WICHITA, Kan.—When Rodger Funk first started farming in parched western Kansas, the conventional wisdom a half-century ago was that the water growers were pumping to irrigate their crops came from an underground river and that it was inexhaustible. He remembers hearing that over and over again from his neighbors.
They were wrong.
It was not until the late 1950s when Funk and his farming neighbors in Garden City attended a community meeting called by some geological researchers who had been studying the Ogallala Aquifer that he realized it.
“They announced the water was finite. It was geological water that had been put down a long time ago and when it was gone, it was gone,” Funk recalled. “That was total news. None of us in the room I think expected that, but it started changing my life. I realized that we were not going to be pumping this water for ever and ever.”
When his son, Boyd, finished college and came back to the farm, the family decided that if they were going to stay in agriculture they would need to learn dryland farming.
So the Funks started buying dryland fields rather than irrigated land. They would need the production from those additional dryland acres to make up for lost yields from ground they would not irrigate. They plugged nearly exhausted wells on irrigated land they bought. They stopped growing thirsty crops like alfalfa and corn and instead planted more drought-hardy things like wheat and milo. They quit tilling the land to conserve soil moisture.
Funk, now 83, may well be the face of the future for the Ogallala Aquifer in western Kansas.
On Thursday, farmers and other water users are gathering in Colby in northwest Kansas for an economic summit on the aquifer’s future.
The High Plains Aquifer, more commonly known as the Ogallala Aquifer, underlies some 174,000 square miles in parts of eight states. It includes portions of South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas. Its saturated thickness varies and now ranges from more than 300 feet to fewer than 50 feet in places.
The focus at the economic summit hosted by Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback will be on how to extend the life of an aquifer that would be a major economic issue for the state if lost. Roughly 94 percent of the groundwater is used for irrigation, which supports livestock, meatpacking, ethanol and other agricultural industries in Kansas.
The governor’s meeting aims to design a so-called action plan for the aquifer. It comes during a time and at a place where drought has raised public awareness of this finite resource.
For years, the Kansas Geological Survey and the state’s Division of Water Resources have measured water levels in 1,400 wells in the aquifer. The overall rate of decline going back to the 1960s continued to drop, but while it was still declining then it just was not doing so as fast. That changed after 2000 when another drought cycle hit western Kansas.
Drought-plagued farmers again began pumping a lot more water out of the aquifer. In southwest Kansas where the drought has been particularly bad well testing this past January showed the aquifer had dropped in places by more than 5 feet in a single year, said Brownlie Wilson, water information resource manager for the Kansas Geological Survey at the University of Kansas. But the aquifer generally recharges only about half-inch a year.
“If you see conditions like that year after year, it won’t come back in your lifetime,” Wilson said of that 5-foot drop in a single year.
Geologists now talk in terms of the lifetime of the Ogallala Aquifer, he said. Some parts of the aquifer have 25 years of life remaining, while other parts may have 100 years or more.
“That changes people’s perception of it,” Wilson said. “It might be within the lifetime of their farm loan or within the lifetime of their heirs.”
Tracy Streeter, the state’s Water Office director, said he hopes the Kansas summit will lead to policy changes in state water rights, particularly the so-called “use it or lose it” water rights law now on the books. Some want to get rid of that so conservation is not a disincentive for water rights holders.
Although as a practical matter, that concept is more myth than reality—the number of irrigators who lose their water rights is pretty small—many farmers do use water at times out of fear they will lose their water rights otherwise, Streeter said.
State officials are hoping the summit will produce some ideas for policy, legislation and incentives to prolong the life of the Ogallala.
“The summit was going to happen regardless of the drought,” Streeter said. “I think the drought has probably elevated the level of concern because it has caused us to rely more heavily on the Ogallala.”
Funk, the farmer, remembers a speaker during another Ogallala meeting during the 1980s predicting that the aquifer would be used up by 2000—when it was expected that it would cost more to pump the water than the market price of the crops were worth.
“What has happened is grain prices have gone up and, of course, cattle prices have gone up. So the water has become more profitable and people are still pumping,” Funk said. “Whenever the day comes that it costs more to irrigate than what you get out of it, well, that will be the end of it. And for some people that comes sooner than others.”
