Latest / Conservation Stories / Working Together to Plan for the Future with Chris Grotegut

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Working Together to Plan for the Future with Chris Grotegut · Conservation Stories

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Foreign.
• 0:16
  Speaker B: Hello, friends, and welcome back to another edition of Conservation Stories. This is a podcast that is hosted by the Sandhill Area Research association, or as we call it, Sarah. And this podcast focus on people that are pioneering new ideas or people that have been here for a long time or just anyone we think that would be helpful to our listeners in our region and we want you to know about it. So today we have invited Chris Grotegut to visit with us. And Chris is a couple of generations here in our area and longtime farming family vet. And I'd love for you, Chris, to give us some background on you and what you're doing these days. Thanks.
• 1:02
  Speaker A: Okay. Good morning, Hillary. What my my focus is, first of all, I am an agriculture producer and a veterinarian in Desmond County, Texas, southwest of Amarillo, little town called Hereford, Texas, known for a few cattle that are being held here.
• 1:21
  Speaker B: And capital of the world, I think is what that title is.
• 1:25
  Speaker A: Self proclaimed.
• 1:27
  Speaker B: Oh, self proclaimed.
• 1:29
  Speaker A: Well, I have, I have some friends, I have some friends in some other states, particularly in Nebraska, that says there's a lot of little feedlots that don't get counted.
• 1:39
  Speaker B: Oh, that's probably true. Probably true, yes.
• 1:42
  Speaker A: And so we wonder where they show up from sometimes. But no, to get back on our focus, what we're at our farm, we have a farming and ranching operation north northeast of Hereford, Texas. And we've been here a long time. We've gone down the road of irrigation. We still irrigate some. We're not anti irrigation, but we are anti the idea of running out of water. And I think a lot of people are anti the idea of running out of water. And we have also woken up to the realization that, that our community is very, very important to us or to whomever lives in this land in the, in the, in the centuries to come. And we have to remind ourselves this is relatively new country. So to run into the problems that we have here with water at the point where it's kind of, it kind of happened historically rather quickly considering most irrigation, you know, early 1900s, a little bit irrigation that started and the boom in the plains did not really happen until Post World War II, going into the drought of the 50s. Prior to that, the banking community thought irrigation was a negative, not a positive. And then the 1950s drought came and it became a positive, not a negative to have irrigation. Hence the technology came forth over time and we've gone down this road where our focus has been. You know, I serve on, I serve as an advisor to county committee for High Plains Water district and I serve on the Region O Water Planning Group, which is the Llano Estacado group out of Lubbock. We look a lot of times at thinking about on one side looking at water policy for the region, the other side looking at water planning. And it's evident that the small and mid sized communities are behind on their water planning needs. And in our works on our farms we've learned that you can balance usage with recharge and still have, you know, be able to maintain a good stable water supply. And part of that is through things like conversion of cropland to grassland, restoring playa lakes to the full function, getting them back to being functional. Where when it rains the water doesn't sit on the surface of the playa for months at a time, it goes down in matter of weeks, days to weeks. So you know that water tables going back, the water is going back down. You know, our eyeballs are probably our best monitoring gauge on that as far as what's happening at the playa level. And transducers and measurement tapes to measure deep well water levels is our other best measurement tool for what's going on below the ground. And so when we did that, as we've done some of that work and we've been so blessed with having the water district curious and what we're doing, the former person who just recently retired, Ray Eades was there was our unbiased documentary of what we were doing on our properties. And so it gave us some validity that there are positive ways forward here. It is not a doom and gloom story, but it's not going to be easy or cheap to solve. So what we've come up with the concept, we're working on the concept and we're trying to engage as many people as possible. This concept of getting the community together to plan and look at data following suit of what LaDonna Clayton with the Oglal Land and Water Conservancy in New Mexico is doing with her backing with the Department of Defense, which is something most communities don't have. That's a huge advantage for them. But that doesn't mean we don't have our own advantages. And so to kind of plan and look at where the water is and try to identify viable ways to have the community study those areas where the water is. And then a couple of different ways you can go about it. One is you bring in the water district data, you bring in the USGS data, you work with Texas Water Development Board and worked with a, probably an engineering firm, I mean at Region O you know, there's Park Hill, Lubbock and we deal with at regional, we deal with hdr and HDR does a great job freezing nickels is also. I mean those are all, those are all three pretty prominent names that come up in the water cycle planning. And the big thing is identify the location and then we've got to figure a