These plans are then subject to approval by the state. Once approved, the plan becomes legally binding. One group of farmers has set up a ninety-nine square mile conservation zone where they agreed to a twenty percent reduction in irrigation for five years. After four years, they have steadily achieved their twenty percent reduction rate while, significantly, not seeing a reduction in profits. Some of their success has also been due in part to the implementation of drip irrigation and more sophisticated irrigation water management.
While that is a step in the right direction, this group of farmers is still the only group that has submitted a plan in Kansas. This arrangement has proven its potential for success, but the question remains on whether it is scalable for the rest of the state. The fact that only one group has formed is likely due to how difficult it is to create one—here, talks lasted three years before boundaries were agreed upon, and members of the group said they had to change their whole mindset and culture to come to an agreement.
Nebraska has taken a tougher stance than Kansas, and consequently has had more success in combating aquifer depletion.
Nebraska has also compromised with farmers, adopting a system like Kansas that empowers farmers and gives them control—so long as they come up with a plan to reduce use of the aquifer.
The approach the state has taken has allowed Nebraska to sustain water levels—or at least slow depletion—in the Ogallala Aquifer better than most other High Plains states. Despite their success, however, the aquifer in Nebraska is still continuously depleting, and annual allocations to farmers have been steadily decreasing.
Interstate compacts—created and enforced through federal law—have played a critical role in driving state efforts to curtail groundwater use. For example, part of the reason Nebraska has taken such a tough stance on groundwater pumping is because of their obligations to Kansas under the Republic River Compact. As the Ogallala aquifer feeds into the Republican River, Nebraska has had to limit its use of the aquifer to comply with the Compact, which has resulted in a more sustainable use of the aquifer but also lowers crop yields for farmers.
The federal government itself has addressed the issue of the depleting Ogallala by instituting the Ogallala Aquifer Initiative. The Initiative works by providing technical and financial assistance to farmers and ranchers to implement conservation practices that use less water, improve water quality, and keep croplands productive. The Initiative benefits agricultural producers by cutting costs for water, cutting costs for energy to power irrigation systems, and increasing crop yields. Extending the life of the aquifer also benefits the public at large, as the public directly benefits from irrigation with Ogallala water.
In New Mexico, circumstances are more critical, prompting the federal government to take a more drastic approach. In eastern New Mexico specifically, the Ogallala aquifer has depleted to the point of crisis. References Gowda, P. Main Hero Image.
Climate change to increase water stress in many parts of U. Longer dry spells in store for U. Great Plains. Western drought: It ain't over 'til National Climate Assessment map shows uneven impact of future global warming on U.
Drought Monitor. Future Climate. In fact, a pecking order of preferences emerges from inhabitants of the region: state involvement is preferred over federal, and conservation measures are preferred over reverting to dryland farming practices. The drawdown of the aquifer raises an important issue that permeates discussions about the social and political responses to a global warming: discounting the future. Here is a good example of a choice that society must make - consume the groundwater resource today or conserve it for future generations when climate in the region might not be as favorable to agricultural production as it is today.
At which time would the groundwater resource be of most value? And to whom? Today, other factors have slowed down the rate of drawdown, such as relatively higher energy prices, low crop prices, large stockpiles of rain and so forth.
Nevertheless, the issues of intergenerational equity should be addressed now when there is less pressure to decide one way or another.
Are the policy measures implemented in response to the Ogallala Aquifer depletion applicable to changes in regional water supplies that may result because of projected changes in climate due to increasing CO 2? The depletion of the aquifer represents a change in the water balance of the Great Plains region, as would the suggested impacts of global warming. Water balance refers to all sources of moisture in the region; atmospheric, surface, and groundwater. With a warming, soil moisture in the region would be reduced, as would rainfall.
By using the Ogallala Aquifer depletion as an analogue, scientists and policy makers can learn much about the process of evaluating and selecting socially acceptable policy responses to large-scale environmental issues. However, regional changes in climate of the magnitude suggested by GCM output may impose a new set of rules on society for choosing appropriate policy responses to climate related environmental change. If the topsoil were rolled up like a carpet, Wilson says, the sponge beneath would look like an empty egg carton, with peaks and valleys of varying depths.
In midmorning we arrive at Mai Farms, a family enterprise that grows winter wheat for King Arthur Flour. The Mai family, Germans who emigrated from Russia, arrived in Greeley County just in time for the Dust Bowl but lacked the money to join the exodus to California.
Their first farm dusted over and went bust. Their second farm, 20 miles away, survived and thrived. Bill Mai was born on it in and lives there today. It was a marvel at the time, pumping a thousand gallons a minute, a rate that would fill an Olympic-size swimming pool in half a day. His neighbors are pulling out so much from their wells that his well drops a foot every year. Irrigated corn makes a lot of money but uses a lot of water.
I ask Mai what he can do about this. Nothing, he tells me. Mai spent 20 years making the shift back to dryland—or unirrigated—farming, in anticipation that his water would not last. He hands me a yellowed newspaper clipping from , which profiled him as Kansas District 10 farmer of the year. Reports on the aquifer as a diminishing resource date back to the s, when President Franklin Roosevelt appointed a Great Plains committee to examine the cause of the Dust Bowl.
Even then, the committee noted the contradiction in basing an expanding farm economy on a finite resource. For the eight states that overlie the Ogallala, differences in the complex hydrology belowground—and in state law, politics, and farming tradition aboveground—conspire against sustaining the aquifer rather than mining it. The states monitor water usage, creating an important record for how much is pumped yearly.
But cutting use is more difficult. Groundwater in Kansas and Nebraska, for example, belongs to the public. Water rights are granted to property owners by those states, which assign a certain amount that can be legally used.
Water law in Texas is vastly different. Groundwater is not publicly owned; Texans can pump as much as they can use from beneath their land. In the High Plains water district surrounding Lubbock, 88, irrigation wells were stuck into the aquifer like straws, with 73, still in use.
Irrigated land is worth more and earns more than dryland farming, and pressure is on to keep pumping—from seed salespeople, farm equipment dealers, bankers, insurers, and landlords. His eldest son is studying aerospace engineering at the University of Kansas, as missions to Mars seem to hold more allure than becoming the sixth generation to farm the family land. As I head south, I encounter a sense of inevitability and resignation.
Hope lies in technology; farmers show me iPhone apps that track water use so precisely that as little as a tenth of an inch can be applied to their crops. In Colby, Kansas, Lon Frahm, who farms 30, acres of wheat and corn, irrigates with two billion gallons of water yearly. He counts among his farmhands an IT technician who collects data to keep his yields ahead of his declining wells. Across the Plains, I pass wide belts of newly planted wind turbines.
Parts of the Ogallala could endure for a century or more. This overstressed zone runs the width of the Texas Panhandle north miles, from Lubbock to the Kansas-Nebraska state line. There, transition to a new era of permanent depletion is under way. Already, warmer-than-average evening temperatures in feedlots in southwest Kansas mean that beef cattle drink more water than they did in cooler years. As more farmers return to dryland farming, large farms are likely to swallow smaller family farms, because dry farming, with lower yields, requires more land to be profitable.
Irrigation will disappear from most places, so more small towns will fade away. Countless towns across the Plains already teeter on the brink of extinction. The day I visited Lazbuddie, a hiccup of a community in Texas cotton country with fewer than a hundred residents, the postmistress sold a single stamp. This was a week before Christmas. The weather—blizzards, tornadoes, and heat waves—could kill.
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