Ogalalla Fading; TX Farmers Turning To Drip & Dryland But Drainage Still 6X Recharge
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From windmill wells in the 1800s, to shallow water pumps in the early 1900s, to more powerful centrifugal pumps in the 1950s, farming in the Texas Panhandle has intensified with each new technological breakthrough – with the Ogallala Aquifer the fuel for the agricultural engine. In recent years farmers have been tapping the brake more when it comes to using water. But while the water is being used more efficiently, there is still a lot more being used than is being recharged.
After a century of agriculture, farming is likely to persist in the Panhandle. And if farmers are saving water through more efficient equipment they tend to use that spare water to increase yields or open another field, rather than leave it in the ground.
The Ogallala isn’t declining uniformly – it is thicker around Amarillo than around Lubbock further south, for example – but groundwater is being pumped out at a rate six times faster than it is being recharged, according to Robert Mace, a water policy expert at Texas State University in San Marcos. Even if that rate slows, so long as withdrawals continue the aquifer “is a finite resource.”
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A transition to a more water-poor future is under way, however. Dryland farming is coming to dominate the southern Panhandle where the Ogallala is thin, and most of the Panhandle is projected to be that way in 50 years. What seems unlikely is another technological breakthrough that transforms the Panhandle in the way windmill wells and centrifugal pumps did. “There’s incremental improvements,” like the Dragon Line and cloud seeding, Mace says, “but not this major silver bullet.”
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https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2018/0530/Amid-drought-in-Texas-Panhandle-farmers-scratch-crops-from-dust