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Running
Dry
Agribusiness
hails ethanol as our best chance to become independent of
oil —but are we destroying the high plains in the process?
With
corn selling at record-high prices, Steve Albracht expects
to have no trouble paying his electric bills this year. Albracht
irrigates 1,000 acres of corn near the town of Hart in the
Texas Panhandle and expects to shell out $180 to $240 per
acre to run his pumps through the spring and summer. “In this
area,” says Albracht, “the water table has dropped, but nobody’s
cutting back on watering yet. There’s still plenty down there.”
Albracht
won the 2005 National Corn Yield Contest in the “irrigated”
category, producing a whopping 352 bushels per acre. In a
region that gets an average of less than 18 inches of rain
annually, Albracht and his neighbors apply anywhere from 28
inches to more than 3 feet of water to their corn each year.
With the prospect of a highly profitable harvest, Albracht
says that he can afford to water generously this year. And
he’ll need to, he says, “because it’s been a dry winter.”
For once, times are good in the High Plains. Corn and other
grains are selling like precious metals, and there is every
reason to believe that prices will stay high. At the heart
of the boom is the U.S. government’s decision to rely on corn-based
ethanol to meet a big part of the nation’s demand for “renewable”
fuels.
Most of the recent controversy over ethanol has focused on
its poor energy return: In growing corn and turning it into
ethanol, you have to burn three calories to get four. With
prices of fuel and other inputs rising fast, corn farmers
won’t be getting rich (except for those who happen to have
oil wells on their property.) But selling their corn for such
high prices, they can afford to sow more acres and burn more
propane, diesel or electricity to pump more water than ever.
A torrent of cash will be flowing through the nation’s corn-growing
regions, but the biggest price will be paid in water.
To hear agribusiness boosters and politicians tell it, corn-based
ethanol is a miraculous solution to the nation’s hunger for
liquid fuels. But as miracles go, it’s not all that impressive.
When Jesus, according to Biblical reports, converted approximately
150 gallons of water into an equivalent quantity of wine,
his conversion rate was about a cup of ethanol per gallon
of water invested (given the typical alcohol content of wine).
Compare that to current processes that use irrigated corn
as their carbon source and get less than a teaspoon of ethanol
for each gallon of water consumed.
In dry areas of the High Plains, where irrigation is the most
crucial to corn production and the ethanol-to-water ratio
even lower, agriculture is dependent on a one-time drawing
of groundwater that hasn’t seen daylight for 11,000 years
or more. The vast Ogallala aquifer, stretching from not far
south of Steve Albracht’s Texas farm all the way up into South
Dakota, is being mined at a rate that, in some areas, will
drain it sometime in the relatively near future—at least before
the oil wells of the Persian Gulf run dry.
The Ogallala was trapped underneath the High Plains around
the time of the last ice age. The formation holds enough ancient
water to fill Lake Huron, the second-greatest of the Great
Lakes—or at least it did before being exploited for agriculture.
In the High Plains, raising a single bushel of irrigated corn
slurps up 2,000 to 3,000 gallons of water, and more corn than
ever is being raised there.
With national corn acreage having shot up 15 percent just
from 2006 to 2007, pressure on water resources is increasing.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that the land
area sown to corn will remain at historically high levels
of 90 million acres or more through at least 2017. The incentive:
the price, which has rocketed up from around $2 to more than
$5 per bushel. And USDA forecasters now see high corn prices
as near- permanent.
Most of the region’s corn currently goes to cattle feedlots,
but from this point onward, prices will be kept high by the
ethanol industry. In western Kansas, for example, ethanol
production plants have a total capacity of 143 million gallons
per day, but new plants already planned or under construction
will add more than 700 million gallons per day, most of that
from irrigated corn or sorghum. In the eastern half of the
state, where the Kansas River is already considered a toxic
hazard because of fertilizer contamination, corn-ethanol capacity
is slated to grow from 101 to 667 gallons per day in the near
future.
The Energy Independence and Security Act, passed by Congress
just before Christmas, requires that the nation produce 15
billion gallons of corn ethanol per year by 2015. While meeting
only 10 percent of Americans’ gasoline consumption, that level
of production would require massive, permanent increases in
the amount of land sown to corn, as well as ramped-up water
consumption and pollution.
