The Water Information Program

A state committee will spend several months looking at ways to account for the possibility of increased consumptive use by crops because of improvements in surface irrigation techniques. The goal of the ad hoc committee announced Wednesday by State Engineer Dick Wolfe at the Arkansas Basin Roundtable will be to help the state meet its compact obligations while minimizing the burden to farmers. “This is an issue for Colorado water users, and we don’t want Kansas making the decisions for us,” Wolfe said. Wolfe and lawyer David Robbins shared the background that led to a proposal for agricultural efficiency rules last year by Water Division 2 Engineer Steve Witte. Robbins represents Colorado in the U.S. Supreme Court case filed by Kansas in 1985 over the Arkansas River Compact. Witte ran into resistance - what one member of the audience called a “public relations fiasco” - and Wolfe said the new committee is designed to reduce the anxiety farmers have about the assumptions about improvements like sprinklers, drip irrigation or canal lining, and to figure out ways to streamline the evaluation of systems to reduce costs.

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