‘No Dam Water Project’ Can Help Save Western Ranching
Prosperity and Western cattle ranching have little in common these days. Cattle bring about the same price they did 30 years ago. Meanwhile, the costs of doing business have skyrocketed, in no small part because environmentalists and congressional budget watchers are forcing ranchers to forgo their subsidies and internalize some of the costs of operating on public lands.
Not everyone mourns the passing of the cowboy. Yet, conservation biologists have begun to wonder if these long hoped-for changes bode well for the land. After battling ranchers all these years, only now do they realize that bigger is better, regardless of ownership. Compared with the subdividers and developers, good ranchers produce both scenic open space and the large blocks of habitat wildlife require. Can--and should--the good ranchers be “saved”?
One man thinks he has a workable answer. Gary Boyce grew up poor on a ranch in the arid San Luis Valley, Colo. Today, he and his wife, Joanne Schenck Boyce, run their 12,500-acre Rancho Rosado near here, hard up against the towering Sangre de Cristo Mts. Joanne Schenck’s father, Nick “The General” Schenck, reigned over MGM and Loews during Hollywood’s Golden Age. When the Boyces returned to the San Luis Valley, they were determined to ranch well and to see that others had the opportunity to do so. Boyce preaches a simple sermon. “If you want to turn the ranching economy around,” he says, “you should consider marketing the water that goes with the ranches. You should consider my ‘No Dam Water Project.’ ”
A few years ago, Boyce outbid the Conservation Fund, the nonprofit real-estate arm of the Mellon family, and the U.S. Forest Service for the 100,000-acre Louis Maria Cabeza de Baca Land Grant. Known locally as The Baca, this property has endured the environmental insults of a century and a half of mineral exploitation and land and water speculation, including a subdivision with 12,000 (mostly vacant) lots. The Baca includes Kit Carson Peak and Crestone Peak, generally considered the “best rock in the Rockies” by serious climbers. It abuts the Forest Service’s Sangre de Cristo Wilderness, on the east, and the Park Service’s Great Sand Dunes Wilderness, on the south.
With the ranch came the rights to use its water--lots of water. The mountains snag snowstorms all winter long. When the melt comes, that water irrigates the vast hay meadows below, serving as a reminder of a phrase that has stuck to the ranch since the Mexican government granted it to the Baca family early in the 19th century: “As high as heaven and as low as hell.”
Even lower than the ranch itself are the unplumbed depths of a hydrologic formation called the Closed Basin. All waters entering this basin, unless diverted by humans, flow to its low point, where they either evaporate or are consumed by the ubiquitous and commercially worthless greasewood and rabbitbrush that cover most of the area. At a cost of $100 million, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation completed, in 1993, the San Luis Valley Closed Basin Project, which extracts shallow ground water and conveys it through concrete-lined ditches into the Rio Grande nearby.
The key to Boyce’s plan is that the Closed Basin waters were never part of the natural flow of the Rio Grande. So, Boyce reasons, ranchers in the Closed Basin area should both reassess traditional ranching methods and consider marketing the water they now use to grow winter feed for their animals. He is not suggesting they abandon ranching. He is suggesting they learn to ranch in an economically rational way already pursued elsewhere in the valley, where large agricultural interests routinely market their water to downstream buyers.
Boyce has founded Stockman’s Water Company to pursue his dreams. He is applying in Colorado Water Court for the right to “harvest new water” from the deep aquifers of the Closed Basin and divert it, via a pipeline and pumping system, across the mountains to buyers along Colorado’s Front Range.
The mechanics of the project’s water-production and augmentation schemes exceed most people’s technical competence. But the economics and environmental effects do not. So-called “behind the dam” reservoirs produce not only absurd evaporation losses but also tremendous environmental damage. The No Dam Water Project would simply tap the Closed Basin’s ground-water storage, estimated at about 2 billion acre-feet. The annual recharge to this natural groundwater reservoir from the surrounding mountains is at least 700,000 acre-feet. Boyce has his sights set on that ground water, which he proposes to pump at renewable rates that, he says, will not damage his neighbors.
On the Baca Ranch itself, Boyce proposes to stop irrigating artificial hay meadows. Instead, he would leave the formerly diverted water to follow its old stream beds out to where it either joins the canals of the Closed Basin Project or disappears into the Closed Basin itself. Restoring the old stream beds would create miles and miles of wetlands and stream-side habitat in an area where such things are rare and endangered. In addition, Boyce’s program would feature a 50,000-acre private wildlife reservation, which borders 22 linear miles of federal wilderness and provides habitat for one of Colorado’s most important bighorn sheep herds. Finally, Boyce would protect 2,000 acres of sand dunes bordering the Great Sand Dunes National Monument.
How would Stockman’s Water help ranchers? Right now, the value of the water on the ranch for irrigating livestock feed is about $160 an acre-foot. At its highest and best use in the San Luis Valley, this value could climb as high as $5,000 an acre-foot for growing potatoes or for sale to downstream users. Any participating rancher can increase his asset value by a factor of eight and--here is the key--he still stays in the ranching business. If he invests his profits, he can easily buy winter feed from other places in the valley where it pays to grow alfalfa.
Does selling the water ruin the ranch? Not necessarily. A rancher who lets his artificial and irrigated hay meadows revert to natural grasslands will have more grazing land and can also increase the size of his ranch by purchasing land from willing sellers.
Boyce estimates the total cost of his project at about $800 million (entirely from private sources), including the conveyance system. Most important, he is willing to use the profits from his water sales to restore and preserve large amounts of wildlife habitat.
Among Boyce’s opponents are the valley’s big potato farmers. “They are already using pumped well water in exactly the way we propose,” Boyce says. “They aren’t really my opposition. They are my competition.”
Then there are the environmentalists. Their opposition puzzles Boyce most of all, given the wilderness and wildlife values of his proposal. Dam or no dam, they say they simply oppose all transbasin and transmountain diversions of any kind. But this doesn’t quite explain how environmentalists can ignore Boyce’s obvious sympathy with their cause, especially given the fact that most conservation biologists today warn against habitat fragmentation through subdivision as one of the chief threats to wildlife. Another explanation: “Gary Boyce is a local boy who made it big. People are so jealous of him that no good deed will go unpunished.”
