Liquid Gold

Ethanol is supposed to be good for the environment. But producing green fuel can cost a lot of water.

Mike Adamson remembers when water wasn’t such a problem. As a kid growing up on his family’s cattle feedlot along the Colorado-Kansas border, “you could dig a post hole and see water runnin’ in the bottom,” he recalls. Today, Adamson is 48 and in charge of the family business, Adamson Brothers and Sons Feedlot, a holding ranch for cattle as they go to market. And the water, he says, is disappearing. “The lakes are gone. The wetlands are gone.” In fact, Adamson adds, entire stretches of the nearby Republican River are gone.


In the arid regions of the American West, water has always been a precious, liquid gold. But in Adamson’s home of Yuma County, Colorado, two hours east of Denver, the stakes just got higher. Thanks to the boom in ethanol production spurred by green-energy concerns, corn farmers in Yuma County