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Old 03-28-2009, 11:34 PM
 
Location: MIA
1,344 posts, read 3,597,387 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by WyoNewk View Post
I think much of the run-off water is tied up pretty tightly by other states' water rights. That goes back to the 1800s.

Drilling deep costs LOTS of money, and pumping it out from a couple thousand feet down isn't cheap either.
800 ft of 110 volt cable costs about $500 wholesale. I know, I just bought a roll for my farm. Take, say, 1 mile of wire - in the most extreme case of well <-> power distance - it would be $3,300. Drilling a 500 foot well, complete with pump and valves, I am guessing $10,000-$50,000 nationally. In Arizona, wells are 200-400 ft., and Wyoming is no way as arid as AZ...I know what well drillers charge for a 165' well in Illinois - around $10,000.

Where am I going wrong? Someone explain the theory of "Water Rights"... It's not like I am a claim jumper with a copper fortune in my future...

Last edited by cuba libre; 03-28-2009 at 11:42 PM..
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Old 03-29-2009, 12:43 AM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by cuba libre View Post
Is Wyoming's climate dry? Or is it that the rain that falls in Wyoming gets quickly dispersed to other states by Wyoming's high speed rivers?
If my meterological memory serves me,

a) WY has been in a drought for at least the past 10 years. Counting on snowfall is dicey at best.
b) annual rainfall is in the teens of inches (depending on where obviously, but I seemed to remember Casper, for instance, had an annual rainfall of something around 14-16 inches.) Ditto drought.

When you look up the weather averages for various regions in WY, it does not seem that green pastures from Mother Nature enter into it unless you have water rights.

As much as we love WY, water issues make it less attractive than other places. It's one thing if you just want to "live". It's an entirely different ballgame if you have livestock.
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Old 03-29-2009, 09:26 AM
 
Location: Spots Wyoming
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You are correct FiveHorses. We have been in a bad drought. But here's why people don't seem to realize it.

Last year, we had over 100% of snow pack and our reservoirs were being drained early to prevent flooding. But that was in early spring. By the middle of June, the water conservation district and the irrigation channels were claiming a shortage. Then by mid July, they were monitoring water channels to make sure nobody was grazing/using water bought by others. Then by the end of July, they were fining people for using because they were now announcing that there was a serious shortage and people who had already paid for water, weren't going to get it.

As such, the occasional tourist that drove through in early June saw beautiful green pastures and belly high grass. The tourists that drove through in August saw brown dead grass and ranchers hauling water to their livestock.

Snow pack is good, as is spring rains. But the showers the rest of the summer are needed and we're not getting them where they'll do any good. A small shower up over the reservoir is much better managed and does more good then a big rain down on the prairies or low lands.
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Old 03-29-2009, 12:00 PM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by cuba libre View Post
With such a sparse population...just over 700,000... and 98,000 square miles - twice the size of Illinois - why is there such a battle over water? Is it because Wyoming prostitutes its own people by subsidizing water to neighboring states? Why? It's not like you guys are a desert... You are in the middle of the American Rockies! You guys get umpteen feet of snow every year, why can't you "corral" some of that water??? <insert pun>

Or is it an ecological issue? Is Wyoming's climate dry? Or is it that the rain that falls in Wyoming gets quickly dispersed to other states by Wyoming's high speed rivers?

Why can't I drill a well of infinite depth in my pastures and enjoy the benefits?

Cuba L.
I mentioned in a prior post that your paradigm of water ... coming from a riparian area ... was totally out of whack with Wyoming's climate and water availability, hence laws.

If you'll look at your map again, you'll see that most of Wyoming is a high altitude DESERT prairie, with some spines of the Rocky Mountains going through it. That limited mountain area is where most of the snowfall actually falls and builds up; that snowmelt is what feeds our acquifers and storage reservoirs and streams. In the springtime, there's a modest amount of rainfall in an average year that will add to the total moisture in an area.

Over the past few years, in the drought climate pattern, there's been less than average snowfall accumulation through the winter, and much less rainfall in the spring. So there's been a serious water shortage.

These weather/water patterns are well known, and have been documented all the way back into the 1880's (and prior) when some of the first water compacts were devised between the states. Water was a BIG issue then for the farmers and ranchers here, and it hasn't gotten any better through the years. Many of the measurements used to determine water availability in that 1880's era were based upon a then more recent abundance of water (snow and rain) for a few year cycle ... which wasn't the same a few years later, and certainly not in the last decade here.

