WATER SCARCITY
Learn how aquifer depletion connects to the loss of drought resilience.
BY NICK BROZOVIC, PHD A
lmost 100 years ago, a character in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” memorably describes how he went bankrupt: “Two
ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” Not only does this quote apply to the pains of financial loss, it also captures the similar experience of aquifer depletion.
It’s not terribly noticeable, until it is.
While I didn’t grow up in a farming community (suburban London is not rural by any measure), I’ve worked on water use in agriculture for more than 20 years. I’ve been lucky to visit with growers all over the world, both small and large, and learn from their insights and experiences. Here, I’ll share a couple of anecdotes that serve as bookends to some of my current thinking and research on aquifer depletion.
What really matters for aquifer depletion?
Early in my career, I presented some of my academic work on groundwater management to a group in Kansas. I met with several growers who (correctly) told me I didn’t know what I was talking about. The highly technical analysis I’d just presented didn’t include well yield or measurements of crop water needs expressed in precise units such as gallons per minute per acre. So, they explained, it would be hard for me to say anything relevant about aquifer depletion as I wasn’t considering the things that
were relevant to the lived experience of irrigating during droughts and with declining water tables.
Of course, those Kansas growers were right. What really matters is the ability to meet crop water needs throughout the growing season, especially on the hottest days. This is a function of well yield and irrigated area, as well as weather. Depending on how these variables change over time, irrigated agriculture gets more or less risky. Understanding the importance and implications of such changes is one of the things that I, and my various collaborators, have worked on over the years since.
The other bookend is more recent. A few weeks ago, I talked with a grower in Oklahoma. He shared an anecdote about rural electrification. A rural electric provider in Oklahoma had declined to extend electric service to an area that requested it. In the provider’s estimation, the aquifers in the potential new service area were too thin to allow growers to sustain irrigation in the long term, meaning that they would be unable to recover the costs of providing a grid connection over the long term. This is the rural development impact of declining aquifers writ large.
How might we take an anecdotal understanding of the role that drought, aquifer thickness and well yield play in determining the riskiness of irrigated agriculture and put it on a rigorous
THIS MEANS THAT ENERGY REQUIREMENTS AND PRODUCTION COSTS WILL INCREASE AND IRRIGATION WILL BECOME LESS PROFITABLE AS AQUIFERS DEPLETE.
irrigationtoday.org Spring 2024 | Irrigation TODAY 25
Photos: Nick Brozovic
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40
