Pumps & groundwater
We’re civilized people out here. Managing groundwater together in western Kansas
By Stephen Lauer and Matthew Sanderson, PhD Adapted from the November/December 2017 issue of Colorado Water
O
ur goal as sociologists on the collaborative U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food
and Agriculture-funded Ogallala Coordinated Agriculture Project is to identify ways of managing groundwater that are most useful and meaningful to the people living in the High Plains region. Through in-person interviews and a survey, we are trying to better understand the values and motivations that influence producers’ groundwater management decisions.
Some of our preliminary results suggest that producers from western Kansas draw on a range of values to make decisions about groundwater, weighted toward economic considerations. Producers are very concerned about the costs of inputs and commodity prices, for example, when they talk about water.
From there, conversations can quickly turn to broader and deeper issues, often leading producers to ask: What would it mean to be unable to pass on a viable operation to the next generation because of wells becoming unproductive? What is really being saved when water is conserved? What should the role be of producers in society? To whom, or what, are we responsible for as producers? What is the real value of water?
Kansas Governor Sam Brownback speaking at a Wichita County Water Conservation
Area informational meeting. The WCA tool, approved in 2015, allows local landowners to develop their own plans on how they would like to conserve water to extend
the lifetime of their local water supplies and gain additional flexibilities for their water use over time. The Wichita County WCA was created by county landowners and stakeholders to address the continued decline of the Ogallala Aquifer in their area.
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Producers experience conflicting values, succinctly summarized by one producer as “a tension between rugged individualism and some sort of a community social contract.” How do producers act on these core values to manage their water resources in a depleting aquifer? One area that shows great promise is the recent development of voluntary efforts of producers in Kansas’ Sheridan and Wichita counties that combine technological and policy tools to conserve water.
Several years ago, producers near Hoxie in Sheridan County, Kansas, approached the constraints of a declining aquifer as an opening for community conversations. A series of formal, four-hour-long and sometimes contentious meetings about groundwater management were held, using an “everybody speaks” format. Meanwhile, informal conversations took place among two or three producers at a time as they ran into each other or sought each other out to pitch ideas and reflect on the previous formal meeting.
Producers are very concerned about the costs of inputs and commodity prices, for example, when they talk about water.
Photo credit: Richard Rockel
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