BOARD02267

• Board Meeting Date: 5/27/1968
• Description: Agenda or Table of Contents, Minutes, Memos
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

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for preventing runoff, so that we can hold this
water on the plots when it falls as compared to
areas where it is allowed to run off normally.
We will be studying such things as the effect
of vegetation on the land. We will be studying
the effects of various surface soil treatments
to prevent evaporation losses back out of those
soils and to i~crease intake into them.

We have also been actively involved in
laboratory and field studies here at Fort
Collins dealing with getting an idea of the
kind of numbers we might expect for this kind
of thing. For example, about two or three
centimeters, possibly an inch, of gravel on the
soil surface will greatly prevent evaporation
losses back out of that soil, providing, of
course, we keep the vegetation off so that
transpiration is not a factor. We have been
able to show that it seems absolutely possible
that we could contribute 12 inches of water a
year in a 17 inch rainfall area to the ground
water providing we just keep about an inch of
gravel on the surface which greatly decreases
the evaporation losses. Immediately then it is
suggested that we go put an inch of gravel all
over eastern Colorado, at least on that land
that isn't producing too much at the moment.
As I mentioned before, economics of course
must come into this.

There are chemical treatments that are
promising. We really haven't gotten far
enough into it to be able to give too many
answers as yet but this is the kind of thing we
are doing.

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The idea, I think, in summary, is this.
Perhaps we have a lot of land in eastern Colo-
rado, as well as in many other places, where
the actual production of the income to the
landowner from that land at the moment is far
less than it would be if we could harvest even
half of the water that fell on it. Harvest it
in one way at least, by putting it back down
to the water table.