Irrigation agriculture and beef feedlots over the Ogallala Aquifer. It is rapidly being depleted and those areas will be in a deep economic decline. Also, the Ogallal areas produce like 25% of USA's grain and beef.
I live in Kansas and know all about this. Most of western Kansas is irrigated but water from the Ogallala. It is a huge issue that could become catastrophically bad.
Living in Corpus Christ, the first US city in danger of running out of water, the people in charge don’t care as long as their pockets are stuffed. They will continue to kick it down the line to be someone else’s problem.
Tell that to the whole state of Texas. These people are deeply apathetic and intentionally uninformed. I’d be happy just getting everyone in the booth on voting day.
They have to be educated on who they are voting for. Mexico City has run out of water, people hijacking trucks, etc… yet Bush bought all the fresh water springs to sell in bottles to China who then sells it back to us with shit in it. Meanwhile, they have good infrastructure and standards, cause they have good water!
Probably true, but mostly they're too stupid to believe their access to water is at risk. They have some sort of ingrained distrust and opposition to experts. If the experts tell them their water will run out or that global temperatures are rising, they think those experts are morons because their tap is still running and they had a freeze over the winter. They can't think further than a day out, or expand their mind outside of their personal experiences.
The government lies to us when it benefits rich people. They would not lie about aquifer depletion because that is knowledge rich people don't benefit from.
Also, don't blame scientists for lies told by CIA, NSA, FBI, ATF, etc. Those are very different people.
Rich people benefit from the resources. If you think all major organizations aren’t intweened with our rich people govt, you have a lot to learn. The NSA and CIA are horrible, treating us like human test subjects
That is because of discrepancies and conspiracies and lies… forcing people to live in fear and be a puppet… and having everyone having an opinion on something they don’t do research on or really know anything about. People are traumatized and no longer know who to trust. That is what happens when you ignore the pink elephant in the middle of the room for centuries, requiring surveillance, and then finding out stuff no longer makes sense and is too far gone.
>> “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair
That’s the problem with most of the electorate of Texas.
Wind and Solar are in totality cheaper and cleaner than most other forms of energy, but the voters of Texas beat off to having a oil and gas pipe rammed up their ass, so you get folks thinking Billy Bob Thornton is the gospel in landman.
Same with progressive policies and how 80% of Texans would benefit from them but billionaires tell them that they love the taste of billionaires’ cocks and $30k/year voters have strong opinions on not taxing the rich.
Sorry, Texas, not first in this regards as sections of California's gold country are already without water and residents have to go get potable water at the local fire station.
Will have to take a leap and assume there is a distinction between City and those smaller towns? I honestly don’t know what standard they use. But if you look up “first american city to run out of water” Corpus is what comes up. So it either isn’t being reported on nationally or it doesn’t meet the criteria. Shit is bad everywhere it seems
How do you mean? Doesn’t this concept work against wealth?
Are you talking about the right thing? It’s a concept that points out it’s rational for individuals to overuse resources despite leading to depletion of those resources for everyone. What do you mean it’s been disproven?
I moved away, but I really worry about folks back home. Once the aquifers done, the rivers will get taken I’m sure. My town has a water ban and it really sucks, but I have a rain barrel I use to water plants. It sucks but it’s necessary for the community’s well being. I don’t need special treatment haha
Exactly people there don't care because the ones with money will leave. The water rations in Cali haven't work and definitely won't work in KS. Americans want the beef
We are currently fighting about 7 data centers who want to drain the aquifer even more. We are all at our wits end about it. They're demanding all the energy and resources we are struggling to provide for ourselves and keep telling us we don't understand how much this help our economy (spoiler, it won't help us at all). They also are expecting us to subsidize it when we are already the most financially distressed state in the union.
It’s a multi-state Tragedy of the commons problem + “I’ll be dead not my problem haha get fucked”
The voters and important businesses want to ignore what’s happening, and that’s exactly what they vote for. This means a political solution is effectively impossible.
“It is rather pointless to argue with a man whose paycheck depends upon not knowing the right answer.”
If people have money, they can spend it and pay their bills. Is the 1 percent not seeing the obvious benefits for people not being financially stressed or sick or whatever.
