Greater Gunnison Region
Healthy Public Lands & Watersheds
Protect Colorado’s Farms, Food & Drink
Food security is tied directly to the health of the public lands that safeguard and sustain the watersheds and natural systems that support our farms and rural communities.
In its earliest days the Colorado Farm & Food Alliance grew out of the need to secure protection for the public lands that surround the North Fork Valley and the forests that protect the headwaters to all who live downstream.
“If you care about what is on your plate, you should agree with the need to protect the health of the land and the security of the water source,” was a foundational idea.
The Colorado Farm & Food Alliance still sees this as at the root of our work: that healthy lands and watersheds protect Colorado’s farms, food and drink.
We also know that landscape conservation and protection of natural places is a powerful tool for addressing climate change and for building resilience to mitigate impacts from it.
This project supports:
Landscape-wide protection for all the public lands that make up the North Fork Valley watershed.
The Gunnison Outdoor Resources Protection (GORP Act) and Protect the Dolores campaigns.
Public lands and watershed education, advocacy and engagement.
2025 Update
2025 began as a year of much uncertainty around the future of federal public lands and western watersheds, including those in western Colorado. Unfortunately this continues as funding and staffing cuts loom across land management agencies.
The change in administration has marked a major shift in national policy around public lands, conservation, climate resilience and the value of public and stakeholder input into these issues.
Locally the decision from 2024 to remove some public lands in the Thompson Divide area from the oil and gas leasing pool, including some headwaters to the North Fork river, as well as limits on new road-building on area National Forests, could be weakened of eliminated to facilitate new energy development and other activity.
A positive development is the reintroduction of the GORP Act, now with all three Members of the North Fork’s U.S. Congressional delegation as sponsors, with legislation now in both the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives.
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