Weld County Farmers Recovering From Floods Making Good Progress
WELD COUNTY, Colo. (CBS4) – There's been some relief for Weld County farmers still suffering from the effects of last fall's flooding.
In one area, diverted water feeds 14 different farmers' operations. In fact, nearly all of northeastern Colorado's agriculture relies on irrigation systems or wells for water. The floods wiped out many of those systems and threatened production across thousands of acres of farmland.
The corn harvested along Weld County Road 28 will feed the Magness Land and Cattle Company's herd all winter. It's a crop that almost didn't happen this year.
"The ground is worth nothing without this water here," Kirk Johannsen with Magness Land and Cattle Company said.
Johannsen operates an irrigation ditch near Platteville that feeds more than a dozen farmers with water to grow grass, alfalfa corn and other vegetables. Last fall, flooding breeched the South Platte River and others around the state. It ruined the water sources for nearly 200,000 acres of farmland and threatened Colorado farmers' livelihoods.
"When it broke and took everything out I thought there would be no way we'd get it back on," Johannsen said.
Federal aid does not apply to irrigated agriculture, so an emergency repair loan for $2 million from the Colorado Water Conservation Board made it possible for Amy Willhite's company to rebuild.
"The Water Conservation Board was just so incredibly helpful. I don't think there's any other mechanism by which we could have done this," said Willhite, who owns the Beeman Irrigating Ditch and Mill Company.
Crews replaced the irrigation ditch in time to grow spring crops.
Johannsen can now operate the system's gates from his cellphone.
"There'd be zero; they would have had nothing this year, so it would have been devastating," he said.
Following months of uncertainty, Johannsen says the recovery effort for farmers moved faster than expected and kept crop production moving forward.
Today, nearly 80 percent of the irrigation systems wiped out by the floods have been restored. While there's still more work to do, farmers say they never imagined they'd be able to recover so quickly.
CBS4's Weather Team is taking a in-depth look at how the flood happened, the recovery work still to come, and how we're preparing for floods in the future. Watch CBS4's "Lessons from the Flood" special report Friday at 6:30 p.m. on CBS4.
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