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The federal government is rewriting its rules governing ranching on public lands to increase the number of cattle, sheep and other livestock grazing on 155 million acres in the West, an area twice the size of New Mexico.

Public lands grazing is overseen by a nearly century-old system that heavily subsidizes some of the wealthiest Americans while doing little to address its harms to the environment, ProPublica and High Country News found last year.

Even though rangeland management experts say overgrazing has degraded public lands, the new rules being drafted by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management — the first overhaul since 1995 — would instead expand the practice.

The wealthy profit from public lands, and taxpayers pick up the tab

The proposed rules would also ratchet back public participation in the agency’s decisions to allow grazing on federal public lands. The BLM’s proposed updates would strictly limit who has a say and when they can object, eliminating many steps where the public has been able to observe and comment on decisions to issue or renew permits.

“They’re clearly trying to reduce involvement of anyone other than ranchers,” said one BLM employee who works on rangeland management.

The BLM did not respond to questions about the proposed regulations, which were released publicly in May and, after a period for public comment, will go back to the agency in mid-July for further review.

In a June news release announcing the action, the agency said it “reflects the Trump administration’s priority to reduce unnecessary regulatory burdens, promote productive working lands and strengthen local economies.”

ProPublica and High Country News spoke to multiple current and former BLM employees to gauge the impact of the proposed regulations. Some, like the BLM staffer who works on rangeland management, requested not to be named because they still are employed by the agency. The employees agreed that the updated regulations offer several concrete benefits, including a requirement that the agency study the ecological impacts of all uses of public lands — from timber harvesting and recreation to mining and oil drilling. The current rules limit such reviews to the livestock industry, where they have uncovered tens of millions of acres of damage due to overgrazing.

“They’re clearly trying to reduce involvement of anyone other than ranchers.”

The regulations would also allow the BLM to handle low-level violations of grazing regulations more informally, avoiding potentially unnecessary fights between ranchers and regulators; clean up sections of the code that may be at odds with recent court decisions and laws; and offer the agency and ranchers more flexibility in how they manage the range, allowing for quicker decision-making responding to a local ecosystem’s needs.

Tim Canterbury, president of the Public Lands Council, a ranching trade group, in a news release called the update “a massive step forward.”

He said the existing regulations grew from the “cattle free by ’93” movement of the early 1990s that was hostile to ranching and aimed to rid public lands of livestock. “The resulting regulations all but ensured ranchers did not have the flexibility to take full advantage of the scientific and management advances that the industry has made over the last 35 years,” Canterbury said.

Other groups working on rangeland management say the regulations go too far in the opposite direction, tipping the scales toward ranchers. They point to proposals allowing ranchers to continue business as usual if they appeal agency decisions limiting grazing, threatening Native American tribes’ ability to graze bison and enshrining highly subsidized grazing fees. (ProPublica and High Country News found that in 2024 the federal government charged ranchers $284 million below market rate for the use of public lands.)

“We can expect considerably more places where cows and sheep are going to be and more damage,” said Josh Osher, public policy director of the Western Watersheds Project, a conservation group. “I think we see big impacts on wildlife.”

“Back to the Ronald Reagan Years”

The livestock industry influenced the regulatory rewrite from both outside and inside the Interior Department.

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and Public Lands Council, two main trade groups, publicly celebrated their meetings with the secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture departments in the spring. Among their agenda items was a memorandum of understanding allowing the trade groups to give guidance to the departments, including on a “Grazing Action Plan” that involved updating regulations.

The groups did not respond to requests for comment. (The Western Landowners Alliance, which represents conservation-minded ranchers and landowners, said it’s still evaluating the regulations.)

Representatives of Native American tribes and conservation groups, meanwhile, told ProPublica and High Country News that the administration offered them no opportunity to provide input on the draft regulations before they were published.

They also take issue with the process due to the involvement of Karen Budd-Falen, a high-ranking official in the Interior Department and a long-time grazing advocate whose family is in the ranching business. She served in the first Trump administration and was barred from discussing grazing policy due to potential conflicts of interest. But after rejoining the department, she received an ethics waiver allowing her to work on grazing policy.

In December, Budd-Falen participated in a discussion about public lands management with Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming. During that event, Budd-Falen called grazing regulations the issue that “probably was the closest to my heart” and gave a rare view into the effort to update them.

“You want to know what put the public ranchland out of business — it was Bruce Babbitt’s regulations,” she told Lummis, referring to President Bill Clinton’s Interior secretary from 1993 to 2001. “By the first of next year, you will see fully new regulations that don’t just fix a few of the Babbitt things. We went back to the Ronald Reagan years and are putting back in those regs.”

“I am so excited about these regulations,” she said.

“We went back to the Ronald Reagan years and are putting back in those regs.”

Native American tribes that manage bison herds say Budd-Falen’s efforts to aid ranchers could hurt their operations. Several rancher and stock grower associations in Montana, which at one time were represented by Budd-Falen, have railed against a conservation group called American Prairie that uses permits to graze bison herds to revitalize local ecosystems. The ranchers worry this will cost them subsidized leases and that the bison could spread disease to their cattle.

The Trump administration has sided with the ranchers in the dispute — first by revoking American Prairie’s permits and then by redrafting grazing regulations to mandate public lands livestock operations be “production-oriented,” potentially eliminating permits for herds used to revitalize ecosystems. Tribes fear they too could lose permits for the bison herds they manage to preserve cultural practices or restore the land.

“We’re really concerned about this,” said OJ Semans Sr., a member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and executive director of the Coalition of Large Tribes, which represents more than 15 tribes. “I’m just kind of confused about how badly it was written.”

Less Public Input, More Public Lands Grazing

Ranchers have long complained that conservationists are quick to sue to prevent them from placing their herds on public lands, miring their businesses in litigation. The BLM’s updates would reduce green groups’ ability to challenge decisions.

The agency proposes changing the definition of “interested public,” meaning those who have a say in rangeland management. Under the new proposal, the public would have to prove a “cognizable” interest in the grazing in question. The agency did not respond to a request to define its use of the word. But a former BLM higher-up said that would likely set a higher bar for who gets advance notice of agency decisions and their ability to comment on them. Environmentalists assume it means only those with a business interest would be allowed to influence agency decision making.

