LOSING PARADISE
When Mike Nolan started farming in southwestern Colorado a little more than a decade ago, the region’s agricultural community considered the Mancos Valley a utopia of sorts. It was, they believed, one of the last best places to farm in an era of rising temperatures, crippling drought, and devastating pestilence. The gentle terrain, nestled among high mesas in the shadow of the La Plata Mountains’ 13,000-foot peaks, had endured a few drier-than-normal years, but it typically avoided the scorching summers and associated pests that plagued lower-elevation ag land in the Montezuma Valley to the west or the La Plata River drainage to the east. Even at 7,000 feet in elevation, an adequate number of frost-free days brought tomatoes and eggplants to fruition, with a little springtime help from a greenhouse. Best of all, and most important in the arid West, the Mancos Valley had long enjoyed relatively secure water, making this valley a sweet spot for growing myriad crops that ended up on Centennial State dinner tables.
In healthy snowpack years, water, climate, soil, and farmers work together to stitch the summertime Mancos Valley into a verdant quilt, replete with apple orchards scattered among alfalfa fields and hay-bale-lined pastures bordering rows of cabbage, broccoli, and squash. It can make for a positively idyllic scene.
That’s not how most folks would describe the valley in 2021. Over the past few years, worrisome trends that had been building in previous decades began colliding, resulting in what appears to be a critical inflection point. After 22 years of meager winters, increasingly monsoon-free summers, higher and higher temperatures, and swarms of crop-hungry grasshoppers, the valley’s lush blanket finally began to fray under the strain. While the patchwork still includes a square of green here and there, it is interspersed with dusty beige, burnt umber, and the brilliant purple of thistle blooms, the unmistakable symbol of a fallowed field.
So dire was the situation this year that Nolan, 40, and his life and business partner, Mindy Perkovich, 36, who moved Mountain Roots Produce to the Mancos Valley eight years ago, decided to end their season early. They shut down operations shortly after Labor Day and then jumped into off-site jobs to pay the bills. They aren’t the only ones: With the entire Western Slope experiencing some form of drought, ditch-feeding streams running at about half of average flows, and irrigators receiving as little as five
