In Kansas, a significant portion of the Ogallala's area has already shrunk below the threshold -- 30 to 50 feet thick -- that can support large-scale irrigation. Kansas lies downstream from Colorado and Nebraska, and has fought bitter water battles with both states in recent years. Those border regions in which struggles over water have been fiercest are precisely the regions being eyed for new ethanol plants and bigger plantings of thirsty corn.
Farther south, the situation is even worse. USDA has recorded water-table drops of 100 feet in the Texas panhandle, and by 2025, several counties at the southern fringe of the Ogallala in west Texas will have lost 50 to 60 percent of their water that's available for pumping. Agricultural economists at nearby Texas Tech University predict that unless restrictions are put in place, farmers will most likely respond to water shortages (and high corn prices) by drilling more wells and depleting the water even faster than that.
Chemical tide
Unlike the High Plains, the Corn Belt of Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois, and surrounding states receives enough rain to naturally replenish most groundwater used to irrigate crops. There, the bigger issue is quality, not quantity of water. Maps of nitrate pollution in streams and groundwater fit closely to maps of nitrogen fertilizer use across the country, especially in the Corn Belt. The National Academy of Sciences found that recent increases in corn production have already led to greater pollution of surface and groundwater. The risk is "considerable", says the Academy, that expansion of corn ethanol production will add to the nitrate load of the Mississippi River and expand the oxygen-depleted "Dead Zone" in the Gulf of Mexico a thousand miles downstream.
A study conducted last year at the request of Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) painted a scenario in which the conversion to biofuels is even more aggressive than what's currently mandated by the Energy Independence and Security Act: 20 billion gallons of corn ethanol and 1 billion gallons of soy biodiesel annually by 2016. Even that mammoth effort would hardly achieve "energy independence", displacing only 13 percent of our current gasoline consumption and less than 2 percent of diesel. But it would achieve the long-term cultivation of almost 100 million acres of corn, with 47 percent of the nation's crop going straight to ethanol plants.
Under that scenario, fertilizer and pesticide use would increase substantially across the Corn Belt and in the High Plains as well. Toxic nitrates in groundwater would rise accordingly, by 11 percent in the states around the Great Lakes and 8 percent in the southern Plains -- areas where there is already a critical need to lower, not raise nitrate levels.
A recent study found nitrate pollution to be by far the worst in those aquifer-dependent regions of Texas where irrigated corn and sorghum are now grown and will likely increase in acreage as ethanol plants clamor for more and more grain. University of Kansas scientists found that pollutants have been concentrated in that state's portion of the Ogallala by "evapotranspiration, oil brine disposal, agricultural practices, brine intrusion, and waste disposal," as well as nitrates, chlorides, and sulfates.
"Everybody else has to get his cut"
Riding the roller-coaster of agricultural economics, farmers have learned to get whenever the getting is good. Ethanol mania is the latest in a long line of schemes designed to wring quick wealth out of a rural landscape that's more suited to slow, steady exploitation. We are wasting irreplaceable water in the name of "energy independence", but so far the only result has been increased dependence of agribusiness on federal and state governments, via subsidies bestowed on every gallon of ethanol produced.
An exhaustive report (pdf) on the vast tangle of past and current biofuel subsidies, prepared for the International Institute for Sustainable Development, concluded that "Government subsidies to liquid biofuels, particularly ethanol, started out as a way to increase the demand for surplus crops. But lately they have been promoted as a way to reduce oil imports, improve the quality of urban air-sheds, reduce carbon dioxide emissions, raise farmer incomes and promote rural development. That is a tall order for a pair of commodities [ethanol and biodiesel] to live up to. It is highly unlikely that they can."
Yet another goal not listed in that statement -- to ensure a big return on investment for agribusiness -- may be biofuel's chief accomplishment. As champion corn grower Steve Albrecht puts it, the ethanol boom may make it possible for him to produce more, but it won't necessarily boost his own net income. "With $800 anhydrous [ammonia fertilizer per acre] and $3.60 diesel for the tractor, we still won't be getting ahead. Everybody else has to get his cut first."
The fate of the Plains
Donald Worster, professor of history at the University of Kansas and author of a shelf-full of books on the environmental history of our drier regions, including "Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s" (1979, Oxford Univ. Press), sees only a very limited future for agriculture in the High Plains, noting, "It is basically a mining economy wherever groundwater is the resource to be extracted, and the ultimate result of such an economy is always a ghost town." If we had the legal tools, he says, "We should reserve the remaining groundwater supply for human and animal consumption during the dessicated future that seems likely to develop with climate change." But today there's no mechanism to do that.