The new regulations would also remove a mandate that the BLM include the public in “consultation, cooperation and coordination,” the agency’s process of gathering feedback when preparing to take actions such as authorizing grazing. The update would significantly narrow who must be involved, staff said.

Throughout the regulations, the agency proposed changes that would keep animals on the land.

Mark Squillace, a law professor focused on natural resources at the University of Colorado Law School, noted that if a rancher appeals an unfavorable ruling, it is automatically paused, meaning the rancher can continue the very practices that had been found to be harmful. “That effectively invites everyone to appeal to avoid the decision,” Squillace said. “That is a disaster.”

The new regulations also elevate cows’ status as firefighters, making it easier to place herds on public lands under the justification that they eat vegetation that could become fuel for wildfires.

Nada Culver, deputy director of the BLM during the Biden administration, said that some provisions would make it more difficult for agency staff to tell ranchers to take animals off the land, hindering their ability to address overgrazing. And renewing permits to continue grazing would be even easier under the new regulations, she said.

“The most text in this regulatory proposal is devoted to explaining why the public no longer gets to participate in pretty much every step of the process,” Culver said.

The Trump administration has also prioritized restocking vacant areas, which may be without cows and sheep because they are far from a water source, they need time to recover from wildfire or the agency is attempting to eradicate invasive species. Within months of President Donald Trump returning to the White House, political appointees instructed staff to build lists of every vacant plot that might be eligible for more livestock.

“By the end of next year,” Budd-Falen said in her discussion with Lummis, “every single vacant allotment will be filled by a rancher.”

The post The rules for grazing on 155 million acres of public lands are getting overhauled appeared first on High Country News.

The Willow fire near Leadville grew by 900 acres overnight spurring mandatory evacuation of areas southwest of the city. Ouray 100 race canceled because of Gold Mountain fire.

Schools in mostly rural counties are building high school shooting teams that teach kids discipline, focus, camaraderie — and most important, how to handle a gun safely

Sylvie Andrews and her partner didn’t just lose the new house they’d helped build when the Eaton Fire ripped through Altadena, California, in January 2025. They lost an entire decade’s worth of sacrifices they’d made to put down roots in their hometown, and the community they’d created. “We put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into it,” Andrews said. “That’s what we lost in the fire.”

That fire, along with the Palisades Fire to the north, destroyed over 16,000 structures and killed 31 people. But while Andrews and thousands of Angelinos were racing to evacuate, other people saw a financial opportunity. Using Polymarket, the world’s largest prediction market platform, they made bets on the fires — how they would grow, how long they would last and how much they would destroy.

Prediction markets are essentially gambling websites where people bet on the outcome of events, including elections, sports, the weather and more. Anything is fair game, from oil prices and the spread of infectious diseases to international incidents. Markets usually frame questions in a “yes” or “no” fashion, with the price of a “contract” fluctuating between $0 and $1. A price of 50 cents on a “yes” contract means that the people doing the betting collectively believe the event has a 50% chance of happening. Market hosts make money by charging a fee on wagers.

In January 2025, Polymarket listed almost 20 questions, created by the platform’s “markets team,” related to the wildfires burning up Southern California. How many acres will the Palisades Fire burn by Friday, three days after it ignited on a Tuesday? Will the Palisades Fire reach Santa Monica by Sunday? When will the Palisades fire be 50% contained? Will the Palisades and Eaton fires be contained before February?

People spent $1.2 million betting on these queries, according to Aeon Magazine. “Wow,” Andrews said repeatedly when she learned the figure. “My first take is that it’s morally reprehensible,” she said. “The fact that someone would feel OK doing that flabbergasts me.”

“The prediction markets are just the wild, wild West,” said Susan Sherman, who grew up in the Pacific Palisades. She lost her childhood home in the Palisades Fire; her late parents had owned it since 1963, and now, it was gone. She sold the empty lot a few months ago. “I look at (betting on the fires) as just being very crass and heartless.”

As prediction markets boom and a new wildfire season begins, fire survivors and ethicists say that the betting encourages and rewards callous thinking — and dangerous behavior, too. 

ONE MAJOR CONCERN stemming from wildfire prediction markets is arson. “That’s what has me nervous,” Sherman said. Theoretically, making a bet could give someone the perverse incentive to start a fire, or help one grow. Unlike other disasters, such as hurricanes, flooding or extreme heat, a fire can be manipulated in minutes by just one person. “Systems that tie financial gain to wildfire outcomes risk encouraging misuse, including arson, and are not compatible with our mission,” a spokesperson for the U.S. Forest Service said.

“Imagine what a bad actor might do,” said Ann Skeet, the senior director of leadership ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. “A market that might support that kind of activity, I think, is a dangerous market.” Firefighters or land managers with exclusive information about a fire’s behavior or an agency’s firefighting plans could even be tempted to bet on a fire, which would be considered insider trading.

But the biggest dilemma is largely an ethical one. “When you start gambling on somebody’s potential death or harm, you’re really diminishing the value that you’re placing on human life,” Skeet said.

BETTING ON A WILDFIRE’S OUTCOME isn’t just limited to general prediction market platforms anymore. This year, ahead of what’s likely to be a busy fire season in the West, a new prediction market specifically focused on California fires was launched. Called “Wyldfyre,” it bears the tagline: “You can’t predict wildfire. But you can trade on it.” High Country News was unable to determine the platform’s owner or the owner of its website’s IP address; the website is opaque, with no contact information listed.

Currently, Wyldfyre users can only simulate trading, but according to the site, the ability to bet with real money is “coming soon.” The platform purports to be the first prediction market of its kind, pricing county and city wildfire risk in real time. “California burns. Every year. And it’s getting worse. The question isn’t if — it’s where and when,” the site reads. It includes hotspot data from NASA and National Interagency Fire Center fire perimeters to help gamblers make predictions.

Proponents of prediction markets say the platforms generate useful information through crowdsourcing. Wyldfyre frames its platform as providing a public good. “Wyldfyre turns collective intelligence into better wildfire forecasting — one trade at a time,” the site reads.

