The Buffalo Commons

 

In a world riveted to violent natural catastrophes - hurricanes and tornadoes, floods and droughts, heatwaves and wildfires - slower moving calamities are easily overlooked.

Canadians don't dwell on the Ogallala acquifer or the American Great Plains, the US grain belt and its decline.

It was ten years ago that "Broken Heartland" appeared in Harper's magazine. Two American academics, Frank and Deborah Popper, were promoting the idea of a Buffalo Commons. The basic idea is to remove land from agricultural production and transform it into a massive grazing area for buffalo (i.e. bison).

Stretching along the eastern steppes of the Rockies from Montana to Texas, the plains constitute nearly a fifth of the land in the lower forty-eight. In the late 1800s, they were the very symbol of our country’s expansionist ambitions, flush with homesteaders drawn to the promise of 160 acres of free land, and a blank page on which to rewrite their lives. But over time the plains have also come to reflect the more modern habit of overdevelopment. By 1930, the agricultural boom in the region had already begun to stretch the limits of sustainability. Groundwater dried up. Drought set in. And under a billowing prairie wind, the shallow roots of annual crops proved incapable of holding the topsoil in place: with massive dust storms darkening the horizon, the migratory exodus began.

The American prairie is losing its agricultural viability.

Although many cities on the plains have grown, rural communities across Kansas and Nebraska, Montana and Texas, Oklahoma and the Dakotas have shrunk each decade since the Great Depression. In Kansas alone, more than 6,000 towns have vanished altogether. Nearly a million square miles of the American heartland currently meet the definition of “frontier” used by the Census Bureau more than a century ago.

While farms in the region have been failing, succumbing to dissolution and amalgamation, with "neighbors cannibalizing neighbors," beneath their feet lies an insurmountable threat.

Farming on the plains may survive in the near term, even without the communities it once sustained. But soon the water will run out.

Sprawling beneath eight states and more than 100 million acres, the Ogallala Aquifer is the kind of hydrological behemoth that lends itself to rhapsody and hubris. Ancient, epic, apparently endless, it is the largest subterranean water supply in the country, with an estimated capacity of a million-billion gallons, providing nearly a third of all American groundwater irrigation. If the aquifer were somehow raised to the surface, it would cover a larger area than any freshwater lake on Earth — by a factor of five.

It wasn’t until the 1940s, when a variety of new technologies coalesced on the plains, that large-scale irrigation sprang up for the first time — but from there, the transformation was quick. Within a decade thousands of wells were drilled, creating a spike in productivity as unprecedented as it was unsustainable. Land that had been marginal became dependable; land that was dependable became bountiful. Even as the U.S. population surged, with soldiers returning and babies booming, the output of the plains rose fast enough to meet and exceed demand.

No one worried about the aquifer. To farmers it seemed a bottomless reserve, generating the same outlandish volume no matter how many straws went in. Soon there were hundreds of thousands of wells producing the same reliable flow, year after year, without any evident stress.

Then, during the early 1990s, farmers throughout the Great Plains began to notice a decline in their wells. Irrigation systems from the Dakotas to Texas dipped, and, in some places, have been abandoned entirely.

Rapacious irrigation is emptying the Ogallala, lowering the water level about six feet per year. That's close to 100 feet over the past 15 years.

None of which is likely to come back. For complex reasons involving wind, weather, and soil composition, the Ogallala does not recharge in the way one might expect. In fact, of the eight states above the aquifer, only Nebraska, with its sandhill dunes, is permeable enough to contribute any serious replenishment.

Texas Tech prof, Kevin Mulligan, with funding from the US Dept. of Agriculture, monitors the Ogallala, especially the Texas Panhandle.  Ten years ago Mulligan warned that region would run dry around 2030.

It seems like 2030 will usher in no end of changes. While America's grainbelt is depopulating agronomists are studying whether perennial crops can replace existing crops dependent on groundwater. Maybe it is time to return the Great Plains back to nature.