In 1987, Deborah and Frank Popper of Rutgers University sparked furious debate across the nation's midsection with their paper "The Great Plains: from dust to dust" in the journal Planning. Because the irrigation economy simply cannot last, they wrote,
The federal government's commanding task on the Plains for the next century will be to recreate the nineteenth century, to reestablish what we would call the Buffalo Commons. More and more previously private land will be acquired to form the commons. In many areas, the distinctions between the present national parks, grasslands, grazing lands, wildlife refuges, forests, Indian lands, and their state counterparts will largely dissolve. The small cities of the Plains will amount to urban islands in a shortgrass sea. The Buffalo Commons will become the world's largest historic preservation project, the ultimate national park. Most of the Great Plains will become what all of the United States once was — a vast land mass, largely empty and unexploited.
With the Ogallala shrunk to a size that can support only animal grazing, small industry, and a limited human population, the land could eventually restore itself, and the people who remain could achieve a pleasant, if not lucrative, existence. But, wrote the Poppers, "It will be up to the federal government to ease the social transition of the economic refugees who are being forced off the land. For they will feel aggrieved and impoverished, penalized for staying too long in a place they loved and pursuing occupations the nation supposedly respected but evidently did not."
Twelve years after publication of that paper, the Poppers noted that the Buffalo Commons was "materializing more quickly than we had anticipated." However, their evidence for that consisted entirely of an observed growth in the numbers of bison grazing in the region. What they had identified as the chief source of the region's problems -- the drive to wring excess private profit out of a parched landscape -- had not been addressed. Now, almost a decade even farther down the road, the ethanol industry threatens to wreck the region's chances for a smooth transition to its inevitably drier, quieter future.
Quieter, that is, except for the High Plains' other great natural resource: a wind that never stops howling and will never be depleted. That has led Donald Worster to conclude that "wind farms, carefully planned to avoid any destruction of native prairie and wildlife habitat, offer probably the most viable economic future for the Plains." However, he warns, that can't be the basis for another growth economy: "I doubt such a future would support the level of population or the number of towns that are currently hanging on."
The vast resource of the Ogallala could be used to help the region ease into such a modestly productive, long-term state. But, saddled with the ethanol industry, the High Plains is more likely to arrive at that future only after passing through an economic crash and ecological ruin.
Farther south, the situation is even worse. USDA has recorded water-table drops of 100 feet in the Texas panhandle, and by 2025, several counties at the southern fringe of the Ogallala in west Texas will have lost 50 to 60 percent of their water that's available for pumping. Agricultural economists at nearby Texas Tech University predict that unless restrictions are put in place, farmers will most likely respond to water shortages (and high corn prices) by drilling more wells and depleting the water even faster than that.
Chemical tide
Unlike the High Plains, the Corn Belt of Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois, and surrounding states receives enough rain to naturally replenish most groundwater used to irrigate crops. There, the bigger issue is quality, not quantity of water. Maps of nitrate pollution in streams and groundwater fit closely to maps of nitrogen fertilizer use across the country, especially in the Corn Belt. The National Academy of Sciences found that recent increases in corn production have already led to greater pollution of surface and groundwater. The risk is "considerable", says the Academy, that expansion of corn ethanol production will add to the nitrate load of the Mississippi River and expand the oxygen-depleted "Dead Zone" in the Gulf of Mexico a thousand miles downstream.
Under that scenario, fertilizer and pesticide use would increase substantially across the Corn Belt and in the High Plains as well. Toxic nitrates in groundwater would rise accordingly, by 11 percent in the states around the Great Lakes and 8 percent in the southern Plains -- areas where there is already a critical need to lower, not raise nitrate levels.
A recent study found nitrate pollution to be by far the worst in those aquifer-dependent regions of Texas where irrigated corn and sorghum are now grown and will likely increase in acreage as ethanol plants clamor for more and more grain. University of Kansas scientists found that pollutants have been concentrated in that state's portion of the Ogallala by "evapotranspiration, oil brine disposal, agricultural practices, brine intrusion, and waste disposal," as well as nitrates, chlorides, and sulfates.