But entities with a real need for wildfire forecasting, including federal and state firefighting agencies, say they aren’t interested in prediction market data. “The Forest Service does not use information from prediction markets for wildfire forecasting, and we do not rely on any system that treats wildfire as an event for speculation,” an agency spokesperson told High Country News. “Our priority is protecting firefighters, communities, and public lands, and our fire analysts use validated science, proven predictive tools, and data from federal partners such as the National Weather Service, NOAA, and the National Interagency Fire Center.”

“The Forest Service does not use information from prediction markets for wildfire forecasting, and we do not rely on any system that treats wildfire as an event for speculation.”

California’s state firefighting agency has a similar policy. “CAL FIRE does not use prediction‑market-derived data in wildfire forecasting or operational decision‑making, nor are we currently evaluating that type of system,” said Phillip SeLegue, staff chief of CAL FIRE’s intelligence program.

The agency uses a “scientifically based fire-behavior modeling” program to generate a fire-spread prediction when a 911 call for a wildfire is processed, SeLegue said. The automated program uses weather observations, forecast data, fuel and vegetation conditions, topography, location data and information on available resources. “Our modeling is deterministic and physics‑based; it is not informed by markets, wagering systems, crowd predictions or any other form of prediction‑market mechanism,” SeLegue said.

AS PREDICTION-MARKET BETTING soars in popularity, politicians are beginning to try to rein it in. Representatives from Utah and California introduced federal legislation in March that would prohibit betting “related to terrorism, assassination, war, gaming, or illegal activity,” according to a press release. A California senator introduced companion legislation that would also prohibit contracts about “an individual’s death.”

Meanwhile, Minnesota just became the first state to outlaw hosting or advertising (though not betting on) prediction markets; the federal government promptly sued the state for over-stepping its authority. None of the proposed restrictions at a state or federal level explicitly include wildfire — at least not yet.

While state and federal governments struggle to control prediction market betting, Andrews has an idea. “If someone won money in gambling with our fate, I would hope that they might be ashamed of themselves,” she said, “and take that money and donate it directly to fire survivors.”

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

The post People are betting on wildfires. Should they? appeared first on High Country News.

By Annie MacKeigan, The Water Desk

Western wildfires start and spread because of a whole host of factors—wind, temperature, drought, forest health. But scientists are finding that the most important indicator of where the next big fire might ignite isn’t held in the trees themselves, but in the soil their roots are buried in.

Recent studies demonstrate how soil moisture data can help wildfire experts predict a potential fire’s location and severity. Those studies could eventually aid in developing more precise forecasts for fires across the country. 

This link, between how moist the ground is under a forest or grassland and fire risk, is gaining more traction among scientists due to an increasingly expansive network of monitoring equipment. 

In Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley, 10 remote soil moisture sensors transmit data hourly, measuring the amount of water in the soil at that specific location and a certain depth, so scientists and researchers can better understand the ecosystem.

In the Rocky Mountain region of northern Idaho and western Montana, the U.S. Forest Service is working to install soil moisture networks at existing remote weather stations to increase the federal government’s observational capacity. 

In the Oklahoma grasslands, 120 monitoring sites make up a network for automated soil moisture data collection that spans the whole state, collecting data once every 30 minutes. The network, called the Oklahoma Mesonet, is one of the densest monitoring networks in the world, and is managed in collaboration between the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University and Oklahoma Climatological Survey.

In Colorado’s Garfield County, the Middle Colorado Watershed Council uses soil moisture data to better understand wildfire risk for their mountain communities. The council uses available satellite data as an indicator for wildfire risk through drying trends and overall watershed health. 

“It doesn’t look like a lot on the surface,” said Stephanie Kampf, professor of ecosystem science and sustainability at Colorado State University. The sensors are buried underground, collecting soil moisture data from different depths across the West. 

But what may not look like much from the surface is a developing network of soil moisture data that could prove invaluable in predicting, and potentially preventing, some of the West’s most destructive fires.

A growing link

The West is in an era of megafires. Decades of fire suppression have put the region in a fire deficit. Fire is an important part of the landscape, but changing climate conditions foster more severe and destructive burns.   

Soil moisture data could help better predict the location and severity of these potentially catastrophic wildfires. 

“There is growing acknowledgment in fire science that soil moisture is really important,” said Zachary Holden, research ecologist for the U.S. Forest Service and contributor to a 2025 research study that explored soil moisture as a strong predictor for wildfire. 

Holden helped create a forecasting model that used archival soil moisture data to estimate wildfire growth from 140 wildfires in the U.S. northern Rocky Mountains from 2012 to 2021, later expanded to include Oregon and Washington. 

The forecasting model, now publicly available, aims to be a more detailed tool for prediction as climate change alters our foundational understanding of ecosystems, a model that will combine weather and hydrology.  

In addition to Holden’s research, which focuses on the U.S. northern Rocky Mountains, a number of other researchers in the West are linking soil moisture with wildfire prediction, finding that soil moisture and hydrologic conditions are an even stronger predictor for wildfire than drought and weather conditions. 

“You can predict whether something is going to be wet or dry, just looking at precipitation patterns, but soil moisture itself gives you the combination of how much water came in, and then how much water went back out through evaporation,” Kampf said.  

A 2023 study aimed to better understand the relationship between soil moisture and wildfire risk. According to Erik Krueger, contributor of the study and plant and soil sciences researcher at Oklahoma State University, wildfire researchers were collecting data related to vegetation fuel, fuel load and fuel moisture properties when the relationship between soil moisture and wildfire became clear. 

“We just said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this soil moisture database, how can we use it to look at the relationship between when and where wildfires will occur?’” Krueger said. 

According to Krueger, scientists have understood that there is a relationship between soil moisture and wildfire, but the data could not be found in one place. “There was no way to quantify [the risk] without the soil moisture data,” he said. 

After combining the data, Kruger said, they could better understand wildfire risk. 

Wildfire scientists have worked for decades without the soil moisture data that is now becoming available. “We can make their jobs a little bit easier, and make our wildfire prediction a little better,” Krueger said.

Applying the science

It’s not just scientists interested in this link between soil moisture and wildfire. Western land and water managers are seeing the benefits of the emerging fire indicator as well.

“Wildfire isn’t just a forest issue, it’s fundamentally a watershed issue,” said Kate Collins, executive director of Middle Colorado Watershed Council and the Colorado River Wildfire Collaborative in Garfield County, Colorado. “Watershed health and wildfire are just not siloed issues at all, they are inextricably linked.” 

