 7, 2014.

[32] “Colorado Economy,” http://www.netstate.com/economy/co_economy.htm, downloaded Oct. 24, 2014.

[33] "USDA Census of Agriculture," 2012 Census Volume 1, Chapter 2: County Level Data, Colorado.

[34] “Economy of Colorado,” last modified April 5, 2016, Wikipedia.

[35] “A Resource Document: Projects & Methods to Meet the Needs of the Arkansas Basin,” Nov. 2009, Arkansas Basin Roundtable, Irrigated Agriculture as an Economic Engine, reported on page 12 of Projects and Methods to Meet the Needs of the Arkansas Basin, the executive summary to the Arkansas Roundtable Basin Implementation Plan downloaded August 1, 2014.

[36] 2012 Census, USDA, Table 1, Volume 1, Chapter 2: County Level Data, footnote 10.

[37] Colorado land values are from “Colorado Agricultural Statistics 2014,” footnote 2, Farm Real Estate: Average value per acre by type of land, Colorado and United States, 2004-2013, pg. 30. Iowa land values are from “Land Values, 2013 Summary,” USDA, pgs. 8-9.

[38] The federal poverty line for a family of 2 in 2024 was $20,440. For a family of 3, it was $25,820; HHS Poverty Guidelines and Federal Register References, https://aspe.hhs.gov/prior-hhs-poverty-guidelines-and-federal-register-references.

[39] 2012 HHS Poverty Guidelines, http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/12poverty.shtml.

[40] “USDA 2013 Farm and Ranch Irrigation Survey,” Table 4. Estimated Quantity of Water Applied By Source: 2013 and 2008.

[41] “According to the AWWA (American Water Works Association) study, countries already experiencing water stress or far worse include Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, Israel, Syria, Yemen, India, China, and parts of the United States.” Ahmed, N., “New Age Of Water Wars Portends ‘Bleak Future’ For The Middle East,” Mar. 26, 2015, MintPress News, http://www.mintpressnews.com/new-age-of-water-wars-portends-bleak-future-for-the-middle-east/203712/. Also see Friederici, P., “The Next Market Crunch: Water,” July 14, 2008, Pacific Standard.

[42] “Carnivore’s dilemma.”

[43] 2012 Census, USDA, Table 1, Volume 1, Chapter 2: County Level Data.

[44] This graph is at C:\Users\Ken\Dropbox\Colorado's Water Future\Chapter - Agriculture\[USDA 2012 Irrigated Cropland Table 1 & 10.xlsx]Table 1.

[45] "USDA subsidies in Colorado totaled $5.4 billion from 1995-2012.," downloaded Feb. 21, 2016, EWG Farm Subsidies, http://farm.ewg.org/progdetail.php?fips=08000&progcode=total&page=county&regionname=Colorado.

[46] "Colorado Summary Information," downloaded Feb. 21, 2016, EWG Farm Subsidies, http://farm.ewg.org/region.php?fips=08000.

[47] Cohen, M., “Water to Supply the Land, Irrigated Agriculture in the Colorado River Basin,” May 2013, The Pacific Institute, Table 4, pg. 13, http://www.pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/pacinst-crb-ag.pdf.