Story Behind the Name - Farmers Ditch

It seems anytime you look at a map of the area, you see a reference to "Farmers Ditch." Farmers Ditch basically travels from Boulder Creek, meanders by Lake Valley Estates off of Niwot Road, and ends at the west shore of Boulder Reservoir. It was constructed in 1862 and is managed by The Farmers Ditch Company.

There are several other ditches carved into the county which all have water supply and farming irrigation as their impetus. There is Star Ditch, Johnson Ditch, Hinman Ditch, Boulder & Lefthand Ditch, Boulder & White Rock Ditch, and Williamson Ditch. With all those ditches, why is this ditch called "Farmers Ditch?"

It has always been about the water. Water is necessary for the survival of all life on our blue marble. There is only so much water. New water cannot be created or existing water destroyed. It is a commodity that is bought, sold, leased and fought over.

Ditches are man-made. They divert water from natural sources, such as springs, wells, creeks, rivers and lakes to where it can be used. They can be constructed by a horse or an oxen pulled plow. They can be in the form of a concrete aqueduct, or a large tunnel like the Colorado-Big Thompson Project's Alva B. Adams Tunnel, which brings water from the Western Slope of the Rocky Mountains to the Front Range. The tunnel supplies 200,000-acre feet of water to more than 1,000,000 residents each year.

The history of all of the farmer ditches in Boulder County can be traced back to the Wellman brothers. Sylvanus, Luther and Henry Wellman came from Pennsylvania in 1859 to find their fortune in the gold mines in Nederland, Colorado. Not finding their fortune, they came down Boulder Canyon and illegally squatted on a 160-acre section of land two miles east of the mouth of Boulder Canyon where they founded the Keystone Ranch. They legalized their claim two years later.

The first thing the brothers did was to fence off the land, build a stone house, dig irrigation ditches and plant a successful crop of turnips. The next crop they planted was potatoes. The land yielded 60 bushels of potatoes per acre that season. The crop brought $1.61 per bushel. In today's dollars that would amount to $3,600 per acre. The next year potato prices fell to one and a half cents per bushel ($33.15 per acre). The next season they planted wheat, which was to prove a much more profitable crop.

Colonel Steven Harriman Long was commissioned by Congress in 1819 to explore the area west of Kansas from the Canadian border to the south along the Rocky Mountains. He reported that the land was a great desert unfit for agriculture or for people to live. That land became known as "The Great American Desert." He also mistakenly identified a 14,259-foot-tall mountain as Pikes Peak. After two years, his mistake was corrected, and that mountain was named Longs Peak.

That "wasteland" was soon to produce abundant crops due to farmers digging irrigation ditches to bring the water needed to grow their crops. President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act of 1862 bringing more settlers to the area. The influx of settlers would add additional pressure on the available water resources. Farmers would sit at their irrigation ditch's headgates with a pitchfork, or more often a shotgun, to protect their water.

Soon farmers and ranchers would band together to form ditch companies to assure and protect their water rights. Water distribution became strictly regulated by the ditch companies and courts of law from that time to the present.

Farmers Ditch brought farmland to that "wasteland" and household water to north Boulder and beyond. Shareholders own an interest in a portion of the water that runs through the ditch, which is diverted or "turned on" usually from mid-April to late August, as needed, according to the Farmer Ditch Company's website.

Interestingly, the Niwot Ditch is completely within the city limits of Longmont. Left Hand Ditch Company owns and administers the Boulder and Lefthand Ditch and the Boulder & White Rock Ditch, both of which flow through Niwot.

It is the only ditch company in Colorado that is not regulated or under the jurisdiction of the state water commission. Their ditches provide irrigation, general use and drinking water to shareholders, homeowners associations, water companies, residents and farms.