After decades of local inaction, Kansas lawmakers are pushing for big changes in irrigation.
Some farmers are bracing for major changes in how they use the long-depleting Ogallala Aquifer.
The nation’s largest underground store of fresh water, the Ogallala transformed area regions of southwestern Kansas into an agricultural powerhouse.
After 50 years of studies, discussions, and handwringing about the aquifer’s decline, the state is demanding that local groundwater managers finally enforce conservation.
But in this region where water is everything, they’ll have to overcome entrenched attitudes and practices that led to decades of over-pumping, according to the Kansas Reflector, a nonprofit news operation.
Last year, Kansas lawmakers passed legislation for the Southwest Kansas Groundwater Management District, which spans a dozen counties.
Unlike the two other Kansas districts that sit atop the crucial aquifer, this one has done little to enact formal conservation programs that could help prolong the life of the aquifer. The new law aims to force action.
At a hearing in February on a bill meant to help farmers in one county leave the district, a Kansas House member floated the idea of doing away with the organization, also known as Groundwater Management District 3 (GDM 3), altogether.
District leaders think the criticism is unfair. But even they acknowledge that painful change is brewing. Change that will force farmers to cut back.
Clay Scott, who has served on the district’s board for more than two decades, said most local farmers are ready to change.
That’s partly because they don’t want to give the state a reason to impose its own restrictions, he said.
Scott said the problem of overuse has been generations in the making and can’t be reversed overnight.
The discussions mirror those occurring not just across the eight Ogallala states (Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming) but also across the country.
Decades ago, Kansas officials issued more water rights than the aquifer can sustain.
The state should fix that rather than punish farmers with across-the-board cuts, one farmer said,
The first step is identifying priority areas for its conservation efforts.
In some parts of the district the aquifer is already all but gone. Other areas have more than 60 years of water left, even if they don’t cut back their usage.
The district in 2026 will have to present an action plan, which it says will reflect the huge variations in aquifer conditions.
Kansas’ chief engineer Earl Lewis, who will evaluate the board’s plan and future conservation efforts, said the board likely can designate the whole region a priority, though he’s not sure it meets “the spirit” of the law.
There has been discussion about the possibility of paying growers to shut down their wells.
Farmer Steve Sterling said conservation planning “should have been done 40 years ago.”
Between the 1950s and the 1970s, Kansas created the fundamental problem that allows aquifer depletion by granting farmers the right to pump more water out of the aquifer each year than returns to it via rainfall.
But the state has largely left it up to locals to find solutions to the problem.
Their five-decade histories primarily have been marked by further decline of the Ogallala Aquifer. Two districts have made progress in recent years and helped farmers to slow, or even stop, the decline.
Though its territory is twice the size of the other two districts combined, the southwest Kansas district hasn’t accomplished as much.
The other districts have offered financial assistance to farmers investing in water-efficient irrigation systems and championed large-scale restrictions on pumping.
GMD 3 has done none of that. Between 2010 and 2022, financial records show, the district spent on average, only 13 percent of the money it budgeted for conservation. In most years, it didn’t spend anything on conservation.
In 2022, Hamilton County farmers submitted a petition to withdraw from the groundwater district.
They characterized the organization as a bureaucratic mess, with a ballooning budget that spends little on conservation, obstructs programs meant to slow groundwater decline, and provides no benefits for dryland farmers who also pay assessments.
The petition criticized groundwater district leaders’ fixation on building an aqueduct across the state. The organization twice has trucked water 400 miles from the Missouri River to western Kansas in an effort to sell the idea.
In their petition, Hamilton County farmers said the project only managed to move and dump water with “no tangible benefit to anyone.”
Kansas started requiring irrigators to install meters and report water usage in the early 1990s.
In Wichita County, Kansas, just beyond the bounds of GMD 3, farmers created a conservation program that was launched in 2021. Called a local enhanced management area, farmers committed to cutting water use by at least 25 percent.
Farmer Don Smith said the program provided a chance for locals to act together before the state stepped in.
Smith said it shows that growers can save water and still make money. Lower water use does lead to lower yields, he said. But it also makes growing crops less expensive.
In Wichita County, Smith said, test wells show the changes have slowed or even reversed aquifer decline. But even so, he doesn’t think irrigated farming will last forever.
He expects the day will come when pumping small amounts of water won’t be worth the cost.
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