For decades, the Texas Panhandle was green with cotton, corn, and wheat. Wells was pulling a thousand gallons per minute from the seemingly bottomless Ogallala aquifer, which allowed farmers to thrive despite frequent droughts and summer heat.
But the groundwater, which lasts for generations, dries up and creates another problem in the southern plains: Without enough rain or groundwater to harvest, the soil can blow away – as was the case during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.
“We the hell wasted the water,” says Tim Black of Muleshoe, Texas, recalling how farmers used to water as a kid. Water flooded furrows or sprayed in high arches before farmers introduced more efficient center pivot systems.
His grandfather was able to get to water with a post-hole dredger. Black is fortunate enough to pull 50 gallons per minute from wells up to 400 feet deep.
Farmers now face tough choices, especially in parts of Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma.
Some grow less thirsty crops or improve watering. Others, like Black, are replacing some crops with livestock and grazing land.
And more native grasses are planting that dormant in drought, while deep roots hold the ground and turn green with the slightest rain.
“There’s a reason Mother Nature chose these plants for these areas,” says Nick Bamert, whose father founded a seed company 70 years ago that specialized in native grasses. “The natives … will remain because they have seen the coldest winters and the hottest dry summers.”
Black, a former corn farmer, plants native grasses in corners of his fields, as pasture for cattle and between rows of wheat and annual grass.
The switch to cattle, he hopes, will allow his eldest son to stay in the land that Black’s grandparents began plowing 100 years ago. His younger son is a data analyst based out of Dallas.
“You want your kids to come back, but damn it, there are better ways to make a living than we do,” says Black. “It’s just too hard here without water.”
Even when it is dry, sand swells from fields and clogs fields, ditches and roads.
Farmers do their best, but “everyone knows … the water is going away,” says Jude Smith, a biologist who oversees the Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge, which was established during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl to cover the native prairie and three headwaters obtain. fed lakes.
According to a study last year, more than half of the currently irrigated land in parts of western Texas, eastern New Mexico, and the Oklahoma Panhandle could be lost by the end of the century. And the central part of the aquifer could lose up to 40% of the irrigated area by 2100.
Those losses could be slowed as farmers adapt to lower water levels, researchers say. However, the projections underline the need for planning and incentives in vulnerable areas.
The US Department of Agriculture is prioritizing the conservation of grasslands in a “Dust Bowl Zone” in parts of Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.
But restoring native vegetation in the sandy soil above the Ogallala has proven difficult where irrigation has ceased on the former Kansas farmland. The same goes for land outside of the Ogallala that was previously irrigated with river water, including in Colorado’s Arkansas River Valley.
Longer periods of drought that have plagued the southwest for the past 20 years are likely to continue, says USDA meteorologist Brad Rippey.
As a result, farmers may need to use some of the remaining groundwater to restore native grasses, says Meagan Schipanski, co-author of the study, associate professor of soil and plant sciences at Colorado State University.
“In an ideal world there would be some foresight and incentives,” says Schipanski.
Chris Grotegrut, who has planted native grasses for 75% of his family’s land, says most farmers don’t convert fast enough.
“Maybe they are using the latest and greatest in equipment and technology in the field, but (that) is not going to fully offset the changes that are coming,” says Grotegut, who uses native grasses for grazing and plants wheat directly in native grass pastures .
However, experts say that federal crop insurance and conservation programs often work in opposite directions: farmers sometimes plant crops even if they are likely to fail because they are covered by insurance; and land management is often more profitable than government payments for grassland.
From 2016 through mid-2021, less than 328,000 acres (132,737 hectares) were registered in the USDA’s Grasslands Conservation Reserve Program in the counties of the Dust Bowl Zone, according to USDA data. Enrollment for 2021 ended last month, but the USDA hasn’t released the latest total numbers.
In Texas, there were fewer than 32,000 acres in Dust Bowl Counties for the past five years – none in Bailey County, where Black lives.
While grasslands can be included in other programs, there has been a big push this summer to include more in the CRP grassland program, which allows grazing and was approved in the 2014 Farm Bill, says Zach Ducheneaux, director of the USDA’s Farm Service Agency.
The agency greatly increased payments to a minimum of $ 15 per acre after being cut by the Trump administration, Ducheneaux says.
The transition to grassland and conservation is also hindered by an agricultural banking system, which makes it difficult to obtain credit for anything other than conventional agriculture and equipment.
But farmers need programs that allow them to make a living while moving to grasslands and less irrigation over perhaps 15 years, says Amy Kremen of the Ogallala Water Coordinated Agriculture Project.
“There is a thirst for action that wasn’t there five years ago,” says Kremen because of the severity of the water loss. “What is at stake is the vitality of communities that depend on this water and cities that are drying up and blowing away.”
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