So, the engineers, hydrologists, and lawmakers came up with a system of allocation of the limited resource which claims that the water in the state, all of it (be it on the surface or in the ground), is "owned" by the state. This is totally different than the casual "take it for granted" attitude of riparian states where water ... good potable water ... is available in abundance without giving any thought at all to it.

We see many people move into this area who don't have a clue about this issue. Why, "back home", if you wanted to use water in any manner, it was there for the taking. If you wanted to drill a well with a drill point 20' into the ground water table to irrigate your lawn, no problem ... head on down to the hardware store and buy a drill point pump and wire and pipe and pound it into the ground. And water flowing across your land in a creek was yours for the taking to water your property.

It simply isn't so here in Wyoming, the water is scarce, limited, and it's already owned by somebody else who has paid a significant amount of money for the water right and the means to deliver it to their property for their adjudicated use. It's the stuff of serious fights ... legal, as well as hand-to-hand. Literally ... a rancher here was recently charged with assaulting a ditch rider with a shovel, injuring him ... and let off with a much lesser charge as the assault was "provoked" by the water official. I spoke recently with a ranch manager in the Lovell area, and she told me that the headgates in her region were chained and locked by the ditchriders, who had the only keys to change the water distribution in the area. Quite different from down our way, where the headgates are unlocked ... but I've had problems with a neighbor who resents my senior water right to theirs, and frequently goes out to close my headgate when I'm not around. It's 5 miles from my ag ground to the headgate, and it's a lot closer to them then it is to me.

I have to check my headgate several times per day to be sure that it's open and not tampered with. The ditch rider here has "tagged it" with the usual warning label about tampering with a headgate, but he tells me the next best thing I can do is to put a chain and lock on it. The problem is that the neighbor has a pair of bolt cutters and has cut my locks ... so, what's the point? They won't arrest my neighbor because there's not enough evidence to charge them ... but it's sure an interesting coincidence that almost every time my headgate gets closed, their headgate gets opened to receive the water downstream from me. Of course, their family has been farming that land for 120 years and is on a first name basis with most of the judges, state water engineers, deputies, ... and a family member or two is (or has been) a judge on the state supreme court; it all proves it helps to know somebody around here.

ElkH had a pretty good description of how folks can be mislead about the moisture out here. We can only store so much snowmelt water, and without rainfall to back that up, we're in a drought ... even with 100% of average snowfall coming down in the winter.

OH, by the way ... You'll find that much of Arizona is no more a desert than a lot of Wyoming. As I mentioned, your paradigm of what the climate is like out here in the West is totally WRONG. My impression is that you'd be one of the folk moving out here that would be very unhappy with the reality of what life is like here in the DESERT of Wyoming ... you'll be better off staying with what you know somewhere with abundant water, especially when it comes to water management and conservation.

I hope you're starting to get a "clue" about "water rights" here. The big misconception you have is that owning a "water right" is equivalent to "having water". Nothing is further from the actuality of the situation. There's a total amount of water that may be functionally available each year. The state owns all of the water and has adjudicated it's use to specific purposes on specific pieces of land. Due to the development history of water in the area, some water rights are awarded by a named quantity of water (acre feet), some are awarded by a flow rate (cubic feet/second, but not a total quantity of water). There are overlapping rights in many areas, so seniority is a big issue. The problem comes when not everybody's water "right" is being fulfilled, because there isn't enough water to go around. In recent years, only the most senior water right holders got their allocation of water, and junior water right holders may have received only a portion of what their "right" allocated, or ... in extreme cases ... none at all. Some municipal water districts ... that's for domestic use water ... actually ran out of water for their districts in recent years. People had to truck in their household water to have any. And some of us, with very senior water rights going back to the 1880's for our lands ... recently didn't get any water at all for ag use from some of our rights while we watched those senior to us waste a lot of water irrigating their fields. We all watched as our stands of crops died in the drought, or wheat headed out early on stunted growth.

Please note that you cannot "sell" or "transfer" your water right (or the acutal water) ... be it surface water or ground water (from a well) ... to anybody else. (the corollary is that you can't "buy" it from somebody else, either) You can only use your water available through your right for the beneficial use for which it was awarded, or allow it to remain in the state system to go to the next junior water right holder. Per the laws, if you don't use the water under your right for the beneficial use to which it was allocated for 7 years, you have abandoned your right and the state engineer will remove it from the books. Trust me ... many eyes are watching to see if you fulfill your use every year and they will know if you've used your water properly or not.

All in all, water is a very precious and limited commodity here. It's cost is measured in much more than the reality of what it costs to deliver it to a property (cost of materials, wire, pump, drilling & casing). And after all that cost, there's still no guarantee that you'll have water due to senior water right holders using it all up, or the scarcity of it in a given year.

