“You could pump all the water you wanted to pump.”Īnd they did. In the early 1950s, when Rodger Funk started farming near Garden City, Kan., everyone believed the water was inexhaustible. High Plains farmers were blissfully unaware a generation ago that a dilemma was already unfolding. What is happening here-the problems and solutions-is a bellwether for the rest of the planet. As landowners strive to conserve what’s left, they face a tug-of-war between economic growth and declining natural resources. The challenge of the Ogallala is how to manage human demands on the layer of water that sprawls underneath parts of eight states from South Dakota to Texas. And scientists say it will take natural processes 6,000 years to refill the reservoir. If the aquifer goes dry, more than $20 billion worth of food and fiber will vanish from the world’s markets. This is the breadbasket of America-the region that supplies at least one fifth of the total annual U.S. In some places, the groundwater is already gone. The Ogallala Aquifer, the vast underground reservoir that gives life to these fields, is disappearing. Framed by immense skies now blue, now scarlet-streaked, this 800-mile expanse of agriculture looks like it could go on forever. On America’s high plains, crops in early summer stretch to the horizon: field after verdant field of corn, sorghum, soybeans, wheat and cotton.
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