Rob Talbott and his family have cultivated a living growing mouth-watering fruit in Palisade for almost 50 years.
Tourists on electric bikes zip down crunchy gravel roads in the summer’s sweltering heat to visit Talbott’s farm and taste peaches and wine at vineyards.
To keep these tasters happy, Talbott has overcome many threats, including droughts and destructive bugs.
“The challenges change day by day,” Talbott said last week. “What we did last year may not be what we do this year. There's always new technology that's coming into play. There’s always challenges from marketing.”
The Palisade peach’s sweetness also depends on water. Lots of it.
On Talbott’s farm, water pumps move almost 200 gallons of it per minute to the thirsty crops on his 145 acres.
This year, a new threat is approaching that water system. And it’s microscopic.
Invasive zebra mussels have now infested at least 135 miles of the Colorado River, from the Utah border to Dotsero in western Colorado.
That includes the stretch that meanders alongside Talbott’s orchards in Palisade.
And if these tiny pests flow into his narrow irrigation pipes and tubes, they threaten to mature and block his most precious farming ingredient.
These mussels rapidly multiply. A single female lays up to 30,000 eggs. And when they reach adulthood, their sharp shells can wreak havoc on water infrastructure.
Talbott says he doesn’t even want to think about what happens if the mussels gain a foothold on his farm.
“My mind goes crazy,” he said. “The first (challenge) would be just the physical effort to try to clean out the underground pipes. And you know, having to go in and dig it up.”
Then he’d need to figure out how to flush the mussels out of the pipes.
“It becomes a pretty, pretty difficult project,” he said.
The mussels are edging closer. Their larvae have been detected in the canal transporting the Colorado River water to Talbott’s farm. Jackie Fisher, the director of the Orchard Mesa Irrigation District, is on high alert.
“The threat to the agricultural and rural communities with the zebra mussels' presence is seemingly catastrophic,” she said. “And we're doing our best to remain proactive, but it is difficult when the source where we all receive our water is contaminated.”
The irrigation district supplies water to Talbott and more than 6,000 other water users in the Grand Valley. A lot is at stake in the battle with the mussels.
The water in this valley sustains crops that feed thousands.
The peaches from Palisade go on pizzas and get brewed into special beers.
Fisher and others who maintain the water lines are now trained to spot the first sign of the mussel. They’re also becoming mussel researchers and learning all they can about their new enemy.
“We’re being vigilant with our monitoring and inspections and just spreading the word that you know, it's kind of like in middle school, if you see something, say something, said Fisher.”
Last fall, the district treated a piped section of its irrigation system with a copper solution that is safe for humans and other animals, but kills the mussel larvae.
But this preventative measure comes with a huge price tag.
Fisher said just a week’s worth of treatment costs tens of thousands of dollars. A whole season’s worth of the treatment would cost more than the irrigation district’s entire roughly $2 million annual operating budget.
“I just keep saying it's overwhelming, because it is once you get to thinking about how quickly these zebra mussels could grow and the damage they could do and devastate farming operations, let alone increase our costs in delivering that water to them in order to keep it under control," she said.
The prospect of mussels clogging irrigation pipes in western Colorado is raising the pressure on Robert Walters. He leads the state’s invasive species program.
Walters says detecting adult mussels in the Colorado River for the first time this year led to swift action.
“We significantly increased the resources that we had available to do monitoring in western Colorado,” he said. “We hired a new full-time employee to oversee our monitoring efforts. We increased the physical size of our aquatic nuisance species laboratory here in Denver.”
Walters said Parks and Wildlife won’t try eradicating the mussels in the Colorado River because treatments would also kill endangered fish and other sensitive species. But Walters says there is some good news in the fight.
“We don't believe that the Colorado River is the best habitat for zebra mussels to really establish in large numbers,” he said. “So I don't think that you're going to see significant population numbers in a river system like you would in a lake or reservoir.”
Colorado is ramping up efforts to contain the infestation. It’s installing new cleaning stations on the Colorado, where anglers can clean waders and rafters can clean their gear the mussels like to hitchhike on.
Farmers like Talbott are also checking irrigation systems and ponds more regularly for any signs of the mussel.
“Framers need to be diligent in their monitoring of the existence of mussels within their systems,” Talbott said. “Secondly, the public needs to be very aware of how much of a problem this could be. It becomes a very significant problem if it gets out of hand.”
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
