Great Plains Running Out of Water

I have been sounding the alarm about this since I lived in TX - over a decade ago. People there use water like there's no tomorrow to have the grass, flowers and trees they grew up with in the Northern states. I was disgusted by their lack of respect for an exhaustable supply of water, particularly given the state's history during the dust bowl years.

They need to change the way they irrigate, WHAT they irrigate and how often. This is a massive task that must be successfully accomplished if we, as a nation, are going to continue feeding ourselves.

Excerpts:

People have been warning about the aquifer's depletion for years, but coordinating conservation programs among farmers has proved difficult. Recently, Texas has imposed state controls on the amount of groundwater that farmers can pump, requiring 16 groundwater districts to each provide a target for an acceptable groundwater level in 50 years.

"The magnitude of this is incredible," he continued. "We're talking about, for the last 20 years, 20 percent of the irrigated acreage of this nation is over the Ogallala."

For an idea of what a severe drought could do to the communities of the Great Plains, consider the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when gigantic "black blizzards" ravaged farms and forced thousands of families to give up their land and try to make a living elsewhere.