ETERSBURG, Tex. — Ronnie Hopper grows cotton, and he has learned firsthand that water is precious. The water that he pumps from underground costs him five times as much as it used to, so he does his best not to waste a drop. Posted on 08/28/2002 11:06:35 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
ETERSBURG, Tex. — Ronnie Hopper grows cotton, and he has learned firsthand that water is precious. The water that he pumps from underground costs him five times as much as it used to, so he does his best not to waste a drop.
He has installed new, high-efficiency center-pivot sprinklers, designed to eliminate losses to evaporation. He has cut back on his planting on his 2,000-acre farm to concentrate water on fields that can use it best. He is even considering drip irrigation, water by the trickle.
Mr. Hopper has reason to be parsimonious. Though he lives atop one of the world's largest aquifers, the Ogallala, which spans eight states, it is falling every day. Here in dry northwest Texas, the problem is particularly acute, with declines of at least three times the average.
"Putting more wells in this particular ground would be like putting more straws in a glass," Mr. Hopper said, ruddy-faced in the Texas sun.
People have warned of the threat to the aquifer, which supplies roughly a quarter of the United States' irrigated farmland, for more than 20 years, and it is still in danger. But the experience of farmers like Mr. Hopper offers reasons both for hope and caution for those struggling to save scarce water elsewhere, and to arrest drastic declines in other underground supplies in places like India and China.
In a shift of much significance, per capita water use — on the rise in most of the rest of the world — is now declining in the United States. That retreat has been led by industrial users and farmers like Mr. Hopper, who began to save water through technology and conservation even before the recent years of drought, which this summer will affect more than a third of states.
Now, however, after years of conservation, these users now worry that whatever savings are achieved will only be lost to competition from fast-growing American cities and suburbs. Despite America's overall decline in water consumption, these booming population centers are making greater demands than ever on limited water supplies.
"We're coming to the reality that we may not have enough water to farm all of this land," Mr. Hopper said, in fields that stretched toward the pancake-flat horizon. "But we don't want anyone coming in and telling us that we don't know how to use it best."
By global standards, the United States remains one of the world's most gluttonous water users. But Americans' water use declined more than 20 percent from 1980 to 1995, to about 1,500 gallons of water per person a day from 1,900, according to the most current data from the United States Geological Survey, which says the downward trend appears to be continuing.
Today the depletion of the Ogallala — beneath parts of Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas — has slowed to an extent not predicted by any forecasts. It is dropping by just a few inches a year on average, after averaging declines of about two feet a year since intensive irrigation began about 60 years ago.
Still, it is the outlook beyond their fields that makes farmers almost as anxious as the falling water levels beneath them.
In most of the country, farmers have primary water rights, ahead of suburbs and cities. But competition is intensifying. Texas, for instance, with rapid population growth and few restrictions on water use, is increasing its water consumption faster than any other state.
By 2050, Texas water planners say the state's population will leap to 40 million people from nearly 21 million in 2000. By the same year, the board has warned, Texas' supply of water, from existing sources, will be 19 percent less than it is today.
Given that imbalance, the Texas water board said, it would be unrealistic to think that the Ogallala could be sustained into the indefinite future. The aquifer should be treated like a mine, it said, and plumbed until it runs out. But then what?
Doing More With Less
At 58, Mr. Hopper remembers when water was so plentiful and the Ogallala lay so near the surface that conservation and cost barely entered his mind. But cotton is a thirsty plant, and out where he lives, farming has always been a marginal business.
On Mr. Hopper's farm, the aquifer, which stood 95 feet below the surface when he was a boy, now stands at 335 feet, with just 65 to go before it hits bottom. Now, he figures, his water bill (in electricity, for pumping from ever greater depths) accounts for a fifth of his overhead. Last year, he earned 52 cents an acre for his cotton, not enough to break even, and 20 cents of that came from the government.
Environmentalists call it a waste twice over: the United States produces a surplus of cotton, and pays subsidies to its farmers, yet in places like Texas the water-intensive crop is draining a finite water supply.
Still, water managers like those in Texas have resisted limiting farmers' water use — and often do not even gauge it.
"One of the goals, I think, of most of the producers here is to reduce the use of water," said Jim C. Conkwright, the general manager for the district based in Lubbock, which covers Mr. Hopper's farm. "But it's not something we can accomplish overnight."
