Is paying farmers to conserve Colorado River water worth the cost?

During the growing season on Leslie Hagenstein’s ranch near Pinedale, Wyoming, water typically flows in and the fields come to life. But last season, her fields were desolate.

“Last year, it looks like Armageddon — there’s just no growth at all,” she said. “There’s no green. Everything was brown.”

But these barren fields aren’t the result of drought; Hagenstein left the fields dry on purpose. She signed up for the System Conservation Pilot Program.

“I made 13 times more money in one summer than I had the previous summer. It’s black and white, it’s money in your pocket,” she said.

The payments are part of a yearslong experiment — a way for the government to see if it works to pay farmers and ranchers to hit pause on using water from the overtaxed river. Four Western states are paying farmers and ranchers tens of millions of dollars this year to conserve water as part of a short-term plan to save water from the Colorado River, which is shrinking amid two decades of megadrought.

But some are skeptical that the federally-funded program is worth the money. Elizabeth Koebele researches water policy at the University of Nevada, Reno, and said that money used for the program could be spent differently.

“Perhaps we need to be thinking about, rather than temporary conservation investments, in longer term conservation beyond what we’re already doing,” she said.

Between 2023 and 2024, the program spent $45 million to save a little more than 1% of the Colorado River water allocated to the Upper Basin.

“I’m hesitant to keep pushing for temporary conservation,” Koebele said. “I think we have pretty clear climate signals that say the basins aridifying and we need big reductions to water use.”

Regardless of how much water it’s saving, proponents of the program say the real value lies elsewhere — better data on how to sell the idea of water conservation to farmers. That’s important, since 80% of the Colorado River is used for agriculture.

“We’re learning a lot from the program, that in the event that people want to stand up and have a longer term durable program, these lessons learned will make that more robust,” said Chuck Cullom, who directs the Upper Colorado River Commission, which runs the program.

But the future might look different when it comes to money. Funding for the conservation program came out of the Inflation Reduction Act, which set aside $4 billion for Colorado River work.

Now, water managers are trying to figure out if they’ll have the money and the information to save water on farms in the long term, for a river that needs every drop it can get.