way to preserve it and to compensate the producers for helping us preserve it. Because they're very important that land stewardship is very, very critical to the outcomes we're going to have and getting them on board and realize they're truly a part of the community. And the culture is critical. The agriculture, the culture of agriculture is critical to these communities because sometimes the best export we have are the kids growing up there and watching what they do across the different careers that they go into. We've looked at a couple different concepts and in discussion that Lynn Tate and I had in August, this discussion of groundwater CRP garden was coming came up. And it's something that's kind of resounded with people. We've gotten a lot of producers like the idea of not, not irrigating when they realize they will be compensated for it. And basically Tiller, it's a us we're trying to get communicate with state senators and state congressmen and U.S. congressmen. And we need to reach out to new senatorship to look at this concept and figure out how if it's a viable program. But the flip on it being the old grass CRP from 1985 was an idling of land and a parking of the land and grass looking at strictly from a wildlife benefit and not thinking about the ecosystem requirements of that grass be grazed. And that was done to preserve the sorriest land we had. And in this case we're looking at trying to. We're looking at methodologies to preserve the best land we have or the best water potential we have. If the communities are going to survive, they're going to have to start focusing on the best water potential or the best recharge potential they have. Because once you pump it down to a baseline level, we're living on recharge. And you can see some examples of that in the area. You know, you go south Lubbock, in that area, those wells are very small and they are pretty much living on a recharge model already. And so it's not like it's a new concept. It's just the concept of how we go about getting that land preserved in a way that is financially viable for the producer and viable for community and it gives the community a moment to look at that land. What we're talking is trying to get a 5 year or 10 year CRP contract on that land to help to see what the water table does there and to figure out where the weak spots are so that they can be addressed and get the playas retar of the flyers modified in such a way that they're working again, try to improve them, improve their functionality.
• 9:42
  Speaker B: Right, right. And, and, and on that note, I'm going to give a plug for the Playa lake restoration project that we're doing. We are, we've got about 25, a list of about 25 folks that have playas and are interested in if the funding is there pursuing and seeing what it would look like to have their playas restored and we are looking for 25 more. So it's no cost, no commitment. All we need to know is are you interested if the funding is there and when we get that list of 50 then we turn that back into the funder which is the Global Water Challenge through Cargill and we would appreciate anybody's interest. Get a hold of us@contact sarah-conservation.com and there'll be a link. End of shameless plug.
• 10:33
  Speaker A: Here is the fact, if you look at the cost of re of getting playas back to functionality and getting grasslands and grass buffers established in those areas, that doesn't mean crop production goes away. But what, but what it does mean you're improving the quantity and quality of the water going into the aquifer. And that is also at this point mathematically the cheapest new water we can bring to the table in the region and across much of the Great Plains, especially in the small and mid sized communities that will be the most cost effective methodology that they can do.
• 11:17
  Speaker B: Well, I think it's not something that people, I mean I don't, I feel like until you know, you've started talking about it, most communities, I don't not sure that they've even been exposed to this idea and because we've, we've been told and I think there is still some people that you know will say it takes, you know, Average playa takes 800 years to recharge and I mean just from our anecdotal experience of the people that we've talked to that it can be way more localized than that. And yeah, you could be, you know, your apply, it could be one that takes years and years to recharge but you could also be setting on top your ply could be Sitting on top of something that's shallower and your recharge could be quicker than that.
• 12:03
  Speaker A: Well, if you look at it like this, if you look at. Even though even the large scale data set that comes out every spring from well measurements usually done in January from the High Plains Underground Water Conservation District of Lubbock and there are years that there are massive declines in specific areas and minor declines in the majority of the area and small areas that usually have some rise. We go, you take that same data set and you get a wet year here on the plains and the decline for those years is near zero. It is very, on a very large scale. 7. If you step and look back and step back from the picture and look at the macro, it tells you that recharge potential is very viable across the region. And the problem is not that it doesn't recharge. The problem is we have an optimized recharge and we are still utilizing this mindset of optimizing the amount of extraction we use to produce a crop or run a town or run an industry to produce a product, whether that be a food product or a non food product. So when we look at the math on it, we have to. The real goal is to get that back in balance at least enough that the community can be viable.