Most water experts say the most urgent task is to find ways to do more with less. "If you become more efficient within reason, we can improve the situation in many places around the world," said Ben Dziegielewski, executive director of the International Water Resources Association.
Mr. Hopper says that is what he and many other farmers have done. American farmers who withdrew 2.9 feet of water for every irrigated acre in 1980 were making do with 2.6 feet by 1995, government statistics show.
The savings reflect efforts to eliminate losses from evaporation, wind and runoff, as Mr. Hopper has done by installing the center-point sprinklers. They deliver water closer to his cotton with about 95 percent efficiency, compared with about 50 percent for old-fashioned furrow irrigation.
With the savings in pumping costs, Mr. Hoppers says he has paid for his investment in just a few years. "It all comes down to economics," he said. "I'll take as good care of the land as I can afford to do."
But even as farmers like Mr. Hopper try to conserve, thirsty cities and suburbs in the region have begun to look to the Ogallala to meet their expanding water needs. By 2050, planners in Texas expect municipal water use to rise by nearly 67 percent.
The competition alarms farmers like Mr. Hopper, who argues that the cities have no claim on the aquifer at all. "Who are they to say that farming is not the most beneficial use?" Mr. Hopper asked.
Controlling Water's Use
In places like Petersburg, there is much talk these days about what is unfolding near Abilene, to the north, as a possible barometer of the future. There, the wealthy investor Boone Pickens and his company, Mesa Water Inc., own farmland, and their plan is to pump the water from underground and sell it to other parts of the state.
Over a lunch of cheeseburgers and tater tots smothered in chili and cheese, Craig Heinrich, 38, who grows cotton himself, was among the local farmers who said he just did not know what to think of the plan.
"If they're going to pump all that water out of the aquifer, it's going to have a real impact on farming," he said. "But if they start telling him what he can and can't do with his water, they'll be telling us next."
Telling people how to use their water, something many see as a natural right, is a sensitive issue. In Texas and most other Ogallala states, landowners still have the final say over how and how much of the water beneath their land they should use.
But in Nebraska, local water districts have taken the authority to limit how much water can be used for crops.
"As we restrict the water supply, the irrigators are more or less required to use the water as efficiently as they can," said Bob Hipple, general manager of a water district in Nebraska's southwest. There, to supplement rainfall, farmers may use just 14.5 inches of underground water per acre per year, down from 22 inches a year in 1980, when the limits were first imposed.
But such restrictions have for the most part been left to states to apply. The federal government has mostly limited its own efforts to promote conservation to making grants available to help farmers switch to more efficient irrigation.
For now, states like Texas seem comfortable with the idea that conservation will more or less take care of itself.
Over the next 50 years, Texas' water board expects rising pumping costs to push some farmers out of business. That, it hopes, will free up increasing amounts of Ogallala water. To water managers like Mr. Hipple in Nebraska, though, such projections seem optimistic and and misplaced.
"When I was in Vietnam," he said, "we used to kid about the idea that we might as well live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse. An area can let everyone pump all the water they want, or it can say, perhaps it is better to live slower, live to be older and look as good as you can along the way."
That is truly, one of the most snide, cynical comments I've seen since I joined FreeRepublic!
In the last half of the last century, we've gone from "making a living" from the land, to "earning a living" by servicing each other. We used to take our heifer down the road to get "serviced" every so often.
Is that the kind of Mc Servicing you're talking about, because that's what rural western America is getting from your flip Liberaltarian attitude that compliments the GANG-GREEN attitude!!!
They want to control all of the elements, like God. They want to control the water, as well as the fires, the earth and the air. This is not hyperbole, it's documented fact.
They're in the process of building a babels tower. At least those misguided folks were trying to get to heaven, these creepy weirdos want to take us to hell.
You don't like Opec controlling your oil, wait until Club Sierra and Greenpeace control your food supply!
Our daily ration would be a handful of trail mix, 12 soybeans and 32 bean sprouts to be eaten in our 400 sf efficiency apartment well outside the "buffer zone" of the 6 gazillion acres of nearby federally owned, burnt out swamp devoid of wildlife.
This is their dream and vision.
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