Last edited by sunsprit; 03-29-2009 at 12:47 PM..
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Old 03-29-2009, 04:21 PM
 
Location: Sheridan, WY
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Default Oh man... it's like you're from Venus and we're from Mars

Quote:
Originally Posted by cuba libre View Post
800 ft of 110 volt cable costs about $500 wholesale. I know, I just bought a roll for my farm. Take, say, 1 mile of wire - in the most extreme case of well <-> power distance - it would be $3,300. Drilling a 500 foot well, complete with pump and valves, I am guessing $10,000-$50,000 nationally. In Arizona, wells are 200-400 ft., and Wyoming is no way as arid as AZ...I know what well drillers charge for a 165' well in Illinois - around $10,000.

Where am I going wrong? Someone explain the theory of "Water Rights"... It's not like I am a claim jumper with a copper fortune in my future...
Where you're going wrong is that you obviously have no frame of reference of what sunsprit and I are talking about.

sunsprit is running a farm in SE WY, I've owned and run a hay farm in central NV. Farms the size you're talking about -- 500 to 1000 acres, with hundreds of acres of hay ground. One pivot will cover 125 acres, and take 800GPM (minimum).

sunsprit and I are talking about big wells -- irrigation wells, which are bored at 24" in diameter, cased down to 16" diameter, and you're using 480 3-phase power onto 150 to 200HP motors to pump water for irrigation to ONE pivot (125+ acres).

At $10K for a well, you're talking about what we call a "domestic water" well, which is enough to supply your house, maybe a little bit of livestock and a garden. They might get drilled 8" in diameter and cased down to 6" or so, then you stuff a 0.75 to 1.5HP pump down the hole. Simple. But nowhere near enough to water hayfields. And before you wonder "Why do you need these big wells to water a hayfield?" you need to get it into your head that there is not enough water coming out of the sky to get more than a measly first cutting of hay in June in Wyoming. If you want a second cutting, and you want to have enough hay to run a ranch, you'll need to irrigate. The water can come down a ditch/stream/river, or you have to drill for it. If you want enough water to water hundreds of head of cattle, and you don't have stream/ditch/river rights, you'll have to drill for it.


To drill, case and develop an irrigation well 800' deep, you're talking about $130K or more (depending on what they hit as they go down), and then you need to purchase the drive line, drip tube, column pipe, pump, motor and motor panel on the top. For a well 800' deep, you're probably looking at least another $50K.

If the well driller is coming from any distance away, he'll likely charge you a $2500 to $4000 "activation fee" just to transport all his equipment to your location - well rigs slurp diesel fuel to go down the road. That "activation fee" is spent regardless of whether or not they find water. The drilling costs (which will run about $70 to $85/foot) will be charged regardless of whether or not they find water. If they do find water, then they'll case the hole (put in the steel sleeve, fill the annular ring with pea gravel, put in the surface sanitary seal, etc).

Let me put it to you this way: You're so far out of your element about water, you need to put everything you know about "where does water come from?" into a box, tape it up and put it into storage. It doesn't apply here in the west. I don't care whether you're talking WY, AZ, ID, UT, NV, MT, CO, eastern OR/WA or northern CA. Just put those eastern notions away - they're worse than useless to you here. They're hazardous to your checkbook and possibly your future financial viability. You could recover from a mistake about domestic water on a parcel of land here in the west.

If you buy a farm or ranch and you find out that you don't have the water you thought you had, or you made assumptions about how easy it would be to develop sub-surface water... this level of financial mistake can break you, unless you're some hedge-fund manager or absentee Hollywood yahoo who doesn't know and doesn't care about these issues. We're not talking five-figure mistakes here. We're talking mistakes that can run $100K to $1 mil and up.

Edit: Oh, yea, what does it cost to pump water like this?

Well, let me tell you what my water bills were in Nevada: On a 200HP motor that was indicating current draw for 180HP. pumping 1200GPM from 240' down, I was paying about $3K/month for that well. That was assuming a demand structure of $8/motor-plate HP per season, then $7.92*peak kW every month, and $0.03523/kWh. The peak kW charge was applied after the first 15 minutes of pumping per month - ie, once you had turned on the pump for 15 minutes, you might as well go full-tilt for the month. There was no incentive to conserve at that point.

To pump 800GPM from a pumping level of 700', you'd be running about the same sort of bill - not exactly the same, but on par. For most co-ops or IOU's, you'd be looking at about $8/plate HP and about $0.05 to $0.07/kWh.

