High Plains, Low Water

One of the premier U.S. grain-producing regions—the area watered by pumping from the enormous Ogallala aquifer—is depleting its groundwater. This threat to agriculture, plus the depletion of the area's major petroleum resources, prompted a study of associated potential economic, social, and environmental changes—the Six-State High Plains-Ogallala Aquifer Regional Resources Study. For understandable reasons, it commonly is referred to as the High Plains Study.

High Plains history

As the frontier was pushed westward in the nineteenth century, the High Plains was the pathway to the undeveloped West. As time passed, three major technological developments—barbed wire, windmills, and the repeating handgun—permitted settlement of the High Plains and a ranching and farming culture began to develop. Settlement and agriculture flourished—for a while: unusually propitious moisture conditions during the 1880s produced bumper crops from the fertile soil, and many farmers moved in from the East. When more usual rainfall conditions returned in the succeeding decades, many farms and settlements were ruined.

In the late nineteenth century, A. M. Simons wrote in the American Farmer: "From the 98th meridian west to the Rocky Mountains there is a stretch of country whose history is filled with more tragedy and whose future is pregnant with greater promise than perhaps any other equal expanse of territory within the confines of the Western Hemisphere." As implied, the region was characterized by periods of boom and bust. The nadir came in the 1930s, when drought coincided with the Great Depression. This is the time when the term "Okies" was coined to characterize those economically displaced from the plains—unwilling, tragic vagabonds, searching for opportunity elsewhere, mainly in California.

But the late 1930s saw other technological developments of great portent for the future: improved well-drilling equipment, advanced pumping technology, and cheap energy opened the area to large-scale irrigation from deep wells and permitted tapping of the Ogallala, regarded at the time as a "vast underground river" and an "inexhaustible resource." The demands of World War II stilled development of the underground water resource, but soon massive development took place, initially in the southern part of the aquifer.

To project how irrigated agriculture might evolve, the High Plains Study examined several plausible management strategies and compared them to a baseline projection that assumed gradual spreading of best irrigation practice but no new policies. The management strategies used in the analysis are:

1. Stimulate voluntary conservation practice using education, research, demonstration, and economic incentives.
2. Add some regulatory programs.
3. Augment local water supply by cloud seeding, groundwater recharge, and the like.
4. Transfer surface water from basin to basin within a state.
5. Allow interbasin transfers from outside a state.

Numbers 1 and 5, in my judgment, are the most interesting. Given the history and traditions of the area plus the costliness of some of the other alternatives, number 1 is notable because it seems to me most likely to happen. And 5 is interesting because it takes a hard look at the dream of imported water so long cherished by some interests on the High Plains.

I will spare the reader details of the fairly complicated models (mostly linear programming and input-output) used to project results of the strategies to 2020 except to note that they depend critically on assumptions about continuing growth in yields and the adoption of conservation practices. Also, because pump lifts make High Plains agriculture very energy intensive, water conservation may be driven fully as much by energy costs as by the perception of limited water supplies.

Number 1 results

For management strategy 1, every economic indicator is higher (in constant dollars) for 2020 than it is for 1977 (the base year). This is true for both the north (Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado) and the south (Oklahoma, New Mexico, Texas), and for each state, the total value of agricultural products for the region as a whole would be up 3.3 percent and employment would increase by 1.1 percent. Under each non import strategy, some land would go out of cultivation in both the north and the south, but overall this would be more than balanced by the development of new land. However, usable water remaining in storage in the south will be severely depleted by 2020.

The central, interesting, and—given the atmosphere of impending doom when the study was launched—surprising conclusion of the High Plains Study is that the economy based on irrigation from the Ogallala can continue to grow for many years in each state in the area. If these projections are valid, the adjustment to depleting supplies can be gradual and non catastrophic.

Number 5 results

Let us turn now to a brief consideration of the importation alternative. Under management strategy 5, the objective for purposes of study is to bring enough supplemental water to replace land that would go out of irrigation under management strategy 1. Possible routes that are feasible from an engineering point of view are shown in figure 2. Under this alternative, 4.1 million acre-feet of imported water is brought yearly to terminal storage for use on the High Plains; total water use in 2020 is projected to be 25.4 million acre-feet, about 20 percent above management strategy 1. Since pumping from the aquifer is not reduced under this strategy, the amount of water remaining in storage is unaffected.

Even a cursory look at the economics of imported water starkly reveals what an outlandish idea it is. Based on projected returns to land and water, the absolute maximum ability to pay for imported water would be around $120 per acre-foot. The Army Corps of Engineers, which is unlikely to exaggerate the costs of the project, calculates that the cost of imported water would be $320 to $880 per acre-foot at projected energy prices. But that is just the cost to bring water to a terminal storage reservoir on the High Plains and does not include distribution costs. I don't know what those costs would be, but it does not stretch belief to think that, given the enormous size of the region, average delivered water might cost again as much as terminal storage water.

If the actual willingness to pay, rather than the maximum possible, is, say, per acre-foot (which is probably generous) and the cost of delivered water range around $1,000 per acre-foot, the cost would exceed willingness to pay by more than an order of magnitude.

First, the Ogallala aquifer indeed is depleting, but there is no water crisis on the High Plains. And second, water importation is a thoroughly bad idea, even if just the economics are considered; imagine an environmental impact statement for such a project. But dreams do not die: in its report, the Texas 2000 Commission's first recommendation about water is that a plan be developed with options for interstate and international transfers.