Colorado articles · Methodology
Colorado is not short of water. It is short of water for people.
Nine in ten gallons the state takes go to irrigation, and most of that grows feed for animals. Households are rationing the remainder.
Every dry summer produces the same headlines and the same instruction: shorter showers, fewer lawns, a day of the week you may not water. The instruction is not wrong. It is just aimed at a very small part of the problem, and the size of that part is a matter of public record.
Mgal/d
Freshwater withdrawal by end use, all 64 counties. Irrigation is not a rounding error beside households; households are a rounding error beside irrigation. Withdrawal is not consumption: a large share of irrigation water returns to the stream for somebody downstream to divert again.
US Geological Survey, Estimated Use of Water in the United States, 2015 · computed September 2026
That is the United States Geological Survey counting every county in Colorado. Irrigation takes 9,000 million gallons a day. Public water systems, which is every tap in every city and town in the state, take 844. Household wells take 35.
Public supply and domestic wells together, against the state total. When a city limits lawn watering it is rationing this share of the water Colorado takes.
US Geological Survey 2015; Colorado SDWIS · computed September 2026
What the irrigation water grows
The obvious reply is that irrigation grows food, and food is not a luxury. So we checked what it actually grows, using the state’s own mapping of which fields are irrigated and by which structures, set against the measured record of what came through those headgates.
acre-feet a year
Measured diversions 2014 to 2023 on structures that serve mapped irrigated fields, apportioned to crops by each structure's own acre split. Not a model: headgate records against the state's own field mapping.
Colorado DWR diversion records and irrigated lands mapping · computed September 2026
Hay, alfalfa and pasture. Not vegetables, not grain for people, not orchards. Feed for animals, and a large share of the alfalfa leaves the country entirely. Put the two measurements together and roughly two thirds of every gallon Colorado withdraws is growing something nobody eats directly.
And it is concentrated where the river starts
% of irrigated acres
Share of mapped irrigated acres in hay, alfalfa or pasture, by water division. Divisions 5, 6 and 7 drain to the Colorado River.
Colorado DWR irrigated lands mapping, latest mapping year · computed September 2026
Divisions 5, 6 and 7 drain into the Colorado River. Their irrigated ground is almost entirely livestock feed. Divisions 1 and 2, which contain Denver, Colorado Springs and Pueblo and therefore most of the people and most of the watering restrictions, are the least feed-dominated in the state.
So the water that a Front Range household is asked to save is not the water that matters most to the river, and the ground that matters most to the river is not being asked to save anything in particular.
Two things this does not say
- Withdrawal is not consumption. A large share of irrigation water returns to the stream and is diverted again downstream, sometimes several times. These figures are about how much water is taken, not how much disappears.
- Hay is a real crop with real economics behind it, and the ranches growing it are not villains for using water they hold decreed rights to. The argument here is about proportion and about where scrutiny lands, not about whether farming is legitimate.
What is hard to defend is the asymmetry of attention. One share of the water is measured daily, priced, metered and restricted by ordinance. The other share is nine times larger, and the public conversation about it is thinner by roughly the same factor.
Where these numbers come from
The withdrawal split is the USGS national compilation for 2015, which is the most recent county-level release. The crop figures are ours: the state publishes diversion records and it separately publishes which fields are irrigated by which structures, and nobody publishes the two joined. Every number on this page can be reproduced from those sources.
This is general information about Colorado law and records. It is not legal advice and not a title opinion. What applies to a particular piece of ground is settled by the documents filed against it.