Plains Farmers Learn from Past as Aquifer Depletes

About a quarter of a million people left the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, but for the families who stayed, hope lay in a massive aquifer of clean, fresh water right beneath their feet.

The Ogallala Aquifer, which lies under parts of eight states, was like lifeblood for Great Plains farmers who today pump billions of gallons of water from the underground supply to their crops annually. But widespread use of the Ogallala for irrigation is depleting the aquifer in some areas, leaving farmers with yearly decisions about how to use the water and how to conserve it for future generations.

An Enormous Resource

The Ogallala, a vast formation of sand and gravel, is part of a larger aquifer that once held more than 3 billion acre-feet of water, roughly the equivalent of 3 billion acres of land covered in a foot of water. The aquifer's depth varies by state. In parts of Nebraska, there are still 1,000 feet of water saturating its sand and gravel. But in parts of Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas — states that had less water to begin with — the water table has dropped steeply.

Just outside of Colby, Kan., farmer Lon Frahm uses 38 sprinklers to pump water over 5,000 acres of farmland. His center-pivot irrigation system sprinkles 600 gallons per minute on his corn, making up for where Mother Nature leaves off in a semi-arid zone that gets less than 20 inches of rain a year.

Frahm estimates that he pumps around 2 billion gallons of water from the Ogallala annually. In recent years, his wells have dropped about 6 inches, though in years when there is more rain, he uses less water. As a member of the Kansas water board, Frahm regularly wrestles with the question of what to do as the water table drops.

"We've got some people that use the analogy of oil. What's the difference between taking oil from the ground, and taking water from the ground? It's a resource not doing any good down there," Frahm says, citing a view he often hears from other farmers.

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