Colorado and Nebraska jostle over water rights amid drought

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

OVID, Colo. (AP) — Shortly after daybreak on the high plains of northeastern Colorado, Don Schneider tinkers with seed-dispensing gear on a mammoth corn planter. The day’s task: Carefully sowing hundreds of acres of seed between long rows of last year’s desiccated stalks to ensure the irrigation water he’s collected over the winter will last until harvest time.

A two-hour’s drive eastward, Steve Hanson, a fifth-generation Nebraska cattle breeder who also produces corn and other crops, is preparing to seed, having stored winter water to help ensure his products make it to market. Like Schneider and countless others in this semi-arid region, he wants his children and grandchildren to be able to work the rich soil homesteaded by their ancestors in the 1800s.

Schneider and Hanson find themselves on opposite sides of a looming, politically-fraught dispute over water resembling the kind that until now has been reserved for the parched U.S. states along the Colorado River Basin.

As climate change-fueled megadrought edges eastward, Nebraska’s Republican-controlled Legislature this year voted to move forward with a plan that stunned Colorado state leaders. The Cornhusker State wants to divert water in Colorado by invoking an obscure, 99-year-old compact between the states that allows Nebraska to seize Colorado land along the South Platte River to build a canal.

https://apnews.com/article/climate-colorado-river-droughts-8948b3bc74335b94ba86fd9f3b631e02

[CrispyQ]

1. I wouldn't bet the farm on this:

...he wants his children and grandchildren to be able to work the rich soil homesteaded by their ancestors in the 1800s.

Do people think this draught is going to end? That things are going to go back to the way they used to be?

[hunter]

2. Water projects are only a temporary fix as less water flows in the Platte.

Dams capture *all* the water in the Colorado River basin and look how that's turning out.

Paying farmers to restore their land to something resembling a natural state and encouraging them to move on is the most reasonable solution.

Let 'em keep the family home and garden and pension off the older ones. That's better than people in most other industries get.

I don't know why were supposed to be automatically sympathetic to the "plight of farmers." Other than fossil fuels agriculture is the most environmentally destructive things humans do. We should ban fossil fuels and minimize the environmental footprint of agriculture.

Cheap "factory farm" meat and dairy products are not a human right.

Yeah, I know that opinion is not going to fly in Nebraska, or even within the Democratic Party.

But it really doesn't matter what one radical environmentalist thinks. Opinion doesn't change reality. Nature is bringing the hammer down.

[hatrack]

3. Recommended Reading - Ogallala Blue" by William Ashworth

It's all about the aquifer and touches on most the issues here regarding the Platte, though it's a few years old.