But wildfire prevention can be contentious, especially in places like Garfield County, which is considered a wildland urban interface, or WUI, where people live in areas affected by wildfire. 

“We do need to have fire in our landscapes regularly,” Kampf said. Routine fire lessens the impact of excess dry fuels in an area, limiting the severity of the burn. And emerging as a tool to plan less severe burns, or prescribed fire, is soil moisture.

Prompted by the increased risk of severe wildfire, the Colorado River Wildfire Collaborative has shifted their focus to mitigation efforts, which include riparian restoration, mechanical thinning of vegetation, creating defensible spaces, and prescribed fire. Each of these efforts not only helps reduce wildfire risk, but also supports soil moisture retention. 

The process of building a usable set of soil moisture data is just beginning. Using the data as a tool, particularly in relation to wildfire risk, is relatively new. Building a strong dataset not only takes time, but also additional resources that are still being pulled together.  

A new approach’s limitations

Sensors can only collect soil moisture data for the specific soil column they are inserted in, which brings other challenges. 

“One is topography, so not just the elevation, but what aspect you are on and sloping around, and then you have the vegetation at that site,” Holden said. 

In a high alpine area, soil moisture data collected at one point may not be representative of an entire region. How do you apply one finding across a shifting landscape?

In July 2025, a team with Aspen Global Change Institute set out to answer that question. “Single point moisture data has value in that it can give you an insight into what’s happening in the soil across a watershed,” said Asa DeHaan, research technician at AGCI. 

A single watershed has a wealth of different types of soils, especially in complex, mountainous regions like Independence Pass near Aspen, Colorado, where the data was collected. “This one spot is really dry. We need to go out and see, is this the case across a larger area?”

DeHaan and a group of 14 others embarked on a three-day mission of collecting soil moisture data with handheld probes every 5 meters in a 100 square meter area around the monitoring site. “There really was a high variability across this area, kind of what we hypothesized was going to be the case,” DeHaan said. 

This idea is called “slope granularity.” AGCI’s continued research on slope granularity aims to understand if the patterns that were recorded among different vegetation types and in different alpine environments may extend to larger landscapes. 

According to Colin Kinsman, a team member on the July 2025 trip, the group collected somewhere between 15,000 and 17,000 data points within the region. “All this was in an effort to see what the deviation is across the slope,” Kinsman said, information that is necessary to groups looking to better understand severe wildfire risk. 

Expanding the networks

But the predictive ability of soil moisture monitoring hinges on there being robust measurements and data collection available to wildfire researchers and managers. Integrating soil moisture data is made more difficult by sparse observations across the West. 

According to Helen Silver, co-director of the Integrated Rocky Mountain-region Innovation Center for Healthy Soils, IN-RICHES, and Quench soil moisture monitoring programs out of Colorado State University, advancing soil moisture as a tool for wildfire prediction means not only expanding the monitoring network, but also putting all the data in one accessible place. 

Silver is working with the U.S. Forest Service to introduce more monitoring sites across Colorado to create a larger network of data. More data could help wildfire managers use the network as a tool for predicting wildfires. “We have a really large opportunity to install more sites that will help with prediction,” Silver said.

But maintenance and installation of such sites is expensive. Together with the Forest Service, Silver is working to bring in more money. “I would love to see federal funds and state funds put towards this,” she said. 

But getting the data, having the data and using the data are all separate issues. “What we need is a few champions, a few wildfire scientists that are champions for using this practically, for implementing these new tools,” Krueger said. 

Ultimately, soil moisture monitoring can’t predict with total certainty where a wildfire will begin. But Krueger said it could give an additional boost to forecasts. Is that worth the investment? “If it’s your house that is downwind from where the fire is, it probably is,” he said. 

This story was produced and distributed by The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.

Lead image: The team that collected soil moisture data at Independence Pass in Colorado in July 2025 recorded over 15,000 data points. Photo courtesy of Colin Kinsman

The post Want to Predict Wildfires? The Key May Be Underground appeared first on Circle of Blue.

The Dry Creek fire was estimated at 315 acres as of Wednesday morning after starting Tuesday in Garfield County

Colorado State University’s crop-testing station near Akron grows varieties of black-eyed peas, testing for drought tolerance, fertilizer needs and more. (Michael Booth, The Colorado Sun)

Editor’s note

Where Colorado will find the water it needs to thrive is a more urgent question than ever amid historic drought, undeniable climate change and unprecedented interstate conflicts over limited river supplies.

The Colorado Sun is embarking on a “solutions journalism” series asking who in the state is doing their share to save precious water. Our solutions-oriented reporting will assess whether specific water conservation projects can free up water at a large scale, or whether local conservation is always overwhelmed by uncontrollable natural conditions or immovable market realities.

The Colorado Sun series “Can Colorado do more with less water?” will create a body of work showcasing what may or may not be possible in creating water solutions across the state. From Akron to Aspen, we’re looking for signs of success or failure that will help lead us to water security. 

AKRON

Surveying miles of sprouting Eastern Plains farm fields, the logic around Colorado’s deepening water crisis might sound simple. 

Colorado each year sinks deeper and deeper into a crisis of water shortages. 

Up to 90% of the water available in the state each year is used for agriculture. 

It takes 44 inches of water a year in Burlington to grow alfalfa. Only about 10 inches of water drops on Burlington in a year. 

It only takes 15 inches of water to grow a healthy crop of black-eyed peas in Burlington. 

So.

The numbers point to seemingly obvious questions: Why couldn’t a lot of eastern Colorado farmers switch crops to black-eyed peas, and sell their saved irrigation water to thirsty Front Range cities, or get paid to leave it in the Colorado and South Platte rivers for others to use? 

Could that help calm the intensifying  interstate and urban-rural wars over shrinking water supplies? 

Expand the questions across Colorado: Could Mesa County farmers leave more water in the Gunnison River by growing obscure but nutritious sainfoin as cattle forage? Would San Luis Valley farmers try easily quenched rye grass to help the dwindling Rio Grande and hold the soil against unhealthy winter dust storms? Can they grow camelina for bio jet fuel in Fruita? Take advantage of oil-producing sunflower varieties that thrive like weeds in Lincoln County? 

