With such a potent mixture of emotion and economics swirling around cloud seeding, what people believe about weather modification this year very much depends on where they live.
"A lot of people out there see these cloud seeders in the sky, and then they get hailed out," says Burl Scherler of Kiowa County. "It may not be scientific, but it's what people believe. Sometimes it doesn't matter what the facts are; it's perception that counts the most. Some perceptions are awfully hard to change."
The farmers of eastern Colorado first perceived a problem in late 1995, when a group of county commissioners representing the area presented the state water board with what they viewed as startling information: Eastern Colorado's hail-damage insurance rates had soared recently. (Scherler says he pays $23 per $100 worth of crop to protect his wheat from potential hailstorms.) At the same time, hail-insurance rates in Kansas had fallen.
"Hail-damage premiums are down in Kansas and up in eastern Colorado," says Prowers County's Stulp, "so we've extrapolated out of that that they've decreased hail in Kansas but at the same time increased the damage here. The insurance companies are convinced we're getting increased hail damage, and I am, too."
Adds Self, of Baca County, "It sure seems like we've got more hail the last few years--we've had some terrible storms. Course, could be the seasons--I'm not prepared to say it's the Kansas seeders. But it sure wouldn't hurt to stop until we know for sure. We're not mad at 'em--there's good people in Kansas, excellent people. But, as I told them, until they can prove they ain't hurtin' us, we've got to say no. It's just one of those situations it's hard to know what to do with."
The complaints escalated this year. Adding fuel to the ire was the court ruling in a dispute between Kansas and Colorado over the Arkansas River, in which the Supreme Court determined that Colorado farmers had been overusing the river for years and now owed Kansas water. Says Scherler, "Don't you think it's a slap in the face that they steal our river water, and now they go ahead and take the rain out of the clouds?"
Colorado farmers' worries about the Kansas seeding program have trickled upward. "We don't favor it," says J.J. Ament, director of the Colorado Wheat Growers Association. "We want a little more research showing this is an effective way of nature engineering. Nature, as we in agriculture know, kind of runs her own show. And we just don't know all the side effects."
On March 27, Baca County's commissioners wrote the following to the Colorado Water Conservation Board: "We oppose the [Kansas flyover] application because of the extension of the affected area and, more fundamentally, because we believe that the risks of weather modification exceed the benefits."
In late April, Thomas Kourlis, Colorado's agriculture commissioner, toured southeastern Colorado to discuss the Kansas flyovers. In an April 29 memo, Kourlis reported to the water conservation board that "farmers stated that they were hopeful that seeding of clouds 60 miles within Colorado's borders would not be allowed. It is believed by many that cloud seeding increases hail damage, and consequently, increases insurance rates to those farmers near the edge of the overfly."
Curtis Smith has tried to answer each concern with reams of letters, charts, graphs and tables. Yes, Colorado has had more hailstorms in the past couple years, and that includes the six-county area of Kit Carson, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Bent, Prowers and Baca. But, he adds, weather records suggest Colorado's severe weather has little or nothing to do with Kansas's cloud-seeding program.
In fact, Smith points out that in 1994, the one year Kansas didn't seed in Colorado, the six-county area still suffered so much hail damage that it accounted for more than half of the total damage reported for the entire state that year. If anything, Smith wrote, "there is a strong suggestion that whatever seeding has been done in Colorado has helped reduce hail there."
Smith also notes that while it's true that hail insurance rates are higher in eastern Colorado than in western Kansas, it is also true that eastern Colorado naturally has more hail than western Kansas does. Besides, he adds, the Kansas hail-suppression program is supposed to prevent hailstorms and thus lower insurance rates; that's what the farmers are paying for.
Finally, Smith points out, of 375 total hours of seeding done by the district last year, only 10 hours--less than 3 percent--was done in Colorado.
Dusty Tallman, a Kiowa County wheat and milo farmer, says that was more than enough. "I don't think it's so much we can prove their seeding causes hail over us or that it takes away rain, as it was that they can't prove it didn't hail after they seeded." Adds Scherler, "We can't prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they're harming us. But they can't prove they're not harming us."
Such reasoning drives Smith crazy. "I don't know what kind of proof they're after," he complains. "You don't know absolutely that Jesus Christ is coming or that you'll live to be 100. You don't know absolutely that you won't get hit by a truck when you cross the street. But there are only so many absolutes in life.
