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Water in the Great Plains There Are No Easy Answers to Protecting Our Surface and Underground Water Resources

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Water in the Great Plains There Are No Easy Answers to Protecting Our Surface and Underground Water Resources Water In The Great Plains There are no easy answers to protecting our surface and underground water resources. Dr. Raun Lohry and Dennis Zabel The Fluid Journal • Official Journal of the Fluid Fertilizer Foundation • Summer 2014 • Vol. 22, No. 3, Issue #85 ▼ DOWNLOAD Summary: Complex problems cannot be solved simplistically. Balancing the social, ecological, economic, and agricultural interests in water will be clearly complex. Protecting our surface and underground water sources will require a holistic approach. Solutions will be regionally based but implemented and applied appropriately on a farm scale. ater is an essentially fixed entity in levels on Devils Lake rose 31.68 feet. with the most common gravity systems Wthe world. No more will be created. Surface areas of the lake increased from being furrow irrigation. Subsurface drip Water has, over time and civilizations, 44,230 acres to 211,300 acres. That irrigation systems were used on only a been worshiped, managed, and wasted. is an additional 261 square miles of small portion of the land. It has been responsible for the rise and land covered with water. The volume of 1942 agreement fall of kingdoms and empires. It has water has grown by 7 times in that time Progress has its consequences. It been fought over and generously given period. North Dakota State University would’ve been impossible for anyone as a source of life. As Benjamin Franklin expects the water body to inundate an to predict the impacts of the increase once said, “When the well’s dry, we additional 10,000 acres in 2014 with in irrigation. In 1942, the states of know the worth of water.” In this article millions of dollars lost in economic Colorado, Nebraska, and Kansas joined we will take a fleeting glimpse into water activity. Roads, highways, and railroads together to form an agreement called and irrigation issues in the Great Plains. have been raised to avoid being the Republican River Compact. This permanently inundated. Hundreds of Like other regions of the world, was necessary before the Crops of buildings have been lost to flooding the Great Plains has to balance Engineers would agree to build Harlan or have been moved. Hundreds of water for farming and water for its County Reservoir on the Republican residents have abandoned their homes citizens. Farming feeds people and River to reduce downstream flooding. and farms through “buyouts” where a it economically supports those who A disastrous flood in May/June of 1935 state agency buys the land. Some have provide food for the world’s growing killed an estimated 113 people and called it the “slow moving monster.” population. Irrigation increases yields, perhaps as many as 41,000 head of allows a myriad of crops to be grown, Ogallala formation livestock. and mitigates weather uncertainties The largest of these aquifer systems, This multi-state agreement was in crop production. Irrigation water the Ogallala formation, is shown in ratified by Congress and approved is derived from surface water and Figure 1, with a concentration of water by the Supreme Court. In it, the deep wells. Wells extract water from appearing underneath Nebraska. The authors determined that Colorado subsurface aquifers but sometimes steady increase in Nebraska irrigation was responsible for about 11 percent surface water and aquifers are led to that state being number one in of the beneficial consumptive use intimately connected. Two examples of the nation for irrigated cropland. The of the Republican River drainage the complexities of these relationships 2007 Census of Agriculture reported system. Nebraska was allocated about are the interactions that come out of that Nebraska had more than 8.5 million 40 percent and Kansas 41 percent. extracting water for irrigation from acres under irrigation. Nebraska had Despite best intentions of the states the Ogallala aquifer, and the legal, more irrigated farmland acres than any to adhere to the compact, progress is economic, and political conflicts from other state, accounting for about one in taking its toll. Colorado now pipes water the Republican River system. every 6 acres of US irrigated farmland. from deep wells into the Republican Overflow The 2012 Census of Agriculture reported River system and has been forced Deficits of water are not the only that Nebraska had about 8.2 million to drain the reservoir in Bonny Lake problem in the Great Plains. In northern acres under irrigation and California had State Park, a locally popular recreation South Dakota and across North Dakota, about 7.8 million acres. Between 1988 area, to make up for over-allocated lakes are increasing in surface area and and 2007 corn accounted for 70 percent consumption Nebraska is also diverting depth due to increased precipitation of the irrigated acres in Nebraska; water from deep wells into Republican and runoff over the past several soybeans accounted for 19 percent River feeder streams and yet is still the decades. Devils Lake in northeast (Figure 2). A 2003 survey suggested brunt of Kansas lawsuits claiming up to North Dakota is a good example of that 72 percent of the irrigated acres $72 million in damage. Prosecuting the where too much water is a massive were center pivot systems and 28 defending lawsuits is expensive for all problem. Between 1993 and 2011, percent were gravity irrigation systems, involved. 