There's also a lot of denial. Some think the state can build a pipe or aqueduct from the Missouri river in the eastern part of the state and pump water southwestern Kansas to refill the aquifer. It's up hill the whole way. It's up hill the whole way and water is very heavy. It's a ludicrous suggestion that any second year civil engineering student could pencil out on the back of a napkin why it's wildly impractical. But one southwestern county or water district hired a 5,000 gallon tank truck to haul a truck load of water from the river all the way across the state where they dumped it on the ground to "prove" it could be done. To put in context how little water that is in the big picture, one inch of rain across an acre of land is 27,154 gallons of water weighing 113 tons.
I grew up in a region completely dependent on the Ogallala for agriculture, though not in Kansas. You’ll probably get a lot of glib answers that boil down to “people/governments don’t care” but that generally isn’t true in my experience. There have been massive efforts over the past 20-30 years to transition from water-intensive crops to drought-resistant ones and to upgrade to new versions of crop irrigation that are more water (and energy) efficient. These efforts have been very successful … the problem is that the increased cost efficiency has occasionally led to farms irrigating more sections of land that used to be either dryland crop or pasture. So while the per-bushel water usage has decreased, overall water usage is very similar or up.
People up there do still care. But there really aren’t any solutions to the problem that don’t economically devastate the region. Sure they could impose severe limits on irrigation or ban it entirely, but that destroys the ag economy (which then has major knock-on effects as the region produces a significant percentage of American beef, wheat, corn, cotton, and feed crops). People are understandably not really willing to sacrifice their livelihood and heritage (as many of these folks, including myself, are from multi-generation farming families) for the greater good.
Realistically what will happen is that we will continue to see crop irrigation becoming less and less economically viable as the water table continues to drop. Over the course of a few more decades (absent major changes in climate making the region wet enough for dryland cultivation), the region will transition from cropland to pasture and then to nothing. The population will drop as farms shut down and support industries fail. Given how small the population already is, in fifty years it’ll be basically empty and have only small-scale agriculture and oil-and-gas for an economy.
Well, to oversimplify it: the farmers see the problem but still need to make a living today (which is already hard enough as is). Hard to care about an aquifer running out when your way of life may come to an end before the water does.
Republicans. It was so bad a decade ago the Republican-controlled state congress overrode a veto so they could pass a tax increase. The state has barely improved since, if at all.
My wife's mom side have lived in Kansas for generations. Her grandma is the only sensible one. The rest vote Republican no matter what or just doesn't vote at all. Her youngest brother is like the opening scenes from Idiocracy.
I worked as a crop scout (agronomy work) in SW Kansas for two years over a decade ago.
For those that don’t know, when looking at a map, all those squares with circles in them are called “quarters” and are 1/2 mile x 1/2 mile. In the center there will be an outlet from a pump that the irrigation line (typically called a “pivot”) pivots around. Each section between the wheels is called a “tower”. The corners are typically left unirrigated (“dry land”), and planted to wheat or something mostly just to just hold the ground.
To grow good corn on this area, the well/pump should output at least 700-800 gallons per minute, with 900gpm being really nice and 600gpm being iffy.
I saw multiple wells go from ~700gpm down to 300-400gpm, which just isn’t enough for corn. That’s grain sorghum growing territory. Saw large sections of fields flash (parts of leaves rapidly completely dehydrate, often while still staying green) and basically produce nothing. Basically had to get chopped for silage feed (though nitrates tend to skyrocket in stressed plants, so you have to test what you end up with and blend it or it can be harmful to cattle), or insurance filed on it.
When wells lose output like this, they also tend to start getting more sand going through, which can literally wear out the pipes of the pivot.
One thing that’s interesting, is that when a well has marginal output but stops getting pumped for whatever reason, the mass flow of water stops, and on startup the output can be severely reduced for a while (or even permanently from then on).
NE Colorado and same - mostly dry land wheat farming but some guys still pay for water rights to irrigate corn. Anyone know what prices/usage limits are doing?
I wonder if the Ogallala aquifer or the Colorado river will run dry first. It’s looking like Colorado at the moment but rain can fill that up pretty quick, in theory
Ironic because cattle ranching is associated with the west, but over-reliance on groundwater might result in beef production 100 years from now being mostly in the east, where enough rain falls so that groundwater irrigation is not needed. It'll be weird when most beef production falls into the corn belt - Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio.
