On a clear June morning in Missouri Heights, Felix Tornare gazes out over his 87-acre cattle ranch. From a distance, it looks like a regular grass field, but there are several other vegetables growing among the tall green blades.
“We plant cover crops … like radishes, turnips, peas,” Tornare explained over the sound of birds chirping.
He cuts the grass for hay, either to sell or to feed his 50 head of cattle, but he doesn’t harvest the cover crops. They provide an extra snack for his cattle and support the growth of hay grass.
“I had a bull that would take the turnips and eat them like apples,” Tornare said. “Or they mush them up; they turn into goo, and then feed the microbes in the ground, turn into nutrients to then help the rest of the grass be healthier.”
Across Colorado, farmers are embracing regenerative methods like cover cropping and rotational grazing, which have environmental benefits, including increased biodiversity and carbon storage.
But these strategies also help farmers adapt to an increasingly dry landscape.
The snow that falls on Colorado’s mountains becomes the water that Western Slope farmers and ranchers use to irrigate their fields, and Colorado just had its lowest snowpack year on record.
“Usually, this time of year, we still have a little snow up there,” Tornare said, pointing to Basalt Mountain. “And that fills Cattle Creek, where our water right comes out of. But we've been out of water now three weeks.”
With water levels so low, Tornare was only able to harvest hay once this summer. Without the cover crops, he said he probably wouldn’t have been able to cut hay at all.
“We're lucky to be where we are today,” Tornare said.
According to Russ Schumacher, Colorado State University’s state climatologist, the main problem was a summer-like heat wave in March.
“We had a lot of areas in Colorado that had a week's worth of days that were warmer than any March day in the previous 75 years,” Schumacher said.
Scientists concluded that the March heat wave would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change.
Colorado’s snowpack was teetering near record lows all winter, but by April 1, it plummeted to a fraction of the previous low.
As a result of that early spring meltout, farmers started their growing seasons with drier soil.
Becca Roberts grows vegetables at Highwater Farms in Silt.
“Coming into this season, it was a lot more dry,” she said. “March was super dry to begin with. Our soils had very little moisture in them.”
In some years, Roberts said a blanket of snow will cover the farm all winter, retaining soil moisture. This wasn’t one of those years.
“We basically had no snow coverage for most of the winter,” she said.
Walking through a gate at the edge of the farm, Roberts pointed to a small stream feeding into a man-made creek — the ditch that supplies water to her fields.
“You can see there's a trickle coming in,” she said. “Most years the water is a lot higher.”
The ditch feeds off the Colorado River, but with so little runoff this year, the company that manages Roberts’ ditch had to use heavy machinery to excavate part of the ditch and improve water flow.
Roberts wasn’t sure how much water she’ll have by the end of the summer. But she has gotten creative, using drought-resistant practices like shade structures, drip irrigation, and, like Felix Tornare, cover crops.
Tornare said it was nerve-wracking when he first switched to this farming style.
“I would be on my knees trying to find all the seedlings and stuff that were coming up,” he recalled. “And it took a while to prove to me that it's working.”
To retain soil moisture, Tornare sold his plows and replaced them with equipment that’s less disruptive — a major investment and a leap of faith. As a relatively small operation, he said the transition would be much more daunting for the country’s megafarms.
But Tornare is convinced that a shift is inevitable.
“The depletion of the ground is devastating,” Tornare said. “It's just going to take more fertilizer, more fertilizer. Otherwise, nothing's going to grow. And at some point, we have to change.”
Regenerative practices can help farmers cope with a warming climate, but they can’t make up for the water lost during this record-low snow year.
Western farmers are hoping for a strong monsoon this summer and for El Niño to bring a wetter fall and winter.
