There are no rivers running through northwest Kansas. But come spring, the region will turn green as farmers and ranchers pump water out of the vast Ogallala Aquifer that sprawls from north Texas to South Dakota. It took thousands of years for water to trickle into the aquifer. Now, thanks to over-pumping, some sections are running dry, and others will suffer the same fate in coming years and decades.
For northwest Kansas and other swaths of the plains states, the threat is existential. “If we exhaust our portion of the Ogallala, life in our part of Kansas is gone,” said Shannon Kenyon, a government water manager in Colby, a town in western Kansas, during a recent phone call. “No ag. No towns. No nothing without it.”
It’s the other US water crisis, often overlooked in favor of the ongoing struggles over the shrinking Colorado River and the future of the desert Southwest. But the shortages in areas dependent on the Ogallala, regions that represent around 30% of irrigated US agriculture, are just as critical.
After decades of denial, last year’s drought has awakened Kansas officials to the danger. If farmers, ranchers and local officials want to avoid the kinds of state and federal intrusions happening with the Colorado River, they will need to embrace conservation and adapt to a drier future. Empowering local communities to make and enforce their own measures are the best way to accomplish both goals. An ambitious approach that reaches across all of Kansas could sustain a crucial industry and become a model for other parts of the US struggling to ensure their wells don’t run dry, too.
Draining a Crucial Resource
The Ogallala is like a 174,000 square mile egg carton. In some places, the water-saturated thickness of the aquifer dips 1,200 feet; across the county line it might only go down a few feet. Each section can deplete at a different rate. Filling it requires rain, and that’s rare on the semiarid High Plains.
Thanks to the invention of powerful and efficient center-pivot irrigation (the circular field patterns visible from airplanes are the footprints of the systems), a modern farm economy began to emerge in the 1950s. Today, agriculture is Kansas’s biggest economic driver, with Western Kansas — home to most of the state’s portion of the Ogallala — producing 60% of the $76 billion value of all crops and livestock.
Irrigation not only grows food, feeds livestock and supplies corn ethanol plants, it creates the jobs that sustain small town communities, which also typically rely on the Ogallala for daily needs.
Over the years, more water has been pumped from the Ogallala than the amount returned via rainfall. But it was only in the 1970s, as irrigation really picked up, that farmers and the state began to worry about the declining levels they noticed in their wells. Conservation was never going to be easy, though. Water is viewed as property in Kansas, and few farmers in the 1970s were going to cede control of it to distant bureaucrats who might do something to slow economic development. So the state called upon local communities to implement a policy of “planned depletion” that would slow — but not halt — the decline.
And depletion is what Kansas got. In 2015, the Kansas Geological Society determined that much of the state’s portion of the Ogallala had declined, with large swaths depleted by more than 60%. In one county it declined by 80%. In some parts of western Kansas, the underground water levels had receded by as much as 30 feet over just the last decade — something well owners and drillers figure out quickly these days. Wells lose their high flow rates, or become unusable altogether, forcing farmers to make changes. Some shift away from irrigated farming to less productive dryland agriculture; others make crop changes. In most cases, farming becomes less profitable.
Shortened Lifespan
It’s a future that looms over much of the US. One recent study of the Ogallala found that one-quarter of currently irrigated lands won’t be able to support irrigated agriculture by 2100. In parts of western Kansas, the lifespan might be just 10 to 20 years. And for some farmers, that future is now. In 2022, portions of western Kansas suffered their worst drought in recorded history. Farmers in need of water pumped the Ogallala more than ever, hastening its depletion.
If anything good came from the disaster, it was a recognition by a bipartisan mix of Kansas policymakers that something must be done. In December, the Kansas Water Authority, which advises the governor and legislature, voted to end the “planned depletion” policy, noting that it’s no longer in the best interest of Kansas.
In coming weeks the legislature is likely to pass measures that will — among other things — make it easier for local communities to set enforceable conservation targets. The model has been proven to work: one northwest Kansas community reduced its groundwater use by nearly 35% over five years by regulating itself, including harsh penalties for those who violate the community’s agreed-upon standards.
That’s a promising start, but nobody in Kansas should have any illusions that the aquifer can return to bountiful 1950s levels. “The aquifer is not renewable, not at present demand levels,” explained Brownie Wilson, water data manager at the Kansas Geological Survey, in a phone call. “You might be able to stabilize the aquifer for the next decade or two but then you’ll have to revisit it.”
Source:washingtonpost.com
Categories: Kansas, Sustainable Agriculture, Weather