HAYS — In increasingly dry western Kansas, underground water makes everything possible. Irrigation for crops. Stock water for cattle. Drinking water for towns.
In all, the Ogallala Aquifer provides 70-80% of water used by Kansans each day.
So how much is all that water worth?
A recent study from Kansas State University says the aquifer under western Kansas increases land values by nearly $4 billion.
But those billions are drying up at an accelerating rate.
Aquifer water levels across western and central Kansas dropped by more than a foot on average this past year. That’s the biggest single-year decrease since 2015, according to the Kansas Geological Survey’s annual report.
And while the aquifer is losing that foot of water, it’s barely being refilled. In most of western Kansas, less than one inch of water seeps underground to recharge the aquifer each year.
The declines were especially dire in southwest Kansas, where average water levels fell by 2.17 feet last year. That’s the region’s biggest drop since 2013, up from a 1.25-foot decline in 2020 and a 0.8-foot decline in 2019.
But those accelerating depletion rates didn’t come as a surprise to Brownie Wilson, the survey’s water data manager. Western Kansas is a water-challenged place that gets about half as much precipitation as eastern Kansas in an average year.
Then the drought hit.
“For some of those folks, it hasn’t rained since May,” Wilson said. “That makes it really challenging.”
Even the snowfall from recent blizzards couldn’t make up the precipitation deficit. Most of western and central Kansas remains in severe, extreme or exceptional drought.
That puts the people trying to raise a crop there in a tough spot. So farmers turn to pumping more water from below to irrigate their fields and make up for how dry it is on the surface.
Wilson said 80-90% of the water used in the Ogallala aquifer region goes to irrigation. That averages out to about 2.5 billion gallons a day, pumped up and sprayed on crops.
It can’t go on like that forever.
