How Urban Political Power Drained a Community Dry — and Left It There
Crowley County once produced alfalfa, barley, cantaloupes, sugar beets, and enough crops to sustain a factory town on the Arkansas River. Tens of thousands of acres. Generations of families. Then the water was sold — and the community was left to die in the dust. This is a documented case study in how the ruling class operates not just in Washington, but in every state capital and every county courthouse in America.
Crowley County, Colorado once boasted more than 50,000 acres of irrigated farmland on the high plains east of Pueblo. The land produced alfalfa, barley, tomatoes, strawberries, cantaloupes, corn, and enough sugar beets to support a processing factory in the town of Sugar City. It was productive, self-sufficient agricultural land worked by families who had built their lives and their futures around it.
Then the water left. And it never came back.
In the late 1960s, with crop and cattle prices in decline, farmers and ranchers in Crowley County began considering selling their water rights. In 1972, the Foxley Cattle Company purchased water rights from landowners across the county. Then came the Crowley County Land and Development Company, which acquired additional rights and sold them to the growing cities of Pueblo, Colorado Springs, Pueblo West, and Aurora to quench the demand of the sprawling Front Range.
Water developers paid between $300 and $400 per acre — significantly above market at the time. To struggling families, it seemed like a lifeline.
"It seemed like a lot of money back then."
— Darla Wyeno, who sold water rights in 1976 for $1,050 per share to pay a farm loan and her children's college tuition. Those shares now fetch $25,000 apiece.What the sellers could not know — and what no state official moved to protect them from — was that the water was the land. Without it, the farmland became worthless. The crops stopped. The jobs disappeared. The families left. The storefronts emptied. The schools shrank. And the cities kept growing.
The county's irrigated acres fell from more than 50,000 in the 1970s to just a few thousand by the 2020s — a loss of more than 92 percent. Drive through Crowley County today and you'll find abandoned farmhouses, barren fields, and wind. Walk down Main Street in Ordway, Broadway in the town of Crowley, Colorado Street in Sugar City — you'll be hard-pressed to run into anyone.
With agriculture gone, the county turned to the only industry that would have it: incarceration. Crowley County now hosts two state prisons. The community that grew food for a region now warehouses people for the state. That is the full arc of what happened here.
Crowley County is not an isolated case. It is a textbook example of a recurring mechanism: urban political power — backed by favorable water law, compliant state courts, and willing intermediaries — extracting resources from rural communities that lack the lobbying infrastructure to resist.
Colorado water law operates under the Prior Appropriation Doctrine — "first in time, first in right." Under this system, water rights are property that can be sold, separated from the land, and transferred to any use anywhere in the state. The cities understood this. They had lawyers who understood it. The farmers had neither.
The state government did not intervene. No law was passed to require impact assessments before agricultural water transfers. No review process was required to evaluate what stripping a county's water supply would do to the people who lived there. The transactions were perfectly legal. That is precisely the point.
"Crowley County is a ghost of what it once was, largely because of water transfers."
— Colorado State University Extension, documented in public research on agricultural water lossThis is not merely history. As of 2025–2026, Colorado legislators have proposed bills that would require revegetation of dried-up farmland when water is transferred away — a tacit acknowledgment that the state failed these communities for decades. The bill has met resistance from the same urban water interests that benefited from the original transfers.
The families whose land turned to dust fifty years ago are still there. They are still watching. And the institutions that enabled what happened to them are still operating under the same rules.
The mechanism that drained Crowley County is the same mechanism that operates in Washington: those with access to legal structures, political relationships, and financial resources extract value from communities that have none of those things — then move on. The transactions are documented. The harm is documented. The accountability is absent. Fifty years later, Sugar City still doesn't have its water back.