Yes.

But. 

Colorado’s farmers can and do grow anything and everything across the state’s wide range of climate and precipitation. They will experiment with any crop and adapt on the fly. 

But they need a market come fall. A farmer adventuring with black-eyed peas in April needs to know that a bumper crop from one farm won’t blow the whole limited market for the nutritious legume most popular in the American South and Middle East. Dairy farmers in Texas want more alfalfa than sainfoin. Some Colorado farmers still have unwanted hemp bales sitting in barns from a years-ago fad. 

“These folks are ready, they’re hungry for a solution, because using less water and recovering our aquifers in the San Luis Valley, it’s required, but it’s also our future. We don’t have a future if we can’t recover these aquifers,” said Heather Dutton, manager of the San Luis Valley Water Conservancy District and a fifth-generation farm kid who grew up in the valley. “So there’s no fighting alternate crops down here. It’s just waiting for these markets to be developed. We need them faster, we need them right now rather than tomorrow.” 

It’s not magic — it’s weather and agronomy and cash flow, Dutton said. Colorado’s water solutions lie with alternative crops, and irrigation nozzles that save 2% of flows, and welcoming local food markets … all of the above. 

“There’s no silver bullet, it’s all silver BBs,” Dutton said. “We’re going to have to do all of this. That’s the long game.”

The Colorado Sun’s Solutions Journalism project is launching today with the state farm economy because that’s where the water is. That does not mean we are asking only farmers what their solution or sacrifice will be — far from it. In this series, we are heading to Aspen, Aurora, Akron, Alamosa and Adams County. Who is doing their part to save Colorado water? What are luxury homes doing? What are data centers doing? What are landscapers doing? 

We start with farms because one of the most common reader questions goes like this: If we need to use less water, and farms are using up to 90% of the water, can’t we just grow something else? 

Colorado farmers, ranchers, researchers and economists are more than happy to discuss the answers, in detail, right after they point out an important fact: 100% of Coloradans eat food. It’s a shared responsibility. 

First, the problem: 

Long-term climate change, shorter-term drought and continued growth in the Western U.S. are combining for a growing mismatch between our water demands and our annual water supply. Lake Powell, a key to the clean water plumbing system for 40 million people in seven states, will catch only 13% of its usual runoff this year. U.S. officials plan to release only 6 million acre-feet from Lake Powell for downstream states in 2026, down from 7 million to 9.25 million in prior years. Annual flows in the San Luis Valley’s streams are down an average of 18% from 20 years ago. 

(An acre-foot covers nearly a football field-size piece of land in 12 inches of water. It’s nearly the equivalent of a year of natural precipitation on the Eastern Plains, or the consumption of two to four urban households for a year.)

Meanwhile, cities like Aurora, Thornton, Colorado Springs and other growing Front Range cities, buy up farm water and spend years arguing with rural communities over whether taking that water will dry up local economies and irreparably alter a way of life. 

Colorado officials have tried a number of grant and mitigation programs to shift water from farm use to virtual water banks that could satisfy federal compacts with Lower Basin states. They’ve also tried alternatives to traditional farm irrigation that would capture water savings to be used by willing city buyers while not permanently drying up the land. 

“Growing something different” remains at the heart of many of those efforts.

Catching an answer in the rye 

The San Luis Valley is the southernmost snow-driven irrigation system in the Western Hemisphere, Dutton notes. Anyone making long-term economic plans in the valley needs to know how perilous that fact is, given how climate change has already cut into Colorado’s snowpack. Meanwhile, the state engineer periodically shuts down wells in the valley in order to meet interstate compacts to raise depleted aquifer levels. 

Many farmers are well aware that a cereal grain like rye uses only a third to a half of the irrigation water required for other popular valley grains. Dutton joined forces with Sarah Jones of Jones Farms Organics in Hooper after a 2023 spring dust storm eroded topsoil and blanketed the valley. Jones Farms was trying rye as a winter cover crop that could hold down and enrich soil meant for potatoes in other seasons. 

Add in Alamosa-based Colorado Malting Company, supplying grains to distillers and brewers, and now there was a team of experts who could apply to the Colorado Water Conservation Board for a water-saving grant. The board provided about $400,000 for education, marketing and other support. 

“We set out to work with 10 farmers and have them plant 1,200 acres of rye for the water savings, and the improvement to soil health and wind erosion,” Dutton said. “Of that, we said, we’ll commit to selling 300 acres of harvest. And we will use some of the grant to grow the market.” 

Marketing rye means expanding possibilities beyond the tang of an intense marble rye soaking up mustard and pastrami at your local deli. Rye can be mixed with wheat flour to lighten the blend in bread, become the base flour for cookies and pastries, be distilled into whiskey, and more. Dutton and partners found 100 potential customers for a new local rye supply. 

“And farmers being farmers, the first year, right out of the gate, they grew over 4,000 acres, because they’re like, wait a minute, this makes a ton of sense,” Dutton said. 

Valley farmers were able to produce a healthy rye crop using about a third of the water usually applied to other popular crops. And when the Rye Resurgence Project went out to sell its committed share of the acreage, they averaged 62 cents a pound, when rye historically has sold at 30 to 40 cents a pound. 

Nonfarm citizens of the valley have also reaped some of the benefits of the slight change in mindset. They hear about water shortages and climate change in a sea of other world problems, Dutton said, and they wonder what to do. Buying a muffin made in Alamosa made from local rye flour is not everything, but it’s more than nothing. 

“On the larger stage in this country, there’s so much going on, and people feel overwhelmed in a lot of different ways,” Dutton said. “And so to recognize that as an individual we can make a difference. … It’s really complicated, but it doesn’t mean that it’s impossible.” 

Yes, they do know beans about it 

For all the recent political and social drama about the urban/rural divide, city and country Coloradans still have a few things in common when it comes to water and the land. 

When it rains over the city, a homeowner looks gratefully at the sky and thinks, “I can turn off my sprinklers for a week.” 

When it rains over the plains, a farmer thinks the same. 

Growing corn in Burlington takes 26.2 inches of water across a season. If it rains and snows the expected 8.1 inches by late summer, a farmer only has to add 18.1 inches of irrigation to raise a decent crop. Sugar beets, though, need a total of 33.7 inches. 

