Land Buying1 min read

Water Rights Seniority Date Matters More Than Quantity

Dinah Sprecher

2 weeks ago

👁 7 views💬 2 replies

Everyone shopping for irrigated ground fixates on the acre-feet listed in the water rights summary. I used to do the same thing. Then I watched a neighbor with twice my paper-allocated water get completely shut out three summers running because his priority date was junior by forty years to mine.

In prior appropriation states, the date is the deed. A large junior right is a liability in a drought year — you're last in line and first to be curtailed. I've seen buyers pay a premium for parcels with substantial water rights only to discover those rights are so junior they've never been fully exercised in living memory.

Before you finalize any purchase on irrigated land, pull the actual adjudication decree from the state water court database. Look at the priority date, the decreed use type, and the historical call records for that water district. A water commissioner or ditch company officer will usually talk to you for free and tell you more in twenty minutes than any broker will.

Has anyone here actually walked away from a deal specifically because the priority date was too junior?

#water rights #prior appropriation #irrigated land #due diligence #western land buying

Join the Discussion

2 Replies

Deke Sorrell

2 weeks ago

Good point on seniority, but I'd push back a little — quantity still matters plenty even with a senior date. My uncle had the oldest rights on his creek but they were so small he couldn't irrigate half his hay ground in a normal year, forget a dry one. Way I see it, you need both columns to add up. Senior date with pitiful volume is just first in line for not enough water.

Bette Culshaw

2 weeks ago

You're right that seniority is the backbone of prior appropriation, but I'd push back on calling a large junior right a straight liability. Out here where I work riparian corridor land in eastern Kentucky, we're not prior appropriation country — and buyers regularly conflate the two systems. Before assuming seniority beats quantity every time, confirm which doctrine actually governs your state. Riparian rights operate completely differently, and applying western prior-appropriation logic to eastern water law will send you down the wrong path entirely.