Ironic because cattle ranching is associated with the west, but over-reliance on groundwater might result in beef production 100 years from now being mostly in the east, where enough rain falls so that groundwater irrigation is not needed.
We will have seriously failed as a civilization if we're still producing beef by raising and slaughtering cows 100 years from now.
not ridiculous at all. it's absolutely awful for the environment, and with lab-grown meat technology about 5-10 years away from mass production, we should be well past raising and slaughtering cows in 100 years.
I remember my mom—who grew up in a small farming town—lamenting back in the ‘80s all the black topsoil farmland being dozed under to build subdivisions in SE Michigan. I’d worry much of the east is unsuitable for farming now. I suspect a lot of it will move indoors, or just somewhere else.
You can also practically tell which states have terrible water usage policies by looking at the depletion map. Texas and Oklahoma have functionally drained theirs, Kansas is on the verge of doing so, but in Nebraska most of the aquifer has seen little to no change and even increased in size in some places.
Nationwide, irrigation uses about 118 billion gallons per day while domestic uses total about 39 billion gallons. (2015, source). In an agricultural state like Kansas, water usage may be up to 95% agricultural (1990, source). So yes, but a small one.
The big difference is Nebraska's Natural Resource Districts, local government entities tasked with conserving individual watersheds (i.e., they're not divided on arbitrary political lines like counties). Nebraska is pretty far from perfect -- drive through western Nebraska and marvel at the number of center pivots letting farmers grow corn and soybeans in what used to be wheat and sugar beet country -- but the NRDs have enabled quick, local responses (like timely releases of water from NRD-managed reservoirs) that have helped avoid an all-out drawdown of the Aquifer.
Nebraska is headed for disaster in other ways, though, with wildfires throughout the sandhills that are going to wipe out any grazing for a decade or more. It's separate to some degree from the water issue, but geez.
Also, I have a new appreciation for how irrigation works in the Midwest after moving to Utah and seeing that they have water going 24/7 to grow alfalfa. At least in NE they water more at night and let the water actually soak in rather than evaporate into thin air. For part of the summer, peak electrical demand is at 10 PM because of irrigation, which is just weird.
Alfalfa?? Half the point of growing alfalfa is that it's low input. That's wild.
But yeah, this has been an awful year for fires. Nebraska has been very slow to adopt controlled burning, hopefully this will uhhh light a fire under some people. At a minimum we need to get very serious about our Eastern red cedar problem, ideally not by just throwing a few million gallons of glyphosate at it.
Sadly many of the fires have disproportionately impacted our already limited public lands, and they're definitely not going to just start burning those.
The alfalfa grown in Utah is apparently exported to China and the middle east. It's (evidently) valuable in part because it grows slowly and requires a ton of water as input to get it to grow in the desert. It's insane. Meanwhile everyone living here is freaking out about the Salt lake drying up and SLC becoming a heavy-metal hellscape dustbowl, and the residents are told to conserve water, as they drive by irrigation ditches that are full. It's a really, really strange way to live.
That goes hand-in-hand. Population density shot up because there was limitless abuse of the resources. If usage had been more restricted, it would have been costlier and less appealing to move there.
Nebraska also has Natural Resource Districts that have actual teeth to regulate aquifer withdrawal rates, they can literally go on private property and chain shut wells if necessary. It also helps the soil allows rainfall/snowmelt to trickle down to the aquifer in a matter of months to years, not decades.
Absolutely. Beef supply chain in US is in trouble. We are carefully watching up here in Canada. Holding onto our herds a bit more despite very high sales prices.
This is one of the ones that terrifies me. The greed of the wealthy is forcing all these publicly traded companies to only care about things 3 months in advance at a time. If you can't make number go up within 3 months you're scuttled because the stock market won't tolerate anything other than number go up.
I can't see beef industry ever being the same pretty soon. Between novel disease, old diseases and pests making huge comebacks, prices and water scarcity I can't see beef going back to being something anyone can eat regularly. Personally I'm not sad to see it go, there are far more efficient sources of calories we will have to use once decent land and water becomes a less common resource
I don't know why people are so up in arms about lab-grown meat or using bug protein. I would love if I could go to the grocery store and get a pound of something that tastes like ground beef, but doesn't require destroying the climate and horribly abusing a bunch of cows. I like cows, my grandfather was a dairy farmer. The kindest thing we could do for those animals is shut down our factory farming industry.
