Ebbing of the Ogallala

By Richard Stengel

The great watering hole beneath the Great Plains is going dry

There are two documentary images of the Great Plains. The first is a black-and-white photograph of the '30s Dust Bowl, with windblown homesteaders treading the cracked earth. The second: a glossy color shot of the same land 40 years later, showing the lush checkerboard farms of America's breadbasket. Now, as if through a strange reversal in time, the second image threatens to fade into the first. For in another 40 years, the territory could backslide into dust and despair. The Ogallala Aquifer, the vast underground reservoir of water that transformed much of the Great Plains into one of the richest agricultural areas in the world, is being sucked dry.

The aquifer is a California-size deposit of water-laden sand, silt and gravel. It ranges in thickness from 1,000 ft. in Nebraska, where two-thirds of its waters lie, to a few inches in parts of Texas. Although it was first tapped in the 1930s, it has been extensively exploited only since the development of high-capacity pumps after World War II. The Ogallala's estimated quadrillion gallons of water, the equivalent of Lake Huron, have irrigated farms in South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico, changing a region of subsistence farming into a $15 billion-a-year agricultural center.

For the past three decades, farmers have pumped water out of the Ogallala as if it were inexhaustible. Nowadays they disperse it prodigally through huge center-pivot irrigation sprinklers, which moisten circular swaths a quarter-mile in diameter. The annual overdraft (the amount of water not replenished) is nearly equal to the yearly flow of the Colorado River. Like all aquifers, the Ogallala depends on rain water for recharging, and only a trickle of the annual local rainfall ever reaches it. Gradually built up over millions of years, the aquifer is being drained in a fraction of that time. The question is no longer if the Ogallala will run dry, but when.

W.B. Criswell has been raising cotton on his 1,700-acre farm in Idalou, Texas, since 1955. Cotton is called the camel of crops because it requires little water, yet Criswell is now in trouble. His water table has dropped 100 ft. since he started farming. Nine years ago, he paid $4 an acre to water his cotton; today he pays more than $45. "It's like a disease," he says. "You just accept it and go on." Gerald Wiechman farms 6,000 acres and feeds 2,500 head of steer near Scott City in western Kansas. When his farm's first well started pumping, it tapped water at 54 ft. Today he has to go 130 ft. "I've got another 20 years, maybe," he reckons. On the High Plains of eastern Colorado, the water level has dropped as much as 40 ft. since the 1960s. In parts of Oklahoma, it has dipped that much in four years. Texas, the thirstiest of the eight states, has consumed 23% of its Ogallala reserves since World War II.

According to a major study just completed by Camp Dresser & McKee, a Boston engineering firm, 5.1 million acres of irrigated land (an area the size of Massachusetts) in six Great Plains states will dry up by the year 2020. If current trends continue, Kansas will lose 1.6 million irrigated acres, Texas 1.2 million, Colorado 260,000, New Mexico 224,000, Oklahoma 330,000. Yet this drastic estimate, declares Herbert Grubb of the Texas department of water resources, is "20% too optimistic."

"When the water goes," says W.E. Medlock, a stoic, third-generation farmer from Lubbock, Texas, who has lost 47 of his 73 wells in ten years, "we'll just go back to dry-land farming." To the farmers of the Great Plains, those words summon up visions of The Grapes of Wrath. Dry-land farming means larger farms with lower yields, fewer workers and probably higher prices in the supermarkets. Cattlemen know that less water means less corn and therefore smaller herds. Grubb calls such farming the "Russian roulette" of agriculture. Over a ten-year period, he says, dry-land farming will yield two strong harvests, four average ones and four "busts."

Although the cause of the trouble is obvious, the cure is not. Indeed, there may be no fundamental solution to the ebbing of the Ogallala. "We can prolong the supply," concludes John Weeks, a U.S. Geological Survey engineer who heads a five-year U.S.G.S. study of the situation, "but we are mining a limited resource, like gold, and we can't solve the ultimate depletion problem."

Conservation may forestall the end. Farmers can simply use less water. They are already converting from profitable but water-thirsty corn to water-thrifty crops such as wheat, sorghum and cotton. James Mitchell, a cotton farmer from Wolfforth, Texas, has installed an experimental center-pivot sprinkler that, instead of spraying outward, gently drops water directly into the planted furrows, thereby reducing evaporation. Sophisticated laser-guided land graders can now almost perfectly flatten the terrain so that water is not wasted in runoff. Electrodes planted in the fields can measure soil wetness and determine exactly when water is needed. Today, these techniques are rarities, but they may soon be routine. As Kansas Cattle Feeder Harold Burnett puts it: "Water misers" will last longer. But even the stingiest will go under if neighbors are wasteful and the whole aquifer dries up.

Last week a committee representing the Governors of states that tap the Ogallala published a list of 20 recommendations for action. Most of the suggestions, based on a $6 million federal study of the problem, involved stopgap efforts rather than cures. Except one. The committee wants further study of a proposal by the Army Corps of Engineers for huge canal systems that would import water from South Dakota, Missouri and Arkansas. The routes -- all of which would be uphill -- range in length from 376 miles to 1,135 miles. The cost-- from $3.6 billion to $22.6 billion -- currently places the canals in the realm of fantasy.

Thus far the states' efforts have been as slow as Chinese water torture. The dimensions of the problem have been recognized, but no one is sure whether the shrinking aquifer is a federal, state or local issue, and no one wants the responsibility of deciding. Several states, including Oklahoma and Colorado, already have established policies limiting water use, but many say such efforts are too little too late. The Governors' group, due to meet again in late June, plans to recommend legislation to Congress by next fall, but thus far inaction is the order of the day. The afflicted states cannot even agree with one another, and unless they all march together, they will all parch separately. --By Richard Stengel.

Reported by Sam Allis/Lubbock and Richard Woodbury/ Denver

With reporting by Sam Allis/Lubbock, Richard Woodbury/Denver

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