The Lower Arkansas Valley has long been a battleground over water rights as Front Range communities purchase and transfer water to support their expansion.

The first massive water exports occurred in the 1950s and continued into the 2000s, permanently drying out tens of thousands of hectares of farmland in the lower Arkansas Valley.

This practice continues to this day, most recently when the Colorado Springs City Council considered incorporating Amara, a 3,200-acre planned community with 9,500 homes.

It is estimated that Amara would require 3,500 acre-feet of water per year at full development. That equates to at least 5,000 acres of farmland that would have to be drained each year to provide enough water for this development. That is the size of nearly 4,000 football fields per year.

From a regional and national perspective, it is worrying to observe a growth strategy that sees the permanent drainage of agricultural land as a long-term solution to promote suburban sprawl.

Why should the needs of one community endanger the livelihood of another?

The City Council sent a clear message by voting against the Amara project that all communities in Colorado matter, including the Lower Arkansas Valley. Stealing from Peter to pay Paul is neither a practical nor a moral approach.

The farmers and ranchers of the Lower Arkansas Valley who attended the meeting to speak out against this development hope that Colorado Springs will continue to work with us and not against us.

Colorado Springs Utilities’ 2017 Sustainable Water Plan states that the company plans to extract an additional 25,000 acre-feet of water per year from the Lower Arkansas Valley over the coming decades, meaning an additional 40,000 acres of farmland will dry out each year.

This number could rise if additional water from the Colorado River is not available and conservation efforts reach their limits.

Irrigated agriculture is the foundation of our rural economy in the Lower Arkansas Valley. The water we use is not only our primary economic resource, but it also enables our lifestyle – and has done so for many generations.

My wife and I are raising our two sons, seventh generation Bent County residents, on the same land my family settled in 1910. We hope they will have the same opportunity to raise their families here as well, if they so choose.

Our family is like many others in southeast Colorado who have produced millions of pounds of food each year for Colorado and our country. This is only possible because of water.

Even though we have lost so much farmland in the lower Arkansas Valley to urban sprawl, we are fortunate to still have some of the most productive farmland, irrigated by a renewable water supply from snow in the mountains and thunderstorms on the plains.

The same cannot be said for the millions of acres of farmland in the Western United States that will dry up in the coming decades due to non-renewable groundwater supplies or urbanization.

According to a study by the American Farmland Trust, 2,000 hectares of farmland are lost every day in the United States.

Ninety percent of the water rights in Crowley County were sold years ago, and the prison economy filled the economic void left by the abandonment of irrigated agriculture. Most of that water, once used to grow food, is used in Colorado Springs.

Future generations will look back and ask why we traded fertile land and fresh produce for concrete and dead-end streets.

Providing water to the Lower Arkansas Valley helps ensure long-term food security for all Coloradans and sustains rural communities.

The Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservancy District was established in 2002 to conserve, protect and enhance the water resources of the Lower Ark. It covers five counties along the Arkansas River from Pueblo to the Kansas state line.

We recognize that Colorado Springs and other communities will need additional water. And while there are no easy solutions to the increasing demand on our scarce water supply, I am confident that together we can develop water management innovations that will benefit urban and rural communities for the long term.

We ask and encourage Colorado Springs leaders to work with us to find win-win solutions.

Are we up to the challenge? Our counter-election against Amara was a step in the right direction.

Jack Goble is the executive director of the Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservancy, which was founded in 2002 to conserve, protect and enhance water resources in the Lower Arkansas River Valley.

Jack Goble is general manager of the Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservancy, which was founded in 2002 to conserve, protect and enhance water resources in the Lower Arkansas River Valley.