Frackers & farmers: oil & gas and agriculture look for common ground on water and environmental issues.

• Author: Buchsbaum, Lee
• Position: ENERGY & AGRICULTURE

As the tents go up at Front Range farmers' markets each spring, it's a sure sign of the immense and healthy bounty to follow. Beginning with bags of locally produced, organic, leafy greens, followed by bulbous tomatoes and an assortment of Zucchinis, peppers and squash, the farmer's market season along the Front Range culminates each fall with truckloads of perfectly pleasant peaches and fresh apples driven in from Western Slope fruit baskets like the North Fork of the Gunnison Valley region surrounding Paonia.

The popular outdoor retailers that dot the Front Range comprise the bread and butter for a budding subset of Colorado's agricultural producers. Increasingly, adjacent to the farmers' booths you'll find Western slope-vinted wine, Front Range produced high-quality and small-batch beef, eggs, poultry and other meats and cheeses.

"The image of our farm is important because we direct market to a consumer who is concerned with who and how produce is grown, the purity of it and the story behind it," said Mark Waltermire, owner of Thistle Whistle Farm in Hotchkiss and the spokesman for the (North Fork) Valley Organic Growers Association. "Many of our buyers want to know us, how we grow our food and how we operate. We charge a little more for our product, in large part because the economies of scale don't work for smaller producers."

But even though agriculture and oil and gas production have coexisted since the state's first oil wells sprung up in Boulder County more than a century ago, today organic producers and activists are worried about impacts on water and air quality. They are increasingly getting involved in efforts to slow the rate of oil and gas drilling expansion fueling tensions between two industries central to Colorado's health and economy.

"What concerns many of us about hydraulic fracturing (tracking) and unconventional oil and natural gas development is the potential for air and water pollution and the general industrialization of the lands surrounding our region," Waltermire said.

The mating of horizontal and deep directional drilling with conventional oil production has helped unlock untold trillions of cubic feet of natural gas throughout the nation, accelerating energy production, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs and propelling the nation to energy independence. Overall, gas production has been a boon to many of the state's farmers who own mineral rights. This gives their operations another source of income and helps tremendously when...