• 13:35
  Speaker B: Because we're talking about municipal, we're talking about water for municipalities and those municipalities. You can balance that, you can balance that use with recharge.
• 13:46
  Speaker A: If you run the math on, if you just run the math on numbers of acres it requires, if you look at it from, you're going to need basically depending on how you model it, you're going to need somewhere between 2 and 10 acres of rechargeable land per house and then still incorporate some conservation efforts within the community to minimize waste of water in the community. But if you can, for example, if you have in the area we're at, if we look at what we think our recharge is based on math and if we can expand that out. So here's an example. I'm going to use Hereford, Texas as an example. That's a model I think about a lot. And, and I'm involved in. I, I sit on, I'm the president of our local economic development corporation. And so I'm communication with the people that run the town on a regular basis. And, and they are absolutely, they're the, the. There's some concern about long term water supplies. It's a big concern of our mayor. And it's not that Hereford doesn't Have water, Hereford has water. However, it, it does not have the footprint it needs to go forward. Okay, and if you said, okay, we're going to add, we're going to identify the best 60,000 acres of water for the city of Hartford. Hereford has on the sign about 15,000 residents. Currently it uses about 5 million gallons a day. 40% of that water goes to the city for homes and operation of the parks and whatnot. 40% of it goes to provide water for our, our local meat processing facility. And about 20% of it goes a little under 20% of it goes to support an ethanol facility and, and, and its subsequent production of, of distillers byproducts for feeding. And so when we total that up with that 5 million gallons, you do the math on it. If you, if you're using an acre, if you can get the recharge level to where it's between 6 and 10% of annual rainfall, we're in an 18 to 20 inch rainfall zone. You can get it to where you can barely make a 60,000 acre field work. That's a lot of land for that size. But so we're a little under 100 sections. We're talking about. If you took that hundred sections and you blocked it up and you identified, hey, we're going to, we're going to pay these farmers like they're doing in Mexico. We're going to pay them a couple hundred dollars a year to not irrigate for a period of five years and then at the end of that five year period we're going to purchase those water rights. If it's what the community agrees on and people understand the importance of it, it gives us a look to see how that water table reacts, number one. But the other part of it is you could go, if we did either a groundwater CRP program and had USDA help us do it, or the state help us do it, or combination of the two, that, that gives some buy in to the farmers from the farmers. I think it really. Because they're important, man. They are really important to this culture, this economy.
• 17:14
  Speaker B: Oh yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 17:16
  Speaker A: You gotta have them. You gotta have them.
• 17:18
  Speaker B: And that's, I think that's the thing that was so impressive to me about ladonna's program was it, was it. She started with the farmer, she started with the economics of the farm when they, when they started talking about easements and because she understood what, what that meant. If you, if you took away the income from, from you just couldn't do it without doing. It's you know, huge damage to. Are you a farmer or rancher? Are you raising cattle or bison? Maybe you're feeling the pinch at your local processor or noticing new disposal fees, or you're simply wanting to get more value from every part of your livestock. The growing grass project could be the solution you're looking for. This USDA funded initiative, led by the American Sustainable Business Institute and the American Sustainable Business Network, along with other half Processing is working to bring value back to cattle and bison producers while also supporting people and the planet with their generalized regenerative agricultural sourcing specification, grass for short. They're helping ranchers verify and market regeneratively raised cattle and bison. And it's not just about the meat. Grass includes hides and other byproducts, making sure that every part of the animal contributes to profitability. If you're interested, you can start by taking a quick 10 minute screening survey. Qualified participants can receive direct payments, technical support and even $500 a year for the remaining year of the grant. Ready to see if your operation fits. Head over to grass.org to learn more and to take the first steps. That's grassggrass.org grow the value of your livestock while growing a more sustainable future.
