[OKC] US farmers fear the return of the Dust Bowl

[Shauna Struby]

Long article. Very powerful and well worth the read. 

 

Note: I lived in Happy, Texas, for three years in the 1960s, and wrote about
the Ogallala for the Oklahoma Gazette in 1992. At the time I was
interviewing for the article, some experts were saying the Ogallala only had
about 20-30 years before we'd begin to see its depletion. Unfortunately, it
now appears those experts were spot on.

US farmers fear the return of the Dust Bowl

For years the Ogallala Aquifer, the world's largest underground body of
fresh water, has irrigated thousands of square miles of American farmland.
Now it is running dry.

The Telegraph, By Charles Laurence 7:00AM GMT 07 Mar 2011

There is not much to be happy about these days in Happy, Texas. Main Street
is shuttered but for the Happy National Bank, slowly but inexorably
disappearing into a High Plains wind that turns all to dust. The old Picture
House, the cinema, has closed. Tumbleweed rolls into the still corners
behind the grain elevators, soaring prairie cathedrals that spoke of
prosperity before they were abandoned for lack of business.

 

Happy's problem is that it has run out of water for its farms. Its
population, dropping 10 per cent a year, is down to 595. The name, which
brings a smile for miles around and plays in faded paint on the fronts of
every shuttered business - Happy Grain Inc, Happy Game Room - has become
irony tinged with bitterness. It goes back to the cowboy days of the 19th
century. A cattle drive north through the Texas Panhandle to the rail heads
beyond had been running out of water, steers dying on the hoof, when its
cowboys stumbled on a watering hole. They named the spot Happy Draw, for the
water. Now Happy is the harbinger of a potential Dust Bowl unseen in America
since the Great Depression.

 

***

Highlights:

 

*        'Since then,' says David Brauer of the US Agriculture Department
agency, the Ogallala Research Service, 'we have drained enough water to
half-fill Lake Erie of the Great Lakes.' Billions upon billions of gallons -
or, as they prefer to measure it, acre-feet of water, each one equivalent to
a football field flooded a foot deep - have been pumped. 'The problem,' he
goes on, 'is that in a brief half-century we have drawn the Ogallala level
down from an average of 240ft to about 80.'

 

*        'The Ogallala supply is going to run out and the Plains will become
uneconomical to farm,' Brauer says. 'That is beyond reasonable argument. Our
goal now is to engineer a soft landing. That's all we can do.'

 

*        Ten years ago Pickens concluded that the prophets of climate-change
may well be right, and if they were, that water would become more valuable
than the oil that had made his fortune. He formed a company called Mesa
Water, and began buying up Panhandle land with water rights over the
Ogallala. He is now the largest individual water owner in America, with
rights over enough of the aquifer to drain an estimated 200,000 acre-feet a
year, at least until the land goes dry. That is 65 billion gallons a year,
or, to put it another way, 124,000 gallons a minute.

 

*        Texas has the Conservation Districts instead, with the local
farmers voting their own restrictions. The problem is that these are
voluntary. 'The idea,' Walthour says, 'is to balance individual water rights
with the common interest. It's the best thing to do. Otherwise the biggest
pump wins - and everyone goes dry.'

 

*        Plunk believes that one way or the other, farming the High Plains
will have to end. Like the farmers of Happy, he has handed his land to the
CRP to let it return to the Plains that nature intended. He misses the life.
'I used to go out on the land before dawn when I worked at school,' he says,
'and I would always plough to the east. I ploughed into the rising sun, and
I knew there was a God.' He pushes back his cap, and stares into the
distance.

 

Full article here ::: http://bit.ly/hiyJ4P 

 

Shauna Lawyer Struby

imagine, innovate, collaborate, transition

Co-chair, Transition OKC

Past-president, Sustainable OKC

www.goinglocalokc.org <http://www.goinglocalokc.org/> 

www.sustainableokc.org <http://www.sustainableokc.org/>  

Fresh Greens blog <http://freshgreens.typepad.com/> 

 

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