"Everybody else has to get his cut"
Riding the roller-coaster of agricultural economics, farmers have learned to get whenever the getting is good. Ethanol mania is the latest in a long line of schemes designed to wring quick wealth out of a rural landscape that's more suited to slow, steady exploitation. We are wasting irreplaceable water in the name of "energy independence", but so far the only result has been increased dependence of agribusiness on federal and state governments, via subsidies bestowed on every gallon of ethanol produced.
An exhaustive report (pdf) on the vast tangle of past and current biofuel subsidies, prepared for the International Institute for Sustainable Development, concluded that "Government subsidies to liquid biofuels, particularly ethanol, started out as a way to increase the demand for surplus crops. But lately they have been promoted as a way to reduce oil imports, improve the quality of urban air-sheds, reduce carbon dioxide emissions, raise farmer incomes and promote rural development. That is a tall order for a pair of commodities [ethanol and biodiesel] to live up to. It is highly unlikely that they can."
Yet another goal not listed in that statement -- to ensure a big return on investment for agribusiness -- may be biofuel's chief accomplishment. As champion corn grower Steve Albrecht puts it, the ethanol boom may make it possible for him to produce more, but it won't necessarily boost his own net income. "With $800 anhydrous [ammonia fertilizer per acre] and $3.60 diesel for the tractor, we still won't be getting ahead. Everybody else has to get his cut first."
The fate of the Plains
Donald Worster, professor of history at the University of Kansas and author of a shelf-full of books on the environmental history of our drier regions, including "Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s" (1979, Oxford Univ. Press), sees only a very limited future for agriculture in the High Plains, noting, "It is basically a mining economy wherever groundwater is the resource to be extracted, and the ultimate result of such an economy is always a ghost town." If we had the legal tools, he says, "We should reserve the remaining groundwater supply for human and animal consumption during the dessicated future that seems likely to develop with climate change." But today there's no mechanism to do that.
Worster believes that as the region dries out, it "will require a large government program to deprivatize a lot of farm acreage and put it into the best vegetation cover we can devise. It will be very difficult to farm much of the southern plains within another fifty years, unless global climate change is arrested very soon. The deprivatized, former agricultural land will have little economic value, except for national parks and light grazing."
In 1987, Deborah and Frank Popper of Rutgers University sparked furious debate across the nation's midsection with their paper "The Great Plains: from dust to dust" in the journal Planning. Because the irrigation economy simply cannot last, they wrote,
The federal government's commanding task on the Plains for the next century will be to recreate the nineteenth century, to reestablish what we would call the Buffalo Commons. More and more previously private land will be acquired to form the commons. In many areas, the distinctions between the present national parks, grasslands, grazing lands, wildlife refuges, forests, Indian lands, and their state counterparts will largely dissolve. The small cities of the Plains will amount to urban islands in a shortgrass sea. The Buffalo Commons will become the world's largest historic preservation project, the ultimate national park. Most of the Great Plains will become what all of the United States once was — a vast land mass, largely empty and unexploited.
With the Ogallala shrunk to a size that can support only animal grazing, small industry, and a limited human population, the land could eventually restore itself, and the people who remain could achieve a pleasant, if not lucrative, existence. But, wrote the Poppers, "It will be up to the federal government to ease the social transition of the economic refugees who are being forced off the land. For they will feel aggrieved and impoverished, penalized for staying too long in a place they loved and pursuing occupations the nation supposedly respected but evidently did not."
Twelve years after publication of that paper, the Poppers noted that the Buffalo Commons was "materializing more quickly than we had anticipated." However, their evidence for that consisted entirely of an observed growth in the numbers of bison grazing in the region. What they had identified as the chief source of the region's problems -- the drive to wring excess private profit out of a parched landscape -- had not been addressed. Now, almost a decade even farther down the road, the ethanol industry threatens to wreck the region's chances for a smooth transition to its inevitably drier, quieter future.
Quieter, that is, except for the High Plains' other great natural resource: a wind that never stops howling and will never be depleted. That has led Donald Worster to conclude that "wind farms, carefully planned to avoid any destruction of native prairie and wildlife habitat, offer probably the most viable economic future for the Plains." However, he warns, that can't be the basis for another growth economy: "I doubt such a future would support the level of population or the number of towns that are currently hanging on."
The vast resource of the Ogallala could be used to help the region ease into such a modestly productive, long-term state. But, saddled with the ethanol industry, the High Plains is more likely to arrive at that future only after passing through an economic crash and ecological ruin.
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