• 19:28
  Speaker A: They had a meeting in August in Clovis, New Mexico and there was a gentleman there with Department of Defense and he said we decided to use the tactical strategy of truth. And I love that term. And so the. And the truth was we were not gonna have enough water. And the other truth was they had to have farmer buy in and had to be economically viable for them. And so the flip side on it, I'll give you, I'll give you a flip side example of a groundwater CRP I could take if the farmers would agree to it in Destino county on that 60,000 acres that has yet to be fully identified, it could be tweaked a couple different ways. And we're fortunate. We have 60,000 acres that would easily have the right attributes to meet the needs for the community here. Smaller communities would need a little smaller footprint. Bigger community need a bigger footprint. But if you looked at that 60,000 acres, if you took. If we could talk our community into utilizing the. Each user group pays their percentage of the deal. And you took $3,000 an acre. Which lands gotten more expensive because of inflation? At $3,000 an acre, there's a lot of farmers that would. Is it the peak of what water rights have sold for the region? Absolutely not. Is it a realistic number? It's pretty close. And if you did that over a 15 year period of time, if the industry paid their percentage, which you know, they were taught, you're talking on that size, that's $180 million collectively over 15 years. But if the industry, so the ethanol plant paid $2.4 million a year and the meat processing facility paid $4.8 million a year on the, on the 4,000 taps in Hereford, and that's how many taps there are, roughly 4,000. And you can do the math. It costs you right at a hundred dollars per month on your water bill to buy 60,000 acres of water rights for 15 years. And so if you do that math, that you would be really near net zero water usage in that 15 years on $100 per tap a month, which is $1200. However, $1200 a house comes 15 years is $18,000. Most people would view $18,000 as a lot of money, except when the fact that they realize that their house is there really would take it more significant hit than that. If the community ran out of water.
• 22:18
  Speaker B: That could demolish somebody's budget, you know, when they're living already below the poverty line. And I know we, we have a lot. If you look at the USDA statistics on poverty in our, our area, it's, it's unfortunately very high in these small communities.
• 22:35
  Speaker A: Well, a lot of that has to do with whenever things get harder, the wealth, the people that have the money to move to Lubbock or move to Amarillo or move to Dallas, they move on. And as you depopulate a town, you end up with a higher and a higher percentage of those that can't afford to leave because, and not leave. And leaving is not the answer. If you don't reinvest in the community, that just speeds up its demise. Because you have to have economic activity to pay for all this. There probably are critical mass sizes that, that will matter to. But in the scheme of water cost, the problem we've run into here is that many people believe that water should be free. Unfortunately, it's not free. And unfortunately the fuel for pumping the water and transporting the water is more significant than the, than the actual cost of the, of the water rights. Okay. When you look at that, it becomes a situation like when Aubrey Spear was here in L and he said at some point we had to make a decision whether the community survives or not. They dealt with their water challenges through rate. He said, he finally said they had to come up this point with, if you can't afford to live here, I'm sorry, move in with a Friend or a family member and see if you can make that work. Because we still have to look at the needs of the majority of the community. Like for example, in our community, I do not know the percentage of people, but I would guess it would probably be close to 10% of our population that would have a problem with that, paying that. And so maybe when that's the case, maybe we need to offset that 10% with the other 90% to make that feasible. But where they have to apply for the grant. So the ones that can afford $110 a month, we're buffering the model and the plan to pay for those that can't.
• 24:47
  Speaker B: Yes, right. Because what happens is a lot of those people, you know, that that hundred dollars is going to impact are the people that if you, if they leave, you don't have people to do those jobs that you need. You need those people there to work on the farm, to work in the meat plant, to work in all of these, you know.
• 25:07
  Speaker A: Well, to say that, to say they work in meat plant tillery would be a wrong assumption because the industrial jobs like in our town, those people make good money.
• 25:19
  Speaker B: Oh, no. And I'm not talking about cabinets.
• 25:21
  Speaker A: Yeah, no, no. And I mean they, no, they, they really good. And employees absolutely good.
• 25:26
  Speaker B: That's absolutely true.
• 25:27
  Speaker A: Cabinets.
• 25:27
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 25:28
  Speaker A: Two thumbs up to both of them. Yes, they're absolutely first rate.
• 25:31
  Speaker B: Yes, that's true. I should not throw, I shouldn't throw everybody into that, but I'm just thinking about all of the McDonald's. Yeah. In the season, we have a lot.
