Kansas Governor To Conduct Water Summit

It's now official.  Governor Brownback with support from Agriculture Secretary Rodman and the Kansas Water Office are co-sponsoring a Water Summit here in Colby, KS on July 21, 2011.  The venue will be the Colby Community College Cultural Arts Center.  The focus will be groundwater in the High Plains Aquifer (Ogallala) - with forays into at least conservation, use-it-or-lose-it, and economic advances in water use.  The final issue agenda has not been set yet, so other topics are likely to be served up as well.  Stay tuned.

The summit will start at 9:30 10:00 A.M. and will conclude at 12 noon 3:30 P.M. with a lunch being provided.  The session will be looking for all ideas regarding the advancement of conservation and economic growth from water uses - hopefully simultaneously.  I am pleased to report that the summit organizers appear to be genuinely seeking ideas, and not just using this venue to showcase their ideas of where the state should be heading.

I'll pick up this topic again following the summit with all the closing remarks I feel need to be expressed.  Perhaps we can continue the dialog a bit right here for those interested.

(Summit times were updated June 14, 2011 at 7:08 P.M. - WAB)

Value of Water - Murray-Darling v. Ogallala

Just read a recent article in the Australian that was reporting on the reduction of irrigation water use in the dwindling Murray-Darling system.  The article reports that:  “The federal government has so far bought back 803 billion litres of water entitlements, which has cost $1.28 billion.”  I have always thought that the Murray-Darling basin of SE Australia is much like the Ogallala Aquifer of the central US in that the overdraft levels, the irrigation footprint, and perhaps most importantly, the rhetoric about the importance of water is very similar between the two areas.  It got me thinking - If my sense of the similarities are true, shouldn't the offered price to retire water rights look similar as well?

The AU calculations are roughly:  803 billion liters equals 615,000 AF.  A cost of $1.28 billion AUD = $2,075 AUD per AF.  The current exchange is:  1 US $ = 1.217 AUD.  In US dollars, the cost to the AU government of buying these 615,000 AF is roughly equal to $1,700 US per AF.  At $1,700 US per AF, and 1.22 AF being applied to each acre in our Ogallala HPA’s, each acre of land would need to be paid $2,078 US to match the Australia situation.  

Based on 100 or so bid proposals to permanently retire water rights in our GMD, the going rate was hovering right at $2,000 per acre of irrigated land needed to retire the full consumptive water use on each acre.  

Unless my calculations (or logic) are wrong, seems like the value of irrigated water in our two areas is far more similar than dissimilar, and we're very much in the ballpark with the Australian government's assessment of the value of water rights.  Jeesch, I hope Zetland doesn't get a hold of this evaluation!

An Ogallala Groundwater Concept Rarely Discussed

Much has been and is being written about the Ogallala Aquifer and its groundwater situation.  Most articles do several things that I always want to question.  First, they tend to discuss a specific part of the Ogallala, but attach a headline that applies to the entire aquifer.

Take for example a recent Twitter post:  "Decline of the Ogallala Aquifer - a classic common pool resource problem."  When you follow the link and read the article, it's solely about the High Plains Texas portion of the aquifer, and moreover, the situtation (problem) is attributed almost exclusively to that states' groundwater management scheme - the Rule of Capture.  Yet, anyone skimming headlines only will come away thinking the entire Ogallala is a classic common pool resource problem - even though there are 8 different management approaches to the entire aquifer and only Texas uses the Rule of Capture.  I have probably 4 times over the past 6 months left comments to this effect on blogs and replied to twitter posts.  This will be a hard practice to correct, I'm afraid.

Secondly, a lot of the articles couch the problem of declines in a constant time frame - and predict a future-certain "plane crash".  For example, they say something to the effect that the water table is declining at 1.5 feet per year, and at this rate, 50% of the aquifer will be gone in 40 years and the aquifer will be dry in 80 years.  What is not commonly understood is that while a constant decline rate will predict the future, there will NOT be a constant decline rate because the wells producing the water and causing the decline will NOT be able to maintain a constant rate of production as the water table continues to drop. 

In fact, even if you are aware enough to know that reductions in saturated thickness will result in reduced pumping rates, most consider these reduced production rates as linear, and therefore predictable over time.  Not true.  A well's production rate decreases ever-faster as the saturated thickness dwindles.  In other words if you find a 10% reduction in your well yield with the last 20 feet of decline, the next 20 feet of decline will reduce your well yield significantly more than 10%, and so on.  The exact relationship is dictated by the aquifer characteristics so they vary from place to place - even within the same aquifer, but the relationship is a geometric one rather than arithmetic.

What this means is that the economic end of pumping will be closer than most think, AND the predicted future water level elevation of the aquifer will be higher than predicted as a result, AND an aquifer (in the sense it is being used in the article) will never be pumped dry.  Said another way, our "plane" will land softer than everyone is predicting.  However, of course, the core issue remains - any overdrafting will eventually see the plane land, while most would prefer that it keep flying forever (sustainability).  This, however, is an issue for a later blog.   

Being Quoted is Not Always Great

I did an interview on water issues for the "Kansas Farmer" which appeared on page 12 of the April, 2009 edition (see article). The piece began saying that I said: "..the only solution to continued depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer is a new industry that uses less water and produces more economic value than today's irrigated production agriculture."

While I actually said this (or something very close to it), the interviewer seemed to completely forget about all the qualifying comments made just prior, which included something along the lines of: traditional responses have been to reduce water use at the expense of the economy or to boost the economy at the expense of the resource. The best solution is to address both the resource and economic issues simultaneously. With this understood, the opening quote above makes more sense and would be less likely to be taken literally. Finding a new industry is NOT the only solution to groundwater depletion in the Ogallala.

I also said irrigation system efficiency improvements wouldn't necessarily reduce crop water use, and gave him 4 reasons why it might not. My next quote in the article had me proclaiming my doubts as to irrigation efficiency saving water, based only (and solely) on one of the 4 stated reasons. And to boot, the interviewer had another person responding to my proclamation which was misunderstood and clipped. It didn't help matters much when the other person's refuting of my statement was not even correct.

When a 75 minute interview results in 3 quick quotes and 3 key points, I don't see how it can be really accurate - and this one missed several key points as well. While they have a job to do, my experience has been that much of the mis-information out there on water issues is because of the press that tries to get the word out.