What's the matter with Kansas? It's running out of water due to cattle production

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/09/15/1236184/-What-s-the-matter-with-Kansas-It-s-running-out-of-water-due-to-cattle-production

A new study from Kansas State University gives a picture of what's the matter with Kansas. Basically Kansas farmers have been living in a bubble of water exuberance, drawing down water from The High Plains Aquifer, which supplies 30 percent of the nation's irrigated groundwater, at more than six times the natural rate of recharge. Farmers there have managed to become so productive that the area boasts "the highest total market value of agriculture products" of any congressional district in the nation, the authors note. Those products are mainly beef fattened on large feedlots and the corn used to fatten those beef cows.

Tom Philpott at Mother Jones sums up the issue:



This is in many ways a slow-motion crisis — decades in the making, imminent for some, years or decades away for others, hitting one farm but leaving an adjacent one untouched. But across the rolling plains and tarmac-flat farmland near the Kansas-Colorado border, the effects of depletion are evident everywhere. Highway bridges span arid stream beds. Most of the creeks and rivers that once veined the land have dried up as 60 years of pumping have pulled groundwater levels down by scores and even hundreds of feet.


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