• 25:41
  Speaker A: Of the season, you know, a lot of these small towns in the South Plains, you have seasonal workers that work these gyms and, and they, they, they may build fence for somebody in the summertime while they're as long. And they can do the, they can do the work in the gym. They can do the build defenses, whatever. They work, just work. They work basically. And that's not a big percentage of the population, but those people are there. Sometimes those jobs pay well, sometimes they don't pay well. The problem is not when they're working. The problem is when they get older. It's, it's when they age, when their health ages them out. That becomes a really big challenge for it. You know, if we don't reinvest in our communities, you all you end up with is a majority of people that are aged out and on fixed income. We've got to encourage youth to come back into the picture in these towns, otherwise we won't have a town. But in towns where you have a long term viable industry to go forward with, and grazing animals on grass is a long term viable industry. Been around before a lot of other things. When we look at trying to identify things we can do in the community, we need to identify things that keep money in the community. So, you know, unfortunately I have a little, I have a little slanted view of the world because we forget that the, you know, like the county I grew up in, it's still one of the higher income counties agriculturally in the state of Texas. Part of that is because of the cattle feeding industry here and the meat business here. So if we go Back to the 2022 Census of Agriculture and we look at that data, I mean, this community, this community is unique in the standpoint of that it generates, it just generates a lot of revenue. I'm going to pull it up real quick and tell you what it was. So for our example of Hereford net cash farmer income, and this is, and this is ironic thing about it, because a lot of this, most of this money does not stay here. The net catch farm income in dental county on the 2022 sense of agriculture was $446,451,000. It was, it did 6% of the state's gross agricultural sales, which is a big number. You know, it marketed $1.89 billion worth of ag products. And so we have a different economy, but you can, you can scale it. The concepts we're talking about, whether it's a groundwater CRP program or a direct purchase by the community, it's scalable to match the size of the community. And the question, the realization is, is that over time irrigation will continue to decline because water supply, water supply is not available to meet the needs. I mean, we're not going to have enough water to have large scale irrigated crop production here forever. We will have, we can have some, but we can't have as much as we were used to. So trying to come up with ways that we can transition this, this economy into something different, morph it into something more long term viable, is part of the, is part of this. The water is only one piece of that. But if they don't have the water, you're not, you're going to have a hard time drawing people to live there.
• 29:22
  Speaker B: Yeah, well, I, I sometimes think, I think about, you know, there's, you know, everybody kind of varies on how much water we have left, how many, you know, years of irrigation we have, and maybe 30. And I think about it like, okay, we're going to hit a brick wall in 30 years. Do we want to be going 110 miles an hour or do we want to go be on like 10 miles an hour when we hit the brick wall? And that is how do we, how are we thinking now? And it isn't even one thinking now of how we transition, you know, from, from this heavy reliance on, on this water that, that's going to be gone, you know, or do you just, you know, wait till it's gone and then you'll just see people move or I don't know, it's going to be and it's going to be interesting. But I like the way that this, you know, that you're thinking here about how to help these communities because I, I don't see anybody else really leading the effort to take a solution to a community and to say we think that this might be helpful to you, you know. And so I don't know if you know, that's something that, do you think, I mean are you hearing that from anywhere else of anybody else thinking that.
• 30:41
  Speaker A: Way on a large scale program? No, I think what I'm hearing is there's, there's these far fetched, they're, they're, they're good ideas but they're not very economical. In 50 years we're going to be bringing water from all over the country here to such a sustainable community. I find that, that, that is, is, is doable. But we talked about the people who can't afford it. And when you look at that cost and you look at the total cost of. For example, we had a regional proposal, it's part of public record to look at a decal plant to clarify water for the salt fork of the Brazos east of Lubbock. East, southeast of Lubbock.
• 31:31
  Speaker B: What kind of, what are the, do you know what the percentages are? How brackish is that? Any idea?