Eastern Colorado farmers know corn if they know anything, said Joel Schneekloth, who retired this spring from his longtime job as a crop and water specialist for the northeast at the Colorado State University Water Center. Between demand for corn as feed and silage, and as an ethanol fuel stock for plants in Nebraska and Colorado, farmers know in the spring that they are likely to at least have cash flow in the fall to get them through another year. 

So Schneekloth and his team face a bumper crop of questions when they suggest northeastern farmers try a less-thirsty, drought-resilient plant like black-eyed peas. Also known as cowpeas, the nutritious legume has been a staple in southern states, in Africa and in the dry Middle East. 

Black-eyed peas get peak production with only 15 inches of total water in a season, Schneekloth’s charts show.

“It just does not show water stress like other crops do,” Schneekloth said. “They don’t wilt in the heat of the day. Part of that is the genetics. They’re a sub-Saharan crop.” 

Not only did they take less of the precious local water supply, but in theory it should be easier to get vital crop insurance on black-eyed pea stands, he added. Premiums could be cheaper because it’s less likely a drought will force the farmer to cash in on the policy.  

Saves water, smoother taste than pinto beans (in Schneekloth’s expert opinion), and gives farmers valuable risk options. … What’s the limitation? 

For one, said Schneekloth’s colleague at the CSU Akron crop test station, Sally Jones-Diamond, the gears from hundreds of years of agriculture bureaucracy turn slowly. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s risk management office doesn’t yet see black-eyed peas as a “common” crop, even though CSU is planting test patches of black-eyed peas from around the world right next to USDA experimental crops at their Akron shared station. Specialty crops require specialized written insurance agreements, Jones-Diamond said. 

“One day if they get their act together, and they get black-eyed peas added, then yes,” she said, farmers could get a price break on their risk. “But not as of now.” 

For another hindrance, look at equally slow-turning markets.

Many cultures have a tradition of a black-eyed pea stew for good luck on New Year’s Eve, but the other 364 days of the year can be brutal. Peru grows a lot of cowpeas and because of cheap rural labor can ship it all over the Western Hemisphere at prices lower than what U.S. farmers need. 

There are 1.3 million acres of corn grown by Colorado farmers each year. If only a few thousand of those were switched to black-eyed peas, the small handful of buyers in Colorado and Kansas would be flooded. 

“We could grow the heck out of them,” Schneekloth said. “As the old saying goes, one pickup load meets the market. One pickup load plus a 5-gallon bucket tanks the market.” 

Another farming wild card: Political whim 

Troy Waters can talk about alfalfa and winter wheat seeds all day. But one of his favorite conversation pieces in the back pocket of his Carhartts is a humble Mediterranean plant called false flax, which grows well at his multigeneration family farm in Fruita. 

The hierarchy at the Waters farm, which has long made a better living by growing crops for seeds to sell to other farmers, starts with water watchdogs’ favorite villain: alfalfa. The extremely nutritious and extremely thirsty bales can always raise welcome cash from local cattle ranchers or well-off dairy operations in Texas or Saudi Arabia. But Alfalfa can take up to 3 acre-feet of irrigation water in a season of multiple cuttings. 

Winter wheat takes significantly less water, and has added benefits of putting out roots to hold soil in damaging winds. But, like corn, it’s an enormous commodity crop with international competition and razor-thin profit margins in a good year. 

False flax is scientifically known as camelina. Run a healthy camelina crop through a press, and you get cattle forage, plus oil that can be mixed at 50% with kerosene to make a biodegradable and sustainable jet fuel. 

“In this valley, we could apply a little over an acre-foot of water less to camelina than we did to winter wheat,” Waters said. 

Waters took a gamble in 2024 and planted 235 acres of camelina, to grow seed stock for a national renewable energy company called Vision Bioenergy Oilseeds, based in Idaho. 

“I actually stuck my neck out. I did find out, we can raise it in this county, it yields really good, and I found out it takes a lot less water than winter wheat to raise a good crop,” Waters said. “The problem with it is, our current political climate changed a bit.” Fast-moving economic waves also rock the planning.

Major energy producers are now forming partnerships to grow camelina on large-scale farms, partly in response to growing demand from European nations mandating cleaner jet fuel mixes. But to plant camelina at scale, farmers need thousands of available acres, and expensive new equipment to handle camelina’s tiny seeds. 

“The seed company needs at least 2,000 acres to send out a train, otherwise it’s not worth it,” said Greg Peterson, director of the Colorado Ag Water Alliance. “And OK, we need a weigh station in Fruita, we need storage in Fruita. You can’t even go to a bank to get a loan for a grain silo anywhere, they’re not interested in funding that.”

One of the primary biofuel seedoil companies is backed by ExxonMobil, and the other is backed by Shell, Waters noted. “You tell me, with the price of oil right now, where are these companies going to throw their money? Drilling for more oil, or for a seed crop they’re still trying to convince farmers to raise?”

“The company I contracted for was willing to come in here and contract for 5,000 acres, and that’s a lot of acres in this valley for seed production,” Waters said. “But the whole industry’s kind of pulled back its horns a bit, and they don’t need any more. They overproduced in 2024. It just doesn’t pay.”

Widespread solutions will require deeper partnerships

Short of a central, Soviet-style planned farm economy, Coloradans interested in saving agricultural water will have to continue seeking piecemeal demonstration projects and solutions.

A typical, marginal Colorado farm this spring is facing fuel prices up 25%, fertilizer prices up more than that if they can get it at all, volatile tariffs playing havoc with international demand, and drought water allotments as low as 10% of normal. They need risk partners to try for the kinds of water savings the public tends to demand, said Peterson.. 

“I don’t want to come off as doom and gloom,” Peterson said. “I’m finding money to do alternative crop projects all the time. It’s just that I need 10 more people like me helping.” 

State agencies often have money for water experimentation, in $50,000 to $100,000 increments, Peterson noted. He helped a farmer in Conejos County find grant support to grow sainfoin as cattle forage in the southern end of the San Luis Valley instead of alfalfa. 

That experiment happens to coincide with impacts of climate change mentioned in a recent Colorado School of Mines study, where higher spring temperatures mean snowpack runoff is happening earlier. That matches up well with when sainfoin needs its first water, Peterson said. 

