It’s getting warm in Palisade, Colorado, as Bruce Talbott meanders through rows of peach trees. With just one look, he can tell how many days until a peach should be picked, whether its pit is split, and whether it will look good at the grocery store.
“See those, they'll pick both of those because that color, that orange color,” he explains, gesturing to a pair of peaches hanging from a nearby branch. “And that one's a good, sound peach.”
Talbott’s family first began planting orchards in the Grand Valley in 1907. Now, Talbott Farms is one of the largest peach growers in Colorado. Their orchards in Palisade grow around 200,000 trees, and each year, they plant about 5,000 more as older orchards become less productive. All that is to say: Talbott knows a thing or two about peaches.
“Appearance sells the first peach, flavor sells the second peach,” he says with a chuckle. “So if it doesn't taste good, they're not getting another one.”
But this has been an extraordinarily challenging year for Talbott, and his fellow Palisade fruit growers. There was virtually no snowpack in the headwaters of the Colorado River, the valley’s key irrigation water supply, which fills ditches and canals that run to its orchards. When March broke records for high temperatures, what little snow there was melted off fast.
Because of the fast melt, Talbott started picking peaches about a month earlier than usual. Now, he’s worried he may not have enough water to finish out the harvest in early September.
“We have never had the canal shut off,” he said. “We've had some really tight years. ‘77 was tight. 2002 was tight, where it was nip and tuck on whether we would finish the season or not. Right now, there's not water to do that.”
Losing water early will have impacts well beyond this season. A peach orchard is a long-term investment. The trees start off in nurseries, and farmers have to put in orders long in advance. Once they’re in the ground, Talbott says he won’t start pulling significant fruit off a tree to sell for four years.
“With that kind of lead time, what next winter's gonna be?” he said, shrugging. “I've already made my decisions for ‘27. I've made some decisions for ‘28 already. I can't turn on a dime.”
In the past, farmers like Talbott haven’t worried as much about water conservation, because there was enough to go around. Now, it’s a bigger consideration, because peaches are thirsty crops and demand for water is rising. Canals in the Grand Valley may go dry before the end of the growing season. Elsewhere in the Colorado River basin, water cutbacks are the focus of intense multi-state negotiations.
David Sterle, a research scientist at Colorado State University who studies tree fruit, estimates that it takes about 3 feet of water per acre to grow peaches each growing season.
“So they're fairly water intensive, especially compared to the amount of precipitation that we tend to get here, which I think on average is about nine inches a year, and lately has been about five or less,” he said.
However, Sterle said most farmers think peaches are worth the water.
“The way I try to think of that is basically if you're trying to calculate per gallon of water used, how much money can you make off of it?” he said. “What kind of economic impact can you have with that? And I think peaches are pretty high on that list.”
He said peaches can bring in anywhere from $10,000 to 35,000 per acre—significantly more than other crops. Talbott estimates the return per acre-foot of water for peaches is ten to 20 times higher than alfalfa or corn.
“Peaches pay the bills,” Talbott said. “Peaches are consistent as anything we grow, and the markets are as consistent.”
It’s why Talbott has invested so heavily in his peach orchards—and why he’s willing to go to such great lengths to make sure his orchards survive this drought. Talbott has started on contingency plans if his ditches run dry before September 1 to keep his trees from dying.
“We will probably be putting water in tanks—it’ll be municipal water—and dig a basin around each plant,” he said. “And we're going like you would house plants and keeping them alive, if at all possible.”
In the longer term, Talbott knows that in the Colorado River Basin, there will be less water to go around for agriculture, as the climate gets hotter and drier. He’s hoping his high value peaches can withstand that seismic change.
But the uncertainty around water supplies is making that much more challenging.
“This industry can absorb a higher cost of water than a lot of your other crops can… as long as it's there,” he said, as he gestured to his orchards. “If it’s just not there, then this has to go away as well. Hope we never go that far.”
In the meantime, Talbott is hoping for monsoon rains to get him to the end of the peach harvest, but he’s not holding his breath.
This story was produced in partnership with The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder Center for Environmental Journalism.
Copyright 2026 Rocky Mountain Community Radio. This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including Aspen Public Radio.
