The entire West is headed for a much drier future.
Ogallala Blue provides a good sense of the bleak
realities of a life of scarcity.
Author William Ashworth
focuses on the Great Plains states, which have for decades thwarted
a notorious lack of rain by reaching into the massive Ogallala
Aquifer. Today, those states grow more than a fifth of the
nation’s crops. But Ashworth deftly shows that, as successful
as High Plains farmers have been at transcending the limits of
aridity, they have done so only by plundering the aquifer.
Some of the effects of groundwater dependency make
intuitive sense. As farmers have to spend more and more money to
reach the falling water table, they have three options: Grow
better-paying crops, “consolidate farms in order to make an
adequate income,” or — in what’s becoming a tedious
refrain in the West — turn the farm into a housing
development.
Some of the effects of groundwater
dependency make no sense at all. A farmer spends $40,000 on a
center-pivot sprinkler, to keep his crops watered even when it
doesn’t rain. Having replaced meteorologic uncertainty with
an irrigation schedule tightly tailored to the needs of his crops,
his biggest fear becomes … rain.
Ashworth covers
much of the same ground John Opie traveled in his book,
Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land. But Ashworth has
startling insights of his own, including this one: Conventional
wisdom, which encourages farmers to make the investments necessary
to improve their irrigation efficiency — thereby stretching
the remaining water in the aquifer further — may not, in
fact, be wisdom at all. To recoup their investment, farmers end up
growing even more crops, using more water to do so. Ultimately,
their efforts hasten, rather than delay, the end of the aquifer.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline A world built on groundwater.
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