“But the saying with sainfoin is that year one, it sleeps; year two, it creeps; year three, it leaps,” he added. “Unless we figure out the economics right, you’re going to have to subsidize it until then.”

Colorado’s city water agencies have billions of dollars in revenue each year. Many Colorado counties facing buyups of their local agriculture water by cities are demanding more ethical treatment: Guarantees that dried-up land will be planted with sustainable local grasses, or requiring the city governments to backfill lost local tax revenues from unproductive land. 

Those water agencies will likely become more involved in the kind of water-saving partnerships that could give farmers the assurances they need to experiment, Peterson said. 

“I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next few years we’re ready to start making those asks,” Peterson said. “We have the data.”

In Fruita, Troy Waters and the son-in-law he hopes will continue the family farm are open to more options. What they are asking Front Range residents to understand is the basic economics of their lives. 

“We farmers don’t farm just for the fun of it,” Waters said. “We’ve got to make a living. So we can farm the next year.”

In our corner of the desert Southwest, it’s been spring since the fall.

The spell of October’s chinchweed marked the unexpected start of a second spring that I didn’t think would last beyond Halloween. Pectis papposa naturally comes to light weeks after summer monsoons, but I had never seen the tiny yellow flowers spill so magically across the Mojave. Especially so late in the year. Their bright display was a struck match to my exposed cornea, hypnotizing me into oblivion. It was disorienting — experiencing so much life even as the Northern Hemisphere began to tilt away from the sun.

Fall was supposed to be a time of shedding sunny summer habits, harvesting and hunkering down for cold, snowy nights. But the second wind of spring meant those cozy habits could die hard: We baked in the sun like chuckwallas, planted penstemons and searched for fairies in the buds of our bladderpod.

Howling storms hit the desert one after another, flooding nearby communities with wildfire debris and turning our dirt road into a date shake. Hints that second spring was transforming into forever spring came queerly as the days grew shorter but stayed warm. Some Joshua trees bloomed around Thanksgiving, and botanists worried they might not be serviced by the yucca moth, their only pollinator. But it wasn’t until the winter solstice that all hell broke loose: The flowerfields of Anza Borrego Desert State Park gushed with color three months early. My husband and I skirted the Salton Sea to see them and were lulled by tens of thousands of devil’s lanterns as we walked toward the looming phantom of a mountain. Giant white evening primrose flowers (Oenothera deltoides) lit the way and led us deeper into a beautiful nightmare.

What else could we do but attempt to enjoy the world out of sync? What’s the difference between strolling through an unusual bloom with chronic climate dread and attending Lady Gaga’s Mayhem Ball while LGBTQ+ rights are torched? Bright lights, whether flowers or strobes, can ignite us in dark times. But they can also be distractions: Did the deep state seed the clouds to cause the blooms and sidetrack us while they built concentration camps and mined our mountains to arm war criminals? Slow down, Sherlock; it’s OK to occasionally photosynthesize and expose our showy sex organs in the breeze as we monkey-wrench dystopia. We might lose ourselves if we don’t.

In true spring, after winter’s big rains, Anza Borrego’s flowerfields are often filled with Northbound songbirds, bees and the flap of over a billion painted lady butterflies. But that afternoon, during one of the darkest days of the year, there was an eerie silence that stopped my husband and I in our tracks. I knew then our reality had become a modern Southwestern Gothic. All the components of terror were there in our tale: supernatural plants, a chronically ill narrator (“Greetings …”), a generational curse called climate change, a vampire (more on that later) and, of course, a lone raven quorking by the road.

What else could we do but attempt to enjoy the world out of sync?

I’d been thinking of The Picture of Dorian Gray, perhaps one of the queerest Gothics, which some view today as an allegory for climate colonialism. Oscar Wilde’s main character, handsome Dorian Gray, descends into reckless hedonism throughout the book. One day, he wishes for a portrait of himself to “bear the burden of his passions and his sins” while he remains forever young. As the portrait’s face becomes hideous over time, he locks it away in a secret room. At one point, after a loved one dies, Dorian even declares, “If one doesn’t talk about a thing, it has never happened.” This denialism is prevalent in our 21st century and at the heart of why some authors are increasingly drawn to the Gothic as they write about climate change. “The Anthropocene remains a prophesy, a promise of future violence, and thus a ghostly, haunting presence,” the editors of Dark Scenes of Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene wrote.

Things only got creepier as forever spring was interrupted by summer-like heat spikes that broke California records in March. We followed more blooms during one heat wave, dropping to the floor of Death Valley, where we found sprawling gravel ghosts (Atrichoseris platyphylla) and caltha-leaf phacelias (Phacelia calthifolia). BEWARE THE PURPLE FLOWERS, a small visitor center sign declaimed like a soothsayer, warning of dermatitis. We slept naked without sheets under the “Worm Moon” before it eclipsed in bloody streaks, sweating the whole night through. In that silvery light, I could see the haunting bodies of flowers outside our tent. We humans often report ghosts of people, sometimes animals, but rarely other lifeforms. Especially extinct ones. Imagine crushed endangered buckwheat haunting Cybertrucks. Or a ghost eubacteria, like prochlorococcus, appearing at the foot of an oil company CEO’s bed on Christmas Eve.

Waking up to sunwashed flowerfields was the Dr. Jekyll to the night’s Mr. Hyde. We moseyed through desolate washes and canyons to find yet more uncanny blooms. Following a wash within a maze of an alluvial fan, we came to a lovely vista. The hills below us rolled, and 3-foot-tall sunflowers danced on every crease. We got low on the sand beside the flowers for a bug’s-eye view, looking up like the sphinx moth caterpillars that were munching their leaves. Joy and whimsy were so back.

But then we discovered a horrific murder scene: a sunflower strangled by bright orange vines. A small-tooth dodder plant had leapt out of the ground, pierced the desert gold with its “teeth” and was extracting its resources like a pumpjack. This slow violence on a 94-degree winter day was the key that unlocked Dorian’s secret room for me. Inside hung the ghastly portrait of the parasitic human greed that had caused this bizarre and worrisome Western winter. What happens when the haunted castle we were taught to fear is actually a superbloom?

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

This article appeared in the May 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “A beautiful nightmare.”