• 31:37
  Speaker A: Pretty brackish. It was pretty salty. I believe it was a 30,000 TDS kind of deal. And for your listeners reference, a thousand TDS is considered drinking water. So it's 30 times saltier than it needs to be. And then that plant, when they proposed it to us, it was going to cost 40 million to build the plant and about 10 million a year, roughly 10 or 12 million a year to operate the plant. And you have to have a place to go with the salt. And that was going to be sell 800 gallons a minute. You start thinking about the cost of that 800 gallons a minute at a 10 or 12 million dollar year. Operating budget. And the reason it made sense because it was going to save cleanup costs, it was going to be about a wasp, the cleanup cost of cleaning up the water downstream for those communities downstream. So it was going to be essentially a break even proposition because it was going to save those communities downstream the 10 or 12 million dollars a year to do it. And then it was going to provide a little bit of water to some communities right in the vicinity where that plant was going to be. If you do that on a large scale for a city the size of Lubbock, the city the size of Amarillo, the city the size of Hereford becomes massive projects and massively expensive. So if you think about if say if that was going into a 5,000 person town, that 40 million dollar plant, and you sit there and look at $10 million a year to operate it, divided by 5,000 people, well that's $2,000 per year per house divided by 12 months, that's $166. And you still have an Eddie paper building the plant yet. So when we talk about $100 a month for water rights and you don't have to clean up the water or very minimally, it becomes a much smarter deal to buy the actual water rights. And it's a two phase approach. One, you have to buy the water rights to get that done. And that's kind of the pay it forward mode mode right now. If the person does it right now, even if you don't need them today, if you're going to need them in 20, 30, 40, 50 years, go ahead and do it now. And then the money will be available then. Whenever new pipelines have to be put in or new wells have to be put in, or any of that, then it can be funded by the people at the time when they're needing that water. But it becomes a very costly deal if you wait till they need the water to do it.
• 34:16
  Speaker B: All right, well, in one point I think people need to really understand about, especially you know, when some of this new water which would be cleaned, produced water out of the oil and gas field, which there's, there's a lot there. Although it would meet, I think what they have right now, once it was cleaned, would meet about 10% of the current demand of the South Plains water use on irrigation. But it would create salt, a mountain of salt that would fill the AT&T Stadium every 13 days. That, that's how much, that's how much we're talking about leftover.
• 34:54
  Speaker A: The salt disposal is a big issue in those models. I mean it's gonna be huge.
• 34:59
  Speaker B: Yes. And, and it's not as brackish. I think the Dockham is, is even more brackish. And that's the aquifer that, that's underneath the Ogallala that we use right now. We were at a produce water conference last week which is, you know, we learned so much about this and where we are on, you know, the issue with what are we going to do with all of this if once we clean it up And I mean there's real, it's really is a, you know, a point where people are really working hard on the innovation to find things to do because we can't continue to store this produced water underground anymore. And so it has to be done. And someone jokingly said like, well maybe we literally, they said you would have the Swiss Alps, you know, in the middle of New Mexico, you know, and so, you know, just like, well, I guess we've turned into a tourist attraction, you know, totally facetious, just joking, that kind of stuff, you know, but that's, you know, and when they first said Swiss Alps, I mean I've known that there was a lot but not until they put it in the terms of, I think that's, you know, that's twice a month to, to AT and T stadiums full. That's so much I did. It's not until we have a solution for that much salt. We're not, we can't do that.
• 36:11
  Speaker A: The problem with the salt, the salt deal is we have wind and unless you can stabilize the salt, you move it, you run a risk of, of the, the Roman army's deal of they salted the land and stopped the production so they would conquer the people. And, and, and we don't need that in the world we're in today. We need, we need, we need good, viable, healthy plants on healthy soil, improving organic matter to hold more water with deep roots, to put more water back in aquifer to stop evaporation and optimize transpiration because transpiration is where the money's made. And, and it's that simple. I think in reality, when we start looking at large scale projects for desalination and not knowing until we have a salt solution and a cost solution, I think it becomes more challenging. I think the economies of the communities have to be able to stand that cost. And if they don't want to stand that, they can't stand that cost. We're better off letting off the accelerator now and leaving the community in a much better position going forward. You know, the truth of it is in agriculture. If we look at it and you look at the cost of equipment and everything else that goes into agriculture is a great economy. But I think we have to start looking at agriculture from the standpoint of how much money that we generate and how much of that money gets to actually stay in the community and move away from models that, I mean, I have friends in Iowa and when, when, when we look at the cost of this equipment and it's love, it's made in the upper Midwest, it's good for their economy. But we export a lot of our well in equipment and technology. So how much do we keep really needs to be the question. And not to say we're totally protectionist. What is the world short of and how can we produce that in a way that we keep enough to keep our communities viable and where people can have happy healthy livings versus the flip flop on that? I mean the reality, and that's the beauty of a grazing it right now in the US we have because of BLM policy, because of ranches going to hunting deals all across the US in large scale. We have, we do not have a surplus of beef cattle in the U.S. right.