Last edited by NVDave; 03-29-2009 at 04:57 PM..
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Old 03-29-2009, 04:55 PM
 
Location: Sheridan, WY
357 posts, read 1,606,586 times
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Default About that snow...

Quote:
Originally Posted by cuba libre View Post
You guys get umpteen feet of snow every year, why can't you "corral" some of that water??? <insert pun>


Cuba L.
Depending on the conditions, western snow typically has less water per inch of snowfall than eastern or midwest snow. This is why the ski people love the snow in Utah -- it is a very 'dry', powdery snow - and takes perhaps 12" of snow to equal 1" of water.

Eastern snow tends to be more like 8 to 10" of snow for 1" of water. Same sort of ratio is applicable in the Sierras of California.

That's for starters.

Second thing: yes, the west is dry. It is also at much higher elevations. Where we used to farm in NV, our farm was at 6,000' above sea level. We could get a foot of snow and it would be gone in a week to 10 days - without ever melting. It would simply sublimate off -- ie, turn from a solid to a vapor, with no liquid phase in-between. What we always prayed for wasn't just snow - it was snow, followed by a warm spell to get it to melt into the ground.

Same deal in WY. The relative humidity is a tad higher in WY than NV, but the same thing happens - and the effect becomes worse the higher you go in elevation. So when you look up into the mountains and see feet upon feet of snow... you need to re-think how much of that is going to turn into usable water that might get down your creek.
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Old 03-29-2009, 05:32 PM
 
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NVDave makes many valid observations about the water situation here, and the costs of supplying water to a ranch.

But paramount to these issues is the "water right" adjudication. If you don't presently have water rights, you cannot simply drill a well to produce water ... no matter how much money you have. There's a waiting list of many folks ahead of you with prior application dates for an ag well .... without that permit to drill, which includes a declaration for the size of the well/gallonperminute capacity approval, no driller can drill the well. Let alone complete it and hook up a power source. At this time, the state engineer is not approving any new ag water wells, and it doesn't look good for the forseable future with the lawsuits against WY to deliver yet more water to downstream water users (which have been upheld in the courts).

The consequences of not having adequate ag water is not only the possible extreme cost of developing it, but the fact that you may only have "dryland" which has a very low productive capacity. If you think you're going to run many horses per acre on dryland ... year around ... out here, you're in for a very rude awakening. You'll be lucky to have adequate livestock water and you'll be buying hay to supplemental feed your horses most of the year. A thousand acres of dryland around here will not support 20 horses year around. We've got a neighbor with a section that runs 35 head of rough stock for only a few months of grazing on it, and then he has to supplemental feed them until he starts out on the rodeo circuit.

Interestingly, my small pivot uses a 750 GPM 40HP 480v3ph pump 350' down ... and my energy cost averages almost $2,000 per month. Between the monthly service fee for the 40KW delivery and the actual KW hours used (at about 11cents per KWH), it's not cheap to pump water onto 80 acres each month through the season. And that still assumes that there's water to be pumped, which there hasn't been adequate levels for the last 7 years. Case in point, I started irrigating 3 weeks ago in the warm spell on my breaking dormancy alfalfa there, and I ran the acquifer down from early season good levels to late season levels (like August of last year) within two weeks. And our real irrigation season hasn't started yet this year with the current cold spell and a few inches of snowfall. At this point, I doubt I will have enough ag water to irrigate 9" of water on my alfalfa through the season ... so I'm looking at a max of two modest cuts if I'm able to get the water onto the field and it's supplemented with some nice spring rainstorms. I can put 15" of ag water to good use, if I have it. If I don't, then I just have to accept the lower yield from stressed plants and a shorter productive life cycle before having to replant.

For all of our capital investment in alfalfa production, we're starting to invest in fruit trees and greenhouses. In the last few years, we can see a path where our greenhouse vegetable production may be more valuable than our alfalfa production. But we've got to continue forage production for our sheep/lamb business, so we can't stop producing and putting up hay.

I know of several neighbors who have valves at each of the nozzles for their pivots, so they can run what water they have available through alternate nozzles for each rotation of the pivot. They typically run 1" of water per nozzle, so it takes them two rotations over a week's time to get 1" of water on the ground. But it's better than nothing.

I have another neighbor with a prominently advertised cattle ranch/farm unit for sale at $1.3 million. The story is that he's going to retire and move to someplace cheaper to live without the winters. But the reality is that he's run out of water in the past few years for his wells, and he can't produce the hay/forage that he used to for his cattle operation. He needs to redrill his wells, at obviously great expense ... and that's after he goes through the permitting process to allow him to abandon the old wells and redrill new ones in their place. It's a tough process ... and expensive. In the meantime, his alfalfa stands are dying out and will need to be ripped out and re-seeded ... another substantial expense in dirt work and seed, made all the worse if his topsoil gets blown away before a new stand of alfalfa takes hold to protect it.

