What's the matter with Kansas? It's running out of water due to cattle production

Community

Sunday September 15, 2013 · 1:00 PM PDT

2013/09/15 · 13:00

High Plains Aquifer

A new study from Kansas State University gives a picture of what's the matter with Kansas. Basically Kansas farmers have been living in a bubble of water exuberance, drawing down water from The High Plains Aquifer, which supplies 30 percent of the nation's irrigated groundwater, at more than six times the natural rate of recharge. Farmers there have managed to become so productive that the area boasts "the highest total market value of agriculture products" of any congressional district in the nation, the authors note. Those products are mainly beef fattened on large feedlots and the corn used to fatten those beef cows.

Tom Philpott at Mother Jones sums up the issue:

So the area has dramatically ramped up both beef and corn production since 1980—and the great bulk of that corn comes from irrigated land. And while beef production in the region has at least leveled off, the region's farmers just keep churning out more corn—including irrigated corn. New York Times reporter Michael Wines summed up the situation in an article last May:
This is in many ways a slow-motion crisis — decades in the making, imminent for some, years or decades away for others, hitting one farm but leaving an adjacent one untouched. But across the rolling plains and tarmac-flat farmland near the Kansas-Colorado border, the effects of depletion are evident everywhere. Highway bridges span arid stream beds. Most of the creeks and rivers that once veined the land have dried up as 60 years of pumping have pulled groundwater levels down by scores and even hundreds of feet.

More on what's the matter with Kansas below the fold.

Kansas is a leader in beef production, with more than 19 percent of all U.S. beef originating from Kansas beef processing facilities. The state ranks third in cattle and calves on farms and third in cattle and calves on grain feed, 10th in hogs on farms, 11th in market sheep and lambs, 14th in meat and other goats, 16th in milk produced, and 19th in sheep and lambs on farms.

Food and Water Watch

Food and Water Watch has done a study of U.S. livestock factory farm concentration. The results are in the image above. The Midwest breadbasket which lies directly over the High Plains Aquifer contains the greatest concentration of livestock factory farms.

Detail of Kansas with livestock factory farm concentration in dark red

The High Plains aquifer is known as the Ogallala aquifer and is also threatened by the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada to Port Arthur, Texas. Keystone XL was proposed to run dangerously close to this water source, though the company has since revised some of the route. Amazing that the possibility of a portentially catastrophic oil spill would even be considered at this time.

In Kansas part of the problem is that they are up the wazoo in farm subsidies. They run in the top five of states receiving farm subsidies. I guess red Kansas doesn't understand the socialist political references. That needs to change. I've written about the immense unsustainable use of water for livestock production. With water stress a future certainty due to climate change and population increase, it's time for Kansas to rethink its farm culture in a move away from unsustainable monoculture crops and livestock.

This content was created by a Daily Kos Community member.

Make YOUR voice heard!

What's the matter with Kansas? It's running out of water due to cattle production

Comments are closed on this story.