It is late June on the Southern High Plains of Texas and we are in the third year of a major drought. There are three irrigation wells that supply the water needed on the Experiment Station and they are dropping off at a precipitous rate. The north well, the one with the highest capacity, is already pumping air at times. I do research on corn, a crop that is considered to be "high water use" as compared to cotton and sorghum, and it is looking more and more like I won't have the water needed to complete my research for this year. We are at the southern tip of the Ogallala Aquifer and irrigation and urban use are depleting this resource at an alarming rate.
All of this has me thinking back to the Dust Bowl, a time when farmers expanded crop production on marginal land and prayed that the necessary rain would come, which of course it did not. Things are different now, to some degree, thanks to irrigation systems like center pivots and subsurface drip. But things are the same as well; we are all ultimately dependent on rainfall and farmers are always praying for rain (without hail). The Ogallala is declining and won't be able to provide our irrigation water for much longer. Of course we are working on research into drought tolerant crops and production systems that maximize water use efficiency, but in the end it is all about the water we pump from the ground, for a time, and the rain that falls from the sky. I listen to the national news and hear about debates in Washington and rulings by the Supreme Court. Of course these things matter on a larger scale, but we who live by nature's rules are totally dependent on what happens on a very small scale.
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