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My father farmed in Kansas and envied those lucky farmers in the
wetter states to the east of us, who could grow 200-bushel corn
and other lucrative crops like soy beans and sugar beets. He had
to satisfy himself with wheat, a drought-tolerant crop first
brought to the States from a place in Russia much like ours.
There, they called such arid places "steppes." Here, we called
them "plains."
To look at the pale-green buffalo grass that covered the High
Plains, you would never suspect that an aquifer holding as much
water as Lake Huron lay beneath. But we knew about the aquifer.
Its waters seeped to the surface in some otherwise dry creek
beds, feeding rare ponds where we sometimes went fishing. And my
pioneer grandparents had drilled down into the aquifer and
erected windmills that we relied on to pump the water we needed
to exist.
The technology to tap more water from the aquifer arrived in the
1940s, but it wasn't until the mid-sixties that my family had
saved enough to drill our first irrigation well. Bumper profits
rolled in. By the time we sold our farm in 2006, we had five
wells pumping 200 million gallons out of the aquifer every
growing season. In all, Plains farmers were pumping 6 trillion
gallons. That's 1.5 trillion more than the Colorado River
carries to the Southwestern United States.
The Ogallala Aquifer is vast. It underlies portions of eight
large states -- 174,000 square miles of crop and rangeland all
the way from South Dakota to Texas. But it is also invisible. So
it's not surprising that until the debate over the Keystone XL
pipeline erupted, few people had ever heard of it. Then for
several months, its melodious name was broadcast all over the
national news. Now that the aquifer is safe from the pipeline
(for the time being), there's another risk worth examining:
industrial agriculture.