An Ancient Irrigation System Could Help Farmers Manage Water
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On a stormy spring day, Devon Peña stood atop a sagebrush-covered hill and looked down on Colorado’s San Luis Valley. Dark clouds had unleashed a deluge just a few hours earlier, but now they hovered over the mountains, veiling the summits above.
Below, rows of long, narrow fields extended from Culebra Creek toward a man-made channel, the main artery of the valley’s centuries-old “acequia” irrigation system. This was the “People’s Ditch,” a waterway holding the oldest continuous water right in Colorado. The channel carried water from tributaries of the Rio Grande, high in the Sangre de Cristo mountains, down to the fields below.
There, the flow was diverted into smaller ditches that irrigated fields of alfalfa, cabbage, and potatoes, the water seeping naturally through the earthen walls. In the San Luis Valley as a whole, 130 gravity-flow ditches irrigated 30,000 acres of farmland and 10,000 acres of wetlands.
“This is an incredibly productive, resilient, and sustainable system,” said Peña, founder of The Acequia Institute, a nonprofit that supports environmental and food justice in southern Colorado.
“[Water managers] are starting to appreciate us a lot more than they did 20 or 30 years ago when they thought we were backward, primitive, and inefficient.”
The acequia system was once dismissed by Western water managers. But as a changing climate brings increasing drought and aridification to the Southwest, time-tested solutions like this one could hold the key to mitigating the worst impacts of climate change, especially in rural communities.
“[Water managers] are starting to appreciate us a lot more than they did 20 or 30 years ago when they thought we were backward, primitive, and inefficient,” Peña said.
An Ancient History
Water management in what is now New Mexico dates back to at least 800 A.D., to the Pueblo people, who used gravity-fed irrigation ditches for their crops. The acequia system, which arrived with Spanish colonizers in the 1600s, is not merely hydrological. It is political, even philosophical.
An illustration of how acequias work. (Illustration credit: Jerold Widdison for the Utton Center at the University of New Mexico)
The word acequia—from the Arabic word “as-saquiya,” which means “that which carries water”—was used to describe the irrigation ditches that evolved in the Middle East and were introduced to the Iberian Peninsula during the Islamic Golden Age. In New Mexico, these systems were often put in place even before a church was built.
Acequias operate under the principle of “shared scarcity,” rooted in Islamic law, whereby every living thing has a right to water, and to deny them water is a mortal sin. Water is thus treated as a communal resource to be shared, rather than divvied up and contested.
“They all share something in common, which is community governance,” Peña said. “It’s a water democracy.”
An acequia is both a physical canal system and a political structure, which includes an elected mayordomo, or ditch boss, along with commissioners who govern management and operations. Acequias are self-sufficient and collectively owned by members, each with water rights to the ditch and an equal vote regardless of property size.
