43 Dry Land Water Management: Two Case Studies Sahelian Sudan and Colorado Piedm
43 Dry Land Water Management: Two Case Studies Sahelian Sudan and Colorado Piedmont
I grew up in a water short environment. We lived in Berthoud, Colorado, 45 miles north of Denver between Longmont and Loveland. Our farm was two miles east of town with a full panorama of the Rockies to the west. Berthoud receives fifteen inches of rain per year on average, most of which comes from snow. This amount of water is inadequate for most agriculture and certainly not enough for our rotated crops of sugar beets, corn, alfalfa, barley, pinto beans, and cucumbers. Our irrigation water was provided by the snow melt from the 14000-foot-high mountains. We always knew about how much water we would get by the amount of snow that we could see on the mountain tops. When there was little snow, we knew we would have a difficult year.
Berthoud, Colorado is shown midpoint on the above map. The Big Thompson River follows Highway 34 as it comes onto the map from the west and continues through Loveland. The water is diverted into some large lakes northwest of Berthoud.
The amount of winter snow on Mt Meeker and Longs Peak indicates the amount of water for farming. Photo by Jean H. Bein 1950.
From the early settlement in the 1860s, Irrigation water was a concern and was allocated sparingly based on a system of water rights acquired on a first come basis. The earliest settlers claiming a share of the water were served first each year and if there was adequate snow in the mountains everyone had water. These water rights could be bought, sold, or leased between farmers as long as the water was used for agricultural purposes. In essence, water was more valuable than land. A newcomer had to not only buy land but had to buy water along with it.
Water was diverted from the rivers and stored in reservoirs along the foothills and then distributed through a network of canals and ditches that delivered it to the farms. The Handy ditch delivered our water from the Big Thompson River.
Siphon tubes bring water from an irrigation ditch in to graded furrows between rows of Sugar beet plants. Photo by Jean H. Bein 1955.
In the late 1800s the competition for irrigation water was severe and farmers found themselves stealing water and getting into physical fights. The trans-mountain Big Thompson River diversion project completed in 1910 eased the shortage of water. The construction of the Adams tunnel, a nine-mile-long aqueduct, diverted water from the Colorado River on the western slope dumping it into Lake Estes on eastern slope in Estes Park. An annual average of more than 220,000-acre feet of water supported farming eastward as far as Greeley. Since this occurred at such an early date, many of the subsequent water demands to the west could not be met. An acre foot of water translates to “water a foot deep covering one acre of land.”
Ground water was not an irrigation option since it was limited in volume. It was very alkaline from the farm chemicals seeping into it. As a source of drinki