This week’s Local Motion travels from a packed conference room in Montrose to a four-acre farm in Gunnison, tying together two stories about how Western Colorado is adapting to a hotter, drier future.
Part 1: West Slop Water Summit
In the first half of the show, host Brody Wilson takes listeners to the West Slope Water Summit. The event drew “ranchers, ditch company leaders, engineers, city and county officials and residents who simply wanted to understand what’s happening to the river that shapes every part of life here on the Western Slope.”
Summit founder and Montrose County Commissioner Sue Hansen told KVNF the series began with a simple request from the community. “The Water Summit started seven years ago out of a community suggestion to, you know, we need to know more about water,” she said.
The summit opened with a hydrology update from Colorado River District engineer Raquel Flinker, who showed how last winter’s modest snowpack and a hot, dry spring led to disappointing inflows to Lake Powell. She said traditional “snow to flow” relationships are breaking down as temperatures rise.
“This puzzle is really hard and it’s changing because temperatures are going up, less precipitation is falling as snow,” Flinker said. “And because of that, snow is becoming less of a predictor of river flows.”
From there, the episode turns to Colorado River District General Manager Andy Mueller. He argued that communities on the Western Slope are already living within the limits of the river and the Colorado River Compact, while the Lower Basin has relied on big reservoir releases and groundwater pumping to keep water use high.
“In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve taken the gloves off in this public dispute with with Arizona,” Mueller told the crowd. “I’m sick and tired of them pointing up here and telling us that our way of life is not worth the same value as theirs.”
He also pushed back on calls for mandatory cuts in the Upper Basin, saying Western Colorado communities are simply using the share of the river they were promised. “We’re not trying to take Arizona’s water to build our communities,” he said. “We’re just using the water that was apportioned to us over 100 years ago.”
Part 2: Gunnison Gardens
The second half of the episode shifts from basin-wide negotiations to the ground-level work of feeding local communities. KVNF’s Laura Palmisano visits Gunnison Gardens, a diversified, organic, non-certified farm on nearly four acres inside the city limits.
Farmer and former hydrologist Susan Wyman describes her operation as “a farm that’s hidden in plain sight” in one of the coldest parts of the Gunnison Valley. Despite frequent summer frosts, the farm supplies three farmers markets and two full community-supported agriculture programs, using intensive, no-till practices and careful crop rotation.
Wyman now sees her role as training new growers through a state-certified apprenticeship program that brings three apprentices to the farm for 22 months at a time.
“It matters more than anything,” Wyman said. “Every human eats three times a day, every day. If we’re lucky, we eat three times a day. As our financial system changes, as our fossil fuel system changes, local food is going to be more important than ever.”
Regenerative agriculture, she adds with a laugh, is “garbage and poop” — the careful cycling of nutrients back to the soil through composting and animal manures instead of relying on synthetic chemicals. “What agriculture shouldn’t do is extract, extract, extract without giving back,” she said. “So regenerative agriculture is giving back to the land.”
From the future of the Colorado River to the future of local food, this episode of Local Motion explores how Western Slope communities are trying to adapt, protect what they have, and grow what comes next.
