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According to a major study just completed by Camp Dresser & McKee, a Boston engineering firm, 5.1 million acres of irrigated land (an area the size of Massachusetts) in six Great Plains states will dry up by the year 2020. If current trends continue, Kansas will lose 1.6 million irrigated acres, Texas 1.2 million, Colorado 260,000, New Mexico 224,000, Oklahoma 330,000. Yet this drastic estimate, declares Herbert Grubb of the Texas department of water resources, is "20% too optimistic."
"When the water goes," says W.E. Medlock, a stoic, third-generation farmer from Lubbock, Texas, who has lost 47 of his 73 wells in ten years, "we'll just go back to dry-land farming." To the farmers of the Great Plains, those words summon up visions of The Grapes of Wrath. Dry-land farming means larger farms with lower yields, fewer workers and probably higher prices in the supermarkets. Cattlemen know that less water means less corn and therefore smaller herds. Grubb calls such farming the "Russian roulette" of agriculture. Over a ten-year period, he says, dry-land farming will yield two strong harvests, four average ones and four "busts."
Although the cause of the trouble is obvious, the cure is not. Indeed, there may be no fundamental solution to the ebbing of the Ogallala. "We can prolong the supply," concludes John Weeks, a U.S. Geological Survey engineer who heads a five-year U.S.G.S. study of the situation, "but we are mining a limited resource, like gold, and we can't solve the ultimate depletion problem."
Conservation may forestall the end. Farmers can simply use less water. They are already converting from profitable but water-thirsty corn to water-thrifty crops such as wheat, sorghum and cotton. James Mitchell, a cotton farmer from Wolfforth, Texas, has installed an experimental center-pivot sprinkler that, instead of spraying outward, gently drops water directly into the planted furrows, thereby reducing evaporation. Sophisticated laser-guided land graders can now almost perfectly flatten the terrain so that water is not wasted in runoff. Electrodes planted in the fields can measure soil wetness and determine exactly when water is needed. Today, these techniques are rarities, but they may soon be routine. As Kansas Cattle Feeder Harold Burnett puts it: "Water misers" will last longer. But even the stingiest will go under if neighbors are wasteful and the whole aquifer dries up.
Last week a committee representing the Governors of states that tap the Ogallala published a list of 20 recommendations for action. Most of the suggestions, based on a $6 million federal study of the problem, involved stopgap efforts rather than cures. Except one. The committee wants further study of a proposal by the Army Corps of Engineers for huge canal systems that would import water from South Dakota, Missouri and Arkansas. The routes — all of which would be uphill — range in length from 376 miles to 1,135 miles. The cost— from $3.6 billion to $22.6 billion — currently places the canals in the realm of fantasy.