LINCOLN, Neb.—Boosting Platte River flows to levels required in a three-state, multimillion-dollar agreement may require less reliance on irrigation shutdowns in Nebraska than originally thought.
Officials say they are increasingly hopeful that practices such as regular crop rotation and more strategic irrigation schedules will help keep irrigation water flowing on some acres, at the same time meeting terms of the agreement between Nebraska, Colorado and Wyoming.
Early next year, officials plan to launch a study to inventory practices used to reduce water use, how effective they are, and to identify other areas of research.
Water-saving measures rather than all-out irrigation shutdowns have always been an option under the $320 million, three-state agreement designed to improve wildlife habitat along the river.
But discussions with farmers and others, said Jerry Kenny, executive director of the Platte River Recovery Implementation Program, have bolstered the confidence he and others have in the ability of the practices to help avoid shutting down irrigation on some acres.
“The concept is, take as little land as we can out of irrigation to minimize the impact,” on farmers and rural economies that rely heavily on irrigation, Kenny said. “The objective of the program isn’t taking land out of irrigation—there will be some of that, but we hope mainly on land that maybe shouldn’t have been irrigated in the first place.”
Kenny said he didn’t have an estimate of how many acres might be spared irrigation shutdowns if water-saving measures farmers would be paid to use become widespread.
Early, rough estimates of how much total Nebraska cropland might be taken out of irrigation under the three-state agreement have ranged from 30,000 acres to 100,000 acres.
The Platte River Cooperative Agreement was signed three years ago by the governors of Nebraska, Colorado and Wyoming. It is designed to benefit endangered and threatened species, such as the whooping cranes, and provide water users in the Platte River Basin with coverage under the Endangered Species Act without giving up their access to federal water, land or funding.
Of the $320 million cost of the plan, the federal government will pay $157 million in cash. Colorado plans to pitch in $24 million in cash, and Wyoming $6 million in cash. The rest comes from land and water credits, which will make up all of Nebraska’s contribution.
One goal of the agreement is to offset Platte River water depletions that occurred after 1997, largely through irrigation.
Farmers would be paid for using practices that Kenny said will likely be studied to reduce so-called “consumptive use” of water, which is water that is lost through evapotranspiration and that otherwise could have ended up in the river. Evapotranspiration is loss of water from evaporation and transpiration, which is the passage of water from plant roots into the atmosphere.
Much of the focus on reducing consumptive-water use is expected to be in Nebraska, but some of the practices expected to be investigated next year will be applicable in Colorado and Wyoming, Kenny said. The North Platte crosses Wyoming, the South Platte crosses Colorado, and both meet below Lake McConaughy in western Nebraska to form the main stem of the Platte.
Some of the easiest water-saving measures that could be used are obvious, and fairly easy—such as making sure that irrigation water isn’t being wasted on weeds, said Derrel Martin, a professor of biological-systems engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is expected to help with the study.
Others may be more difficult to persuade farmers to implement. One calls for irrigating less both in the spring, when crops are sprouting but when rainfall is often more plentiful, and in late summer and fall before corn harvest, said Martin.
Irrigation, then, would mainly be confined to the middle of the summer.
“We can stress crops some and that reduces evapotranspiration,” Martin said. “It will reduce yields some,” Martin added, “but it doesn’t have to be a train wreck.”
Another technique that will be studied is more crop rotation on irrigated acres, much ;like what is commonly done on dry-land farm ground. It entails switching crops from year-to-year—planting corn one year, for example, and soybeans the next. Soybeans have a shorter growing season, so don’t require as much water.
None of the practices will be free, as farmers will likely be paid for using them. So officials will have to determine if indeed their cost will be lower than simply paying to take land out of irrigation altogether.
“Is it more economically efficient to subsidize people to use a crop that has lower evapotranspiration, than taking the land out of irrigation?” Martin said.
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