Kansas

Every Raindrop Counts

Southwest Kansas and northwest Texas pump so much water and so little is recharged that the aquifer has been largely depleted.

Before irrigation, there were the rainmakers. The dry corner of the High Plains near Goodland has a long and turbulent romance with those who claim to be skilled at wringing raindrops from the sky. Frank Melbourne, the “rain king,” who worked the county fair circuit in 1891, was surely the most flamboyant, if fraudulent, practitioner. Cloud seeding, which involves injecting clouds with chemicals that induce them to produce rain, took hold by the 1940s and is still in use today. It is not without controversy.

As the extended drought settled in the end of the 1990s, frustrated farmers in nearby Colby blamed the Kansas Weather Modification program for the cloudless skies overhead. Cloud-seeding pilots were chasing away clouds with their flares and dry ice, the farmers claimed. The Citizens for Natural Weather organized, attracted 500 members, and rallied to end cloud seeding. Cloud seeding survives today, though in fewer counties and recast as “hail suppression”—which uses the same techniques to bust up large hail stones. Kyle Spencer, a cloud-seeding pilot and manager of the groundwater management district in Scott City, shrugs off the opposition: “During a drought, everybody’s looking for a scapegoat.”

Out of Balance: Mining Water Like Coal

Across western Kansas, water levels in the aquifer have declined in some places by 60 percent. The gap between what is withdrawn for irrigation and what is recharged is significant.

400 Groundwater extraction 300 200 100 Average recharge rate 1950 2014 1990 Water use for irrigation, Finney County, Kansas

in thousands of acre-feet

Oasis of Water Conservation: Will It Spread?

In an effort to narrow the gap between water withdrawal and recharge, 70 farmers around the tiny town of Hoxie have done what no political leader in Kansas has dared—they required irrigation be cut back to conserve water. In 2013, the farmers set up a 99-square-mile conservation zone, where they agreed to a 20 percent reduction in irrigation for five years. It is the first such zone in Kansas, and setting it up wasn’t easy. “Nobody is willing to stick their neck out,” says Mitch Baalman, a fourth-generation farmer and leader of the conservation effort. “We had to change the culture. We took water for granted,” he says. “You didn’t talk about it. It was a taboo subject, and as we had these meetings and got to talking about it, people said, ‘Our wells are dropping off too.’”

The talks lasted three years before the group agreed to the terms and the zone boundaries. “At every meeting, it came up—life’s not fair,” Baalman says. “That’s right. Somebody is always going to be on the line.” Jeff Torluemke, a banker and farmer, is on the line. His wheat field lies inside the zone. The cornfield across the road is outside the zone. Torluemke turned off his center-pivot irrigation sprinkler last year on June 4. The sprinkler in his neighbor’s cornfield ran until the first week of September. Torluemke wants to conserve the aquifer for future generations. Yet, standing in his field, the view across the road pains him. “It is irritating to me,” he says. “I feel no ill will towards the farmer. I feel ill will towards the system. Everyone should be doing what we’re doing.”