Liquid Gold

Mike Adamson remembers when water wasn't such a problem. As a kid growing up on his family's cattle feedlot along the Colorado-Kansas border, "you could dig a post hole and see water runnin' in the bottom," he recalls. Today, Adamson is 48 and in charge of the family business, Adamson Brothers and Sons Feedlot, a holding ranch for cattle as they go to market. And the water, he says, is disappearing. "The lakes are gone. The wetlands are gone." In fact, Adamson adds, entire stretches of the nearby Republican River are gone.

In the arid regions of the American West, water has always been a precious, liquid gold. But in Adamson's home of Yuma County, Colorado, two hours east of Denver, the stakes just got higher. Thanks to the boom in ethanol production spurred by green-energy concerns, corn farmers in Yuma County—one of the top three corn-producing counties in the country—are enjoying a new prosperity.

But the green-fuel boom touted as a clean, eco-friendly alternative to gasoline is proving to have its own dirty costs. Growing corn demands lots of water, and, in eastern Colorado, this means intensive irrigation from an already stressed water table, the great Ogallala Aquifer. One sign of trouble: in just the past two decades, farmers tapping into the local aquifers have helped to shorten the North Fork of the Republican River, which starts in Yuma County, by 10 miles. The ethanol boom will only hasten the drop further, say scientist and engineers studying the aquifers. The region's water shortage has pitted water-hungry farmers against one another. And lurking in the cornrows: lawsuits and interstate water squabbles could shut down eastern Colorado's estimated $500 million annual ethanol bonanza with the swing of a judge's gavel. Collectively, "[ethanol] is clearly not sustainable," says Jerald Schnoor, a professor of engineering at the University of Iowa and co-chairman of an October 2007 National Research Council study for Congress that was critical of ethanol. "Production will have serious impacts in water-stressed regions." And in eastern Colorado, there's lots of water stress.

Still, with so much money growing in the fields, the current problems haven't stopped anyone on Colorado's plains. "Finally, here's the alternative market that farmers have been working toward for decades," said Mark Sponsler, executive director of the Colorado Corn Growers Association. The state's farmers planted a near-record acreage of corn in 2007, up nearly 20 percent from the year before. It's not hard to see why. After hovering around $2 a bushel for nearly 50 years, corn is trading at about $4.50 today. Meanwhile, the Bush administration has called for ethanol to displace 15 percent of the nation's gasoline supply by 2015, double that by 2030. And Yuma is preparing. The state's two ethanol plants have been built nearby in just the past few years, with a third on the way. "It sure is a good time," says Byron Weathers, a farmer with 2,500 acres of corn. "It's definitely been a big plus for our state. The whole nation, really."

But the effort to keep the good times rolling locally has actually fueled a bitter Hatfield-vs.-McCoy atmosphere in these parts. "There's definitely tension between families," one long-time Yuma corn farmer said, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation. Here's the trouble: eastern Colorado is painfully dry, but it sits on top of one of the world's largest underground freshwater oceans—the Ogallala Aquifer, which stretches from Montana to New Mexico. Seepage from the Ogallala in eastern Colorado creates the headwaters for the North Fork of the Republican River, which flows past the Adamson family farm and into Nebraska and Kansas. But before the Republican reaches the border, 4,000 groundwater wells tap the Ogallala, which depletes the river further and faster than rain or winter runoff can recharge it. Near Yuma County, the water table has dropped more than 100 feet in the past few decades, drying out Adamson's post holes.

In Yuma County, the battle is between farmers who irrigate 400,000 corn acres with groundwater against those who draw surface water from the river using drainage ditches, like Adamson. (Adamson uses the water to grow less-water-intensive crops, like wheat, that he can feed to the cattle). As the wells draw down the water table, the river flow drops, too. So, when the valves are opened, the water barely trickles into irrigation ditches, like Adamson's, whose family's right to draw that water according to state law dates back to the 1800s. "We're the canary in the coal mine," Adamson said. If there's little water in his ditches, the river is running low.