Sharing Water to Save the Farm: A Guide to Agricultural-Municipal Water Sharing for Colorado's Land Conservation Community
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About This PDF
The authors have directed this guide primarily to the land conservation community in Colorado – land trusts, local government open space programs, and the appraisers, attorneys, and other experts who frequently work on private land conservation. However, this guide may also be helpful to landowners, and to those in the water community who may be interested in the role land conservation can play in their planning.
The Colorado land conservation community has, out of necessity, developed a level of expertise and savvy about water rights. Early conservation easements in Colorado often referenced water rights generally as being encumbered by the conservation easement but usually didn’t reference the specific water rights or explicitly set forth what that encumbrance meant, or didn’t reference water rights at all. Project staff did not necessarily conduct any due diligence to determine the conservation need, historical use or ownership of water rights. As water attorneys became more familiar with conservation easements and organizations like the Colorado Water Trust stepped up to offer water expertise in land conservation transactions, the conservation community largely shifted its approach to encumber all water rights on a property and often developed narrow language perpetually limiting those water rights to historic use on the property.
