Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [285]
The Ogallala region supports not so much a farming industry as a mining industry. If the pumping has been reckless, as some believe, it is an example of carefully planned recklessness, for all the states regulate the pumping of groundwater; their choice was to allow its exhaustion within roughly thirty to a hundred years after the pumping began in earnest back in the early 1960s. Except for petroleum and natural gas and coal, most mining industries affect a rather small area. This is one that affects an area larger than California. Actually, it affects the entire world, for the product of mining the Ogallala is a prodigious amount of food, much of it consumed overseas.
It is a dead certainty that the Ogallala will begin to give out relatively soon; the only question is when. Everything hinges on one constant—the weight of water—and two variables: the cost of energy and the price of food. As anyone knows who has ever carried a full pail up five flights of steps, water is one of the heaviest substances on earth; pumping it a hundred or two hundred feet out of the ground consumes a lot of energy. The Ogallala farmers do not benefit, as do many groundwater pumpers throughout the West, from hydroelectricity generated at Bureau of Reclamation dams and sold to them at discount rates. For the water table to drop fifteen or twenty feet during a period when the price of energy increases sevenfold is a catastrophe. This, however, is precisely what happened throughout much of Kansas, Oklahoma, and West Texas between 1972 and 1984. During the same period, the price of most farm commodities barely doubled, if that.
The odds are high, therefore, that long before all the water runs out, the farmers will no longer be able to afford to pump. In 1969, a study performed by Texas A and M University projected that the West Texas aquifer would decline to forty-four million acre-feet by the year 2015, down from 341 million acre-feet before the Second World War. Irrigated acreage would, by then, have fallen to 125,000 acres from a mid-sixties peak of 3.5 million acres. Sorghum yields would be down 90 percent; cotton would be down 65 percent; total agricultural value in the region would diminish by 80 percent. In those figures lay the makings of a Dust Bowl-sized exodus, a social calamity, and a huge rash of bankruptcies that could ripple through the nation’s economy. In 2015, the study predicted, there would be 300,000 fewer people in the region than there were in 1969. A new set of figures compiled in 1979 by the Texas Department of Water Resources was somewhat more optimistic, but the planning director of that same agency did not sound as if he subscribed to the optimism himself. “It’s pretty easy to conjure up a disatrous series of events,” said Herbert Grubb in 1980. “We’re sort of assuming that a lot of the farmers will stay in business raising dryland cotton or wheat. But with interest rates high as they are, and drylands yields down 70 or 80 percent from irrigation yields, I really don’t see how the farmers are going to carry their debts. The older ones, maybe. But the younger ones, the newer ones, are up to their ears in debt. So you could just as easily assume that millions of acres suddenly go fallow. Then along comes a drought, some eighty-mile-an-hour winds, and you’ve got another Dust Bowl. The shelterbellt trees are gone. A lot of those farmers are milking every cent out of the land while the water lasts. The conditions are ripe for something downright catastrophic.”
The decision of the Ogallala states to treat the aquifer as if it were a coal mine, thereby setting themselves up for a long, long fall, is ironic in an extreme sense. Their