Fallowing-Leasing Pilot Project Update- 5 Years In

Pop Quiz: How many acre-feet per year of water could the Catlin Pilot Project provide to its municipal partners?

A)    Up to 500 acre-feet    B) Less than 200 acre-feet      C) More than 1,000 acre-feet

Answer: A. Up to 500 acre-feet

The Catlin Pilot Project is a ten-year undertaking to make water from the Catlin Canal’s senior water rights temporarily available for lease to municipal water providers through the temporary fallowing of some irrigated lands in the Lower Arkansas River Basin (this practice is referred to as “rotational fallowing-leasing”). The Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) approved the Catlin Pilot Project in 2015, and 2019 marks the fifth year of the project.

Alternative Transfer Methods (ATM projects) have been called upon to help meet growing municipal water needs while preserving agricultural communities. The Catlin Pilot Project, engineered by Martin and Wood, is meant to test the deployment and feasibility of rotational fallowing-leasing ATMs to meet municipal water needs on small scale prior to application on a large scale.

The Catlin Pilot Project is approved for 10 years and can dry up to 30 percent of each participating farm each year. At the end of each 10-year period, the water goes back to the farmers for irrigation use. “It’s better than buy and dry,” says Ken Schweizer, a participating farmer, “allowing me to continue farming the remaining portion of the ground and letting me reinvest in my community.”

Buy and dry describes the practice of municipalities buying up water rights from farmers and then using the water elsewhere leading to the permanent dry up of the farm and ranch lands. This practice closes farms and has significant economic and social impacts. Rotational fallowing-leasing projects create a path for annual income from the water temporarily used by others while maintaining the majority of the farming operations in the area.

The Catlin Pilot Project is approved to provide up to 500 acre-feet of water per year to three municipal water providers – the Town of Fowler, the City of Fountain, and the Security Water District. It uses 1046.83 shares in the Catlin Canal Company that historically have irrigated approximately 1,000 acres of land on six farms.

Since the initiation of the Catlin Pilot Project more than 1,650 acre-feet of water has been supplied to the municipal participants. The Catlin Pilot Project consistently met all return flow obligations. The fallowing of fields went smoothly, and the participants received a maximum of $1,031.00 per fallowed acre per year.

The lessons learned during Catlin Pilot Project operations are helping to identify ways to streamline operations and administration for this and future rotational fallowing-leasing projects.

Very few obstacles hindered operation of rotational fallowing-leasing. Importantly, operations continue to increase irrigators’ interest in rotational fallowing and  municipal leasing. Another year of the successful pilot project further demonstrated to municipal users that temporary transfers for municipal use can be accomplished through the successful exchange and delivery of wet water.

In the five years of the project, the operational lessons have been the biggest. To meet the return flow obligations of the project, widely considered to be the true challenge of rotational fallowing-leasing projects, there’s a lot of considerations, calculations, adjustments, and communication to ensure water is delivered to appropriate locations including multiple augmentation stations and recharge facilities.

Adequate exchange potential must exist to move the water upstream under the Catlin Pilot Project. Ditches, ponds, reservoirs and rivers are all used in the movement of the water from farms to municipalities. Sometimes, the streamflow in the river is too low to allow delivery of an equal amount to upstream storage or to a municipality. In these cases, water can be stored in a closer reservoir until the exchange potential improves, but water is lost to evaporation and transit losses in this process. The years with the highest exchange potential likely achieve higher water yields for the municipal partners and correspondingly higher payouts for the participating farmers.

In the five years of the project, additional equipment and technology has been used to aid in data gathering. For example, sensors have been deployed to the recharge ponds so the water levels can be monitored from anywhere, instead of requiring site visits for every measurement.

The continued success of the Catlin Pilot Project is significant in that it reflects the first “proof of concept” in Colorado for rotational land fallowing and municipal leasing as a viable alternative to the permanent buy-and-dry of agricultural lands. This is a critical mission of the Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservancy District and the Lower Arkansas Valley Super Ditch Company. It is also central to the goals of the Colorado Water Plan, the CWCB, the Interbasin Compact Committee, and the Arkansas River Basin and other basin roundtables. The remaining five years of the project will be critical in further establishing best practices for future ATM projects.