• 38:43
  Speaker B: And that, I mean, you know, from what you and I both love to listen to the Business of Agriculture podcast, another plug for Damian Mason. If you're out there, you should come on our podcast. And that's a great. That is, I love him because he's just so focused on the, you know, the bottom line. And I mean that's one of the things he says is one thing that we, you know, do not have an oversupply of is cattle and sheep. We are not, we do not have an overproduction of that. And that's, that could be a whole nother podcast. But that was such an interesting podcast where he was talking to the Economist about our overproduction and agriculture. But I think, you know, to your point that you know, we, we still grow some cotton on our land and in family land. So I am, you know, I have, I value that industry. But I also, you know, look at and go 5 million, 5 many acres. 5 million acres. It's a 24 billion impact on the state. Grapes are 5,000 and it's a 20 billion because everything in, in the grapes, it stays in the state. You know, we've lost a bit of the, every bit of the value chain in textiles. You know, so since all of that's gone, all of it, you know, if we, if that was still here then it would, I mean it'd be an enormous impact.
• 40:04
  Speaker A: Well, it's the whole margin with the 55 cent, the 55 to 65 cent a pound cotton that turns into a $65 RG and off slide road we missed that margin.
• 40:16
  Speaker B: We sure do. We sure do. It's that way. It's that way every time. Well, this has been super, super interesting and just so people will kind of understand, you know, just concise, you know, overview of this. The idea is to look at paying, paying farmers to, to not use their water. We're paying them to let municipalities use that water and we're paying them well enough that, that they can. They're not going to be, we're not going to be hurting the economy and not going to be hurting the farmer and doing that across a wide enough area that you have enough land to meet the municipality needs. And you also are putting a buffer around that so that as we, we know we have right of capture laws so you don't have somebody coming right in, you know, next to where all this water is being you know, reserved for municipality and putting in a well saying great, what's the highest water use crop I can grow? Because none of these people are using water. I'll take it all. So that is what we're looking at and we, Chris, I think, you know, we actually submitted a project to Texan by Nature to the, to their water collaborative to just trial this, you know, in an area around Farwell because we, we could use the numbers there for Clovis. But I think this is something that we, it needs to at least be tried somewhere. It needs to be, we need to put it in an action somewhere and see, you know, because until we, until we do that, we aren't really going to have the data to know. This is why we, this is why you do research, you know, so even if you're talking about just doing research and doing this just for Hereford alone, you know, we need to move something forward. And so I, I think that it's important for people to know that there is, there is an idea out there that these small communities can look at.
• 42:09
  Speaker A: Hillary, this concept, it's a, it's been very interesting since it's moved forward and that it has gotten friends on lots of different levels and it's applicable for either water quality or water quantity and it has an applicability in many places in the western half to 2/3 of the US and, and it's more of let's get the thinking right and let's get action going. I think that where we have missed it was communities and industries have sat and talked going oh we have a problem, but they haven't really come up with a solution. And unfortunately we are in that window of time where if we do not want to have depopulation efforts go forward at some point in the next half a century to century, the time is is right to do the work to prove up these locations and to help communities have a plan of solving the problem and going forward with out of a business of strength, not sitting on their hands in a position of fear.
• 43:34
  Speaker B: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Chris, thanks for visiting with us about this today and we'll put some information in podcast links to some documents people can read a one pager about this idea and Chris will put your contact information in the show notes as well so that people can reach out to you if they would like to show support or have some inside track with someone that they feel like would be helpful to to support the idea as well. Friends, thanks for joining us again for another episode of Conservation Stories on this such an important topic of water and supporting our very precious rural communities. And I hope you will join us again. And if you would like to do something that is really easy that would help us, you can just like our podcast, follow it and share it. And that is as good as a monetary donation because it really gets us out there in front of a lot of folks. So we appreciate your help in that way and we will be with you again next week. Thanks.
• 44:57
  Speaker A: Sa.