Western Kansans know the time to conserve what’s left of the Ogallala Aquifer is now. Coming up with ideas on how to do that is simple. But figuring out ways that satisfy the farmers, the conservation districts and the state is difficult.
It’s so difficult that various parts of the state are mired in fights over whether their water saving plans do too much or too little.
A plan that doesn’t do enough to satisfy the state
In 2023 the state passed a law requiring conservation districts in western Kansas to submit plans on how they would conserve water, or else the state would intervene.
Trevor Ahring, a civil engineer for Groundwater Management District 3 which covers southwest Kansas, has spent the last few years developing a plan that would stabilize the aquifer in his region.
“We wanted to create a plan that was actually going to accomplish something. We didn’t want to do some grandiose gesture that wasn’t supported long term by the data,” Ahring said.
In southwest Kansas, GMD 3 has struggled in the past to slow how much water it loses every year to irrigation. Some places in the region have lost as much as 30 feet of water in just the last ten years.
That wouldn’t be a big deal if the aquifer was thousands of feet thick. But even at its thickest saturation, the Ogallala is just over 300 feet of water depth in Kansas.
Running out of water means fewer crops harvested, less cattle feed, fewer trucks of grain at the mill and overall less money running through the counties. And the value of land on top of that depleted water resource would likely plummet.
“Our top priority is preserving land values for people and keeping them in business, while saving water,” Ahring said.
GMD 3 also asked for $10 million annually from the state to go towards incentivization programs that allow farmers to collect money with water-saving plans. The farmers would essentially lay water savings plans as bids, and the GMD would select the winning plans and pay those landowners.
The state argues the plan was too soft on irrigators, and said it needs to be more aggressive to stabilize the aquifer sooner.
Earl Lewis, the chief engineer for the state’s Department of Water Resources, rejected the plan twice due to some parts of the region taking as long as 50 years to stabilize the aquifer.
“If you look at 40 or 50 years, you’re really going to get to the bottom of the aquifer and have very little water left,” Lewis said.
But Ahring and GMD 3 said they feel like they have held up their end of the law and created a forward-thinking plan. They decided not to just focus on areas with only 50 years of life remaining in the aquifer as required by law, but the entire district as a whole.
After holding multiple meetings with farmers throughout the region, GMD 3 developed this — its first district-wide conservation plan — by breaking up the district into subregions. Each region has different aquifer saturations and goals to stabilize, a number the Kansas Geological Survey calls “Q-Stable.”
