Cite as: 533 U. S. 1 (2001)
Opinion of the Court
Colorado's violations, the crops planted on that farmland, the price of those crops, and the difference in yield between what the affected land would have produced with the additional water and what the land actually produced with the water it received.
The parties were in agreement concerning most of the facts bearing on the Special Master's calculation. They agreed that water was in short supply in the affected area each year, 178 Tr. 127-128; they agreed on the amount of the shortage that resulted from Colorado's violations, ibid.; and they generally agreed on which crops were planted on the affected farmland as well as the prices of those crops in the relevant years. See Third Report 46.
The only issue on which the parties disagreed was the exact effect of the diverted water on the crop yields for the farmland in question. On that score, both Kansas and Colorado accepted the general notion that "[u]p to the point where crops no longer can make use of additional water, more water produces more crop yield." Id., at 47. But they parted ways on the question of precisely how much additional yield would have been produced with the missing water.6 Kansas' experts relied upon the hypothesis of a generally linear relationship between water available for
6 As the Special Master noted, "Colorado experts did not dispute, in general, the linear relationship between [water usage] and crop yield. . . . However, they were of the view that the particular linear crop yield coefficients used by Kansas were not sufficiently reliable to determine the increase in yields that would have occurred if there had been no depletions of headgate deliveries to the [affected] lands." Third Report 47. Colorado suggests that Kansas' model, based as it is upon academic studies, does not adequately account for reductions in crop yield from such real-world conditions as "weather, disease, and pests." Brief for Colorado 44, n. 12. But, as the Special Master correctly noted, Kansas' experts reduced the predicted crop yield by 25% in order to account for such possibilities. Third Report 51 ("The 25% reduction was calculated to adjust the controlled experimental data to 'realistic long-term type conditions' in western Kansas, including high temperatures, winds, insects, and other stressful conditions").
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