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Over the course of his long life, media mogul and philanthropist Ted Turner bought vast stretches of land in Colorado, New Mexico, Montana and Nebraska and managed them for conservation. That work is expected to continue, even after Turner’s death on May 6 at age 87.

One of the Turner family’s largest properties, the 363,000-acre Armendaris Ranch in south-central New Mexico, is shielded from development by the nation’s second-largest permanent conservation easement. According to a statement on Turner Enterprises’ website, the rest of the roughly 2 million-acre ranchland empire will “continue to be protected, limiting future development and parcellation.”

“Turner Ranches, the Turner Foundation and his other nonprofits intend to do stewardship and restoration on those lands,” said Jonathan Hayden, executive director of New Mexico Land Conservancy, which holds the conservation easement on the Armendaris Ranch. Turner “will be known for being an innovator in the conservation space and being willing to try new things, from reintroducing desert bighorn to bison restoration — things that take a lot of capital and vision.”

Who owns the West?

Turner, who bought his first ranch in 1987, spent the following decades acquiring 12 more in six Western states. He focused on buying properties that were suitable for raising bison, intending to use the animals to restore the land to its original state as well as supply meat for his restaurant chain, Ted’s Montana Grill. By all accounts, his land purchases were about more than easements, a tool some wealthy landowners use to avoid taxes. Turner said publicly and on his website that his properties would continue to pay taxes to contribute to local communities. He also viewed his land as a way to bring back some species that are at-risk in the West and across the nation.

He made headlines with vast properties like the Vermejo Ranch in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, which he bought from the oil company Pennzoil. For years, his ranch managers worked to restore the overgrazed and overused 558,000-acre expanse, ultimately bringing back more than 1,200 bison and reviving riparian areas along 30 miles of streams and more than a dozen lakeshores.

In 1997, Turner created the Turner Endangered Species Fund, which reintroduced Mexican wolves at his Ladder Ranch in New Mexico and black-footed ferrets on the Bad River Ranch in South Dakota as well as on Vermejo. He also brought westslope cutthroat trout to his Flying D Ranch in southwest Montana.

The Armendaris is focused on “sustaining wildlife species in a time of unprecedented drought,” Hayden said. Operators there have restored populations of imperiled desert bighorn sheep, reintroduced the endangered Bolson tortoise and the aplomado falcon, and protected habitat for more than a million seasonal and migratory bats in the famous Jornada Bat Caves.

Turner “will be known for being an innovator in the conservation space and being willing to try new things, from reintroducing desert bighorn to bison restoration — things that take a lot of capital and vision.”

The ranch “was both a keystone project and a catalyst that demonstrates how integral private land conservation can be to preserving broader ecoregions,” Hayden said, noting that other landowners have followed Turner’s lead. Since the completion of the Armendaris easement, the New Mexico Land Conservancy has facilitated two conservation leases totaling 120,000 acres on state public lands and another five on private land.

Ted Turner makes a deal

But Turner’s ranches also concentrated on economic output, raising upward of 45,000 bison, as well as hosting sustainable timber harvest and high-end guided hunting, fishing and ecotourism, according to Turner’s websites. In 2021, he created the Turner Institute of Ecoagriculture with the goal of “conserving ecosystems, agriculture, and rural communities,” especially on his 80,000-acre McGinley Ranch, which straddles the Nebraska-South Dakota border.

“He understood from a practical standpoint that commerce and conservation have to go hand in hand,” said Lesli Alison, CEO of Western Landowners Alliance. “If commerce is pitted against conservation, nature will lose every time.”

This story is part of High Country News’ Conservation Beyond Boundaries project, which is supported by the BAND Foundation and the Mighty Arrow Family Foundation.

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As the worst snowpack in half a century kindles potential for a devastating wildfire season on Colorado’s 24 million federal acres, Colorado has lost more federal land management workers than any other state.  

A new analysis of federal workforce data by two policy-watchdog groups — Prospect Partners and Hawk Eye Strategies, consulting firms made up of former government employees, including advisors in the Biden administration— shows that Colorado ranks at the top of states for public lands agency job cuts last year. Colorado lost 1,753 positions from agencies including the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management amounting to a 26% loss in the public lands workforce in 2025. 

The Trump administration’s sweeping cuts of nearly 300,000 federal jobs by the Department of Government Efficiency included 6,000 public lands jobs at 10 federal agencies in six Western states. 

“We are heading into a summer of heightened risk with unprecedented low federal capacity,” said Bernie Kluger, a coauthor of the analysis with Prospect Partners and a former senior consultant for the U.S. Department of Agriculture under the Biden administration, in a statement. “At a moment when federal agencies should be surging in capacity to protect Colorado communities from drought and fire, the Trump administration’s cuts instead eliminated the scientists who forecast the risk of these disasters.”

About 60 Forest Service jobs were cut from the 2.3 million-acre White River National Forest, the busiest forest in the country with more than 8 million annual visitors who stir an economic impact of more than $1.6 billion in Colorado’s high country communities.

Scott Fitzwilliams supervised the White River National Forest for 15 years before resigning last year as visitation soared and he was forced to slash his workforce. 

A year later he still can’t make any sense of the cuts. 

“There was no rhyme or reason that I could see. They did not have any kind of strategic approach to the downsizing. If they tell you differently, they are lying,” he said in an interview with The Colorado Sun. “It just seemed random. When you think of the type of visitation we get and the needs of our forests, it’s just disheartening to think about how fewer people are out there doing this critical work.”

More than a third of those job losses in Colorado last year were newly hired or probationary employees on the frontlines of the agencies, including workers in visitor services, field operations and emergency operations. Another third of the job losses came from the reassignment of Interior Department staff from regional offices to the department’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. 

And now the Forest Service, as part of a “sweeping restructuring” will be moving its headquarters from D.C. to Salt Lake City in a move that will close all 10 of its regional offices across the country, including the Region 2 headquarters in Lakewood, where the Federal Center employs more than 6,000 workers in 28 federal agencies. The Forest Service also is consolidating all of its research centers into a single operation in Fort Collins. 

“We need these foresters and oil and gas specialists on the ground here in Colorado,” Fitzwilliams said. “I really do worry about the work getting done. I’m not sure they have a plan. It’s like their war plan: ‘Let’s bomb these people and figure out what happens later.’”