Finding Ways To Conserve

While the water from aquifers doesn’t move above ground with the force required to erode rock, farms in the Great Plains are changing. The Ogallala Aquifer, which provides nearly all the groundwater in western Kansas and Oklahoma, the Texas Panhandle and eastern New Mexico, is drying up faster than it can be replenished.

In New Mexico, there’s a novel solution in the works to incentivize producers to de-commission wells. The Ogallala Land & Water Conservancy in Clovis launched a pilot project in 2022 that paid landowners through a water rights lease agreement to leave 80% of their water allotment in the ground.

“Since we shut off these wells in 2022, we have made three lease payments to our eight landowners, soon to be nine,” says Ladona Clayton, executive director of the conservancy. “We saved almost 8 billion gallons of groundwater in just two years. By the end of 2025, with additional wells now decommissioned, it’s going to be 13 billion.”

Riley thinks crop subsidies disincentivize farmers from reducing their cotton or wheat crops despite repeated poor or nonexistent harvests. He believes we need a better solution, something that balances the needs of farm families today with the needs of the next generation.

“The young people that are coming in behind us, they’re the ones that are going to pay the price of us utilizing all the natural resources. I think we have a duty to go in there and figure this problem out and have enough gumption to carry it through,” he says.