Socialized agriculture killing Great Plains Aquifer: part n

Nebraska signed the South Platte River Compact with Colorado in 1923. In 1998, when Kansas sued Nebraska over its groundwater use the Supreme Court of the United States didn't even mention the word "groundwater" and although it never appeared in the initial 1943 Republican River compact the Court ruled its use affects flows.

Today, Republican counties throughout the High Plains where desertification driven by overgrazing and poor land management practices still yield scorched earth. 

The Ogallala Aquifer or Great Plains Aquifer, is being depleted six and a half times faster than its recharges and nearly all the groundwater sampled from it is contaminated with uranium and nitrates.

That’s because, experts say, generations of corn growing, feedlot runoff and oft-unwitting nitrogen overuse has left a sobering legacy buried in the Nebraska soil. It’s nitrate, creeping slowly downward towards our water supply. And Nebraska has the highest pediatric cancer rate of any state west of Pennsylvania, according to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. [Nebraska’s nitrate problem is serious, experts say. Can we solve it?]

Ag producers have destroyed shelter belts to plant industrial crops that deplete aquifers and now drought is blowing toxin-laden topsoil into downwind states. Spring wildfire seasons begin in eastern Colorado, western Kansas, the panhandles of Oklahoma, Texas and other Republican-held areas where moral hazard and poor ranching practices routinely decimate the high plains. 

Dead grasses are potentially explosive in a region where bison would have been clearing fine, flashy fuels just 150 years ago. In Kansas alone wildfires blazed across some 400,000 acres last year during a derecho that traversed some 1500 miles beginning on the Front Range in Colorado. Record high winds fanned fires some forty miles wide consuming power lines, fences and domestic livestock.

In Russell County alone, the fire killed 1,711 cattle — 1,359 cows, 36 bulls and 316 calves — according to data from the county’s USDA farm services agency. The USDA office has paid out just north of $1.3 million to Russell County cattle producers to help cover those losses. Yucca plants that were reduced to charred stumps are now adorned with crowns of long, green leaves. The layer of tan ash that blanketed just about everything has blown away or blended into the dirt. [One year after wildfires, Kansas ranchers vow to ‘get by ... somehow’]

American bison will eat a yucca, root and all. 

At a defunct AltEn ethanol plant just west of Omaha in eastern Nebraska 150 million gallons of water contaminated with 84,000 tons of pesticide residue have been determined to be too toxic to be spread on area farm ground. In February, 2021 two tanks at the facility burst releasing some 4 million gallons of polluted slurry downstream.

Picture a bathtub. But this bathtub has a very rocky, jagged bottom. When you pour in the water, the tub doesn’t fill evenly. Instead, it forms pools of different sizes within the crags and pits of that rocky floor. Now imagine that bathtub is huge: 175,000 square miles huge. It stretches across 8 stations, from South Dakota all the way down to Texas, including parts of eastern Colorado. That is the Ogallala Aquifer. [Less water, fewer farmers: the future of agriculture on the Ogallala Aquifer]

In May this scribe did a 2000 mile loop to Vermillion, South Dakota from Santa Fe County, New Mexico and back again where the number of cattle feedlots in Kansas, Nebraska and eastern Colorado draining the Ogallala Aquifer is staggering. The Arkansas River was dry at Dodge City, Kansas and thousands of confined feeder cattle there valued at some $2000 per head died in June.

Rewild the West.