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The clock is ticking for Colorado River Basin states to decide how to split up shrinking water supplies, and some conservationists are reconsidering a centuries-old water distribution tradition at work across the arid American West.

Nick Saenz, historian and Hispanic Conservation Leadership Council member, explained that each spring farming communities in Colorado’s San Luis Valley are in a race against time to water crops before snowmelt disappears. In the tradition known as "acequia," decisions are made democratically, and irrigation priorities benefit entire communities over any individual user. Saenz says acequia offers a blueprint for how to share a scarce resource.

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"That’s going to require us all working together," he contended. "That’s going to require some concessions and some compromise, and trying to envision how as a group we can make decisions about our collective future."

Decades of drought, exacerbated by a warming climate, has greatly reduced water supplies for the 40 million people who rely on the Colorado River. And under existing rules, agriculture and other users are already allocated more water than the river can deliver. If Colorado and other basin states can’t come up with a new plan by October 1st of next year, the federal government would step in.

The headwaters of the Rio Grande, which makes its way south to the U.S.-Mexico border and into the Gulf of Mexico, are in the San Luis Mountains. Because some Colorado River water is diverted to places such as the Front Range, Saenz said the future of the two rivers are connected, and noted that farmers across multiple states, and cities like Albuquerque and El Paso, all depend on the Rio Grande.

"If we get to a point where we need to be thinking about cutting off some of those trans-basin diversions, that has implications for the amount of water in the Rio Grande and the life that has been built along that riverway," he continued.

Sprawling cities with lawns and golf courses built on arid landscapes are often cited as examples of poor water stewardship. But alfalfa grown to feed beef livestock uses more water than all cities and industries in the entire Colorado River Basin. Saenz believes the acequia tradition gives all stakeholders a pathway to make difficult decisions.

"The acequia model gives us a democratically-based mode for determining the outcome of all these water challenges, a way for thinking about community decision-making around water," he added.