7 The Fluid Journal Summer 2014 Figure 1. Ogallala aquifer system. Summer 2014 The Fluid Journal 8 Much has changed on the land since the 1942 agreement. Spring water once flowed into the Republican River, keeping a steady flow throughout much of the year. Since 1942, deep wells and irrigation development in Colorado and Nebraska lowered water tables, which dried up many of the springs in the feeder streams. Soil and water conservation practices were applied to the land beginning in the late 1940s and continue through to the present time. Terraces and farm ponds kept soil and water on the farm, thus reducing runoff into the river. More recently, crop residual management, minimum tillage, and no-till farming methods have reduced runoff even further. “Reuse pits” were installed to collect runoff water from gravity irrigated fields with the water being recycled to use for irrigation again and again without leaving the farm. Inefficient gravity irrigation gave way to more efficient center pivot irrigation systems. Through the decades, the goal of soil and water conservationists who assist the growers was and is to reduce erosion by keeping Figure 2. Corn accounts for 70% of irrigated corn acres. rainwater and irrigation runoff to near zero, thus much less water reaches shutdown of half of the irrigated acres in more probable, thousands of years of the river. On well-managed farms, the Republican River basin would cost rain required to restore aquifer levels water leaves the property only through billions long-term in economic activity even if no additional irrigation was evapotranspiration. to the state. The number and value of allowed. The Great Plains area is not Zero-sum game irrigation-related transactions for seed alone in ground water depletion. The fertilizer, herbicides, feed, machinery, USGS map (Figure 3) indicates known In the end, the Republican River insurance, and the sale of forage depletion areas. controversy has resulted in a zero- quickly mount. Not only agriculture The villain sum game. Water consumed upstream is affected. There are also industrial, The villain of this drama is the farmer’s cannot be used downstream and the recreational, and municipal components friend--the center-pivot irrigation system. benefit to the upstream user is to the that have a strong reliance on water. detriment of those downstream. For The pivot makes irrigating crops easy many years, Nebraska argued that The High Plains Aquifer is a in comparison to other systems and groundwater was not included in the waterlogged jumble of sand, clay, and requires much less labor. The center- Republican River Compact. Kansas filed gravel that begins beneath Wyoming pivot irrigating system is, perhaps, the suit in 1998 and the case wound its way and South Dakota and stretches to the most efficient way to create an oasis. to the United States Supreme Court. Texas Panhandle. The Northern portions Center-pivot irrigation efficiency was That case was settled in 2002 when the of the aquifer hold enough water for improved by the addition of dropped three states agreed to use a computer perhaps hundreds of years of irrigated nozzles, which reduce water lost to model using an algorithm including agriculture. Most of the water lies evaporation and drift. Paradoxically, it precipitation, stream flow, and assumed under the Nebraska Sandhills, a mass was often found that farmers ended up values for recharge from precipitation of stable sand dunes covering a third applying more groundwater to fields. and subsurface leakage in and out of of the state, an area not suitable for Rather than reducing consumption, the Republican River area. The model farming. As one travels south, pumping some farmers use the efficiency also included water used by irrigators water is increasingly elusive. Kansas “savings” to expand irrigation into poor and others. Years of legal wrangling wells that used to pump 1,600 gallons soils or grow higher value crops such followed with Kansas notifying the other to the surface every minute now may as corn, alfalfa, and soybeans, which states in late 2007 of an alleged failure yield only 300 gallons or be completely consume more water. dry. High Plains Texas irrigators find to comply with the settlement. Kansas Texas researchers set out to they have to drill deeper and deeper to proposed a remedy to groundwater and determine how much water loss occurs extract water from the declining aquifer. stream flow depletions and asked for a in the air above the canopy, within From 1940 to 1980, the water table was shutdown of all wells within 2.5 miles of the plant canopy, and from the soil lowered by more than 100 feet in parts the Republican River and its tributaries surface.
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