Yet another neighbor has 9 sections covered with 11 pivots. He's near the neighbor above, and he, too, has wells drying up. They've been "fracturing" his wells to try to get renewed production, but it's not looking good. He's slowly losing alfalfa production and his cattle operation is shrinking. Used to run about 10 employees ... now he's down to a couple of family members and one or two hired hands in peak labor times.

Last edited by sunsprit; 03-29-2009 at 05:59 PM..
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Old 03-29-2009, 08:19 PM
 
Location: Sheridan, WY
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I want to echo what sunsprit says about the water rights issue. It is of absolute and paramount importance that you:

1. Know the water law in the state where you'd be buying your property. Just because you know water law in Montana doesn't mean you know water law in Wyoming. I know the water law in Nevada backwards and forwards - and there are significant differences (as well as broad similarities) between NV's water law and WY's water law. Knowing water law in NV makes me aware of the issues, but not the specific statutes, regulations and case law. It is a whole new world for me in WY.

For example: In NV, all rivers flowed inwards, into the middle of NV. We had only one river compact with other states, and that was on the mightly Colorado River. All other rivers were Nevada-only issues as far as water went.

Here in Wyoming, you must know the compacts/treaties and court cases (ie, case law) on irrigation sources that flow into other states. The N. Platte, The Powder River, Tongue River, Big Horn River -- all have issues from other states. There are more than a few people in WY who must allow water to flow right by their farm/ranch downstream to other users in other states.

2. Know the water rights for land you're purchasing. Allow me to state for the record loudly and vehemently here: do not trust anyone else's representation of the water rights on a piece of property. Not the current owner's, certainly not the realtor's, not the county agent. No one. Trust only the information you develop on the property directly from the state engineer's office. If there is ever any contest as to what water rights attach to a property, the deciding information will be whatever is on file with the state engineer.

3. Know this: In Wyoming, most real estate agents are quite obviously not conversant on water law or water rights on the properties they represent. Remember that real estate agents work for the seller. If it is to the seller's advantage to not tell buyers that there are problems, conflicts or pending lawsuits over the water, you're probably going to be the last to know.

4. Get the bylaws of any irrigation company, ditch company, reservoir company, etc that might be connected with your irrigation rights. These often have boards of directors, dues/assessments, annual meetings, etc that you must know about before buying. They're like a condo association in urban areas -- except that irrigation associations have knock-down, drag out fights, often with fists, historically guns have been involved from time to time. Condo associations have CPA's and lawyers pissing onto each other's shoes. The scale of the issue is a little bit different here.



Also know this: real estate agents in WY are often also operating on the shady side of fraud when they list ranches as "8000 total acres, 2000 deeded..." -- if you're not familiar with BLM and/or USFS grazing leases, become familiar with them before you put down any offer. Go into the BLM/USFS district office and talk to them about the grazing leases. They are leases for nothing other than the forage in the described area. You have no power to exclude any access. You have only conditional use of the forage, subject to the terms of the lease. When someone lists a grazing lease as "nnnnn acres" -- this is fraudulent, IMO, because the grazing lease is NOT for "nnnnn acres" - it is for "xxx AUM's" from a "turn out date" to a "gather date" during the year, subject to the range conditions in the lease area. If the area has been burned over -- you won't get to use it for at least two years. If the previous owner has abused it - you might not get to use it for years - or you might take a "transfer cut" in the AUM's on the lease. You should also know that the environmentalists are gunning for every grazing lease in the west. The environmentalists would rather see the range burn to the ground than anyone make a thin dime off it with cattle or sheep.

By the time we bought our farm in NV (and when we sold it), we were so well known in the State Engineer's office in Carson City that the Engineer knew us by name and we were on a first-name basis with him. The state engineer will be a P.E. - so when he won't give you some off-the-cuff opinion, it is because P.E.'s are cautious and deliberate people by nature and training. They want anything they say to hold up in court, so they often don't hand out informal opinions - they want to deal in only facts. Don't become discouraged when talking to the State Engineers' offices in the west - they all now have some of the most lawsuit-ridden jobs in the west, bar none.
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Old 03-31-2009, 05:07 PM
 
Location: MIA
1,344 posts, read 3,597,387 times
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Australia is going through a major drought right now. They are using buckets in the shower to water their gardens. You guys should be lucky you're not "down under" right now. I just read in National Geographic that herds have been cut by more than two thirds in New South Wales (SE Australia).
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