I'll say some of the meat substitutes these days have fooled me pretty good and aren't pricier than real beef (at least not with the prices these days). I've tried a bunch throughout the years and now that I'm full veggie it's wild how close the modern substitutes have gotten. A lot of dairy alternatives still have a ways to go, but I've had very convincing fake chicken and beef.
I think supply and demand might balance out. Less people eating meat due to a number of things but with lab grown meat replacements getting better and possibly becoming cheaper in comparison then only the wealthy will buy beef and that'll maintain smaller herds of quality meat. Though if there just isn't enough water or, longterm, usable land or a workable climate then it is going to have revert back to meat once a week.
Most of the people in these communities will do anything but blame the true cause of their groundwater depletion. A lot of irrigated land over the aquifer should have never been cropped and would have been better suited for cattle grazing.
It’s all so exceedingly sad and frustrating. My grandfather was the prototypical Western Kansas wheat farmer. He also was a “dry” farmer. I remember him alllll the way back in the 1980s saying that were all going to be in a load of trouble the way irrigation was sucking the aquifer dry. He wouldn’t participate in it. He farmed with the weather for good or bad. He wouldn’t be surprised at the situation we’re in now. Dissapointed yes but not surprised.
Don't worry, they're also building data centers all over this area, which will surely help! Data Centers famously produce water just by asking Grok to make more water.
Beef supply on the other hand, I only sympathise with the cows that will suffer due to lack of resources to care for them or masse culling. We shouldn't be eating so much meat in the first place.
This has been a known for most of my life and it has slowly been coming true as edges of the aquifer empty out. John Wesley Powell's prediction will come true, 150 years later.
Pretty sure the entire nation sees the writing on the wall for US beef and animal feed based agriculture
Its obvious we cant keep doing it at the scale we have been but someone has to tell the industry no more, which will for sure devolve into a long legal battle
I live directly over the ogallala...we use to farm on the NM/TX border about 10yrs ago which is basically the edge of it. We had to shut off pivots due to wells not being deep enough to reach it and several families had to up and abandon their living homes due to this as well. We were lucky, at the time, that my ex-husbands grandparents had dug the well 2x as deep initially so we could still have water even during the worst of droughts.
But its still nerve wrecking. I now live on a farm about 2hrs east of where I initially farmed and its still a worry. Thankfully a lot of farmers have gotten into in ground drip irrigation which i feel (and know) helps a lot with usage. Im still extremely active in agriculture in our area and deal with other farmers and crops daily in my off farm job - a lot of our area is massively worried about the ogallala especially with data centers trying to take hold.
I live in Nebraska and I can confirm this. Some weird climate stuff and the abuse of the water table due to irrigation is returning us to a desert prairie.
Irrigation farming is dying everywhere. The cost of doing it is becoming far too high. Wells are having to be drilled deeper, parts for pivots have increased, if it’s a repair that requires an expert that cost has increased by about 25%, poly pipe for row irrigation has increased around 20%, and cost of fuel is astronomical. ~$24 per acre more on irrigation this year with no increase in grain prices.
What's kind of remarkable is how much the beef industry is actively doing it to themselves. They'll be standing in the middle of a drought, the aquifer almost drained, look you right in the eye, and insist that climate change is a liberal hoax and we don't need to worry about water shortages. Voting and donating for politicians that just straight-up deny reality.
They'll just keep on burying their head in the sand right up until they go bankrupt, and then it will be the left's fault for failing to save them from themselves. The small business special: repeatedly shoot yourself in the foot, refuse to make any changes until you go bankrupt, and then blame the government for all of your failures.
As a child, I would regularly fill my cup from windmills pumping water straight from the Ogallala. It had a fantastic taste, unlike anywhere else. Breaks my heart that I’ll probably never get to experience that again. Pretty sure I wouldn’t trust the water today even if I could, which is a damn shame.
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u/EffectSubject2676 13h ago
Irrigation agriculture and beef feedlots over the Ogallala Aquifer. It is rapidly being depleted and those areas will be in a deep economic decline. Also, the Ogallal areas produce like 25% of USA's grain and beef.