That new law also will be a big nail in the coffin of the
Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which, since the mid-80s,
has been paying farmers to reseed millions of acres of highly
erodable cropland to diverse mixtures of native perennial
grasses and other plants. CRP has done more to conserve soil
and protect water in agricultural regions than any other federal
initiative. But the USDA now estimates that farmers will plow
up 5 million acres of CRP land in the next four years alone
to plant corn and other biofuel crops.
According to the calculations of the Washington-based group
Environmental Defense, increasing irrigated corn acreage by
10 percent to 20 percent in the High Plains will have an effect
on water resources similar to that of plopping onto its landscape
a city the size of metropolitan Denver (which would be equivalent
to doubling the human population of the entire region).
After World War II, irrigation technology reached a level
that allowed for faster exploitation of the Ogallala. The
U.S. Geological Survey has reported that by 2005, the most
heavily exploited areas, accounting for almost one-tenth of
the entire region, had seen the water table drop between 50
and 270 feet farther beneath the surface. Farmers in some
of the prime agricultural areas with the richest, thickest
water deposits—in western Kansas, eastern Colorado, and the
Oklahoma and Texas panhandles—have had to spend more and more
money and fuel to bring water from greater and greater depths.
Flowing through the natural shortgrass vegetation of western
Kansas, once-great rivers like the Arkansas are fed not just
by surface streams but also by water tables that reach up
and away from their streambed. Across much of the region,
irrigation has drawn aquifers down so far that the flow of
water has reversed, now moving down and out of rivers into
the surrounding dry ground. Rivers are actually dropping underground,
leaving only dusty beds visible for much of the year.
In Kansas, a significant portion of the Ogallala’s area has
already shrunk below the threshold—30 to 50 feet thick—that
can support large-scale irrigation. Kansas lies downstream
from Colorado and Nebraska, and has fought bitter water battles
with both states in recent years. Those border regions, in
which struggles over water have been fiercest, are precisely
the regions being eyed for new ethanol plants and bigger plantings
of thirsty corn.
Farther south, the situation is even worse. The USDA has recorded
water-table drops of 100 feet in the Texas Panhandle, and
by 2025, several counties at the southern fringe of the Ogallala
in west Texas will have lost 50 to 60 percent of their water
that’s available for pumping. Agricultural economists at nearby
Texas Tech University predict that unless restrictions are
put in place, farmers most likely will respond to water shortages
(and high corn prices) by drilling more wells and depleting
the water even faster than that.
Unlike the High Plains, the Corn Belt of Iowa, Minnesota,
Illinois and surrounding states receives enough rain to naturally
replenish most groundwater used to irrigate crops. There,
the bigger issue is quality, not quantity of water. Maps of
nitrate pollution in streams and groundwater fit closely to
maps of nitrogen fertilizer use across the country, especially
in the Corn Belt. The National Academy of Sciences found that
recent increases in corn production have already led to greater
pollution of surface and groundwater. The risk is “considerable,”
says the academy, that expansion of corn-ethanol production
will add to the nitrate load of the Mississippi River and
expand the oxygen-depleted “Dead Zone” in the Gulf of Mexico
a thousand miles downstream.
A study conducted last year at the request of Sen. Saxby Chambliss
(R-Ga.) painted a scenario in which the conversion to biofuels
is even more aggressive than what’s currently mandated by
the Energy Independence and Security Act: 20 billion gallons
of corn ethanol and a billion gallons of soy biodiesel annually
by 2016. Even that mammoth effort hardly would achieve “energy
independence,” displacing only 13 percent of our current gasoline
consumption and less than 2 percent of diesel. But it would
achieve the long-term cultivation of almost 100 million acres
of corn, with 47 percent of the nation’s crop going straight
to ethanol plants.
Under that scenario, fertilizer and pesticide use would increase
substantially across the Corn Belt and in the High Plains
as well. Toxic nitrates in groundwater would rise accordingly,
by 11 percent in the states around the Great Lakes and 8 percent
in the southern plains—areas where a critical need to lower,
not raise, nitrate levels already exists.
A recent study found nitrate pollution to be by far the worst
in those aquifer-dependent regions of Texas where irrigated
corn and sorghum are now grown and will likely increase in
acreage as ethanol plants clamor for more and more grain.
University of Kansas scientists found that pollutants have
been concentrated in that state’s portion of the Ogallala
by “evapotranspiration, oil-brine disposal, agricultural practices,
brine intrusion and waste disposal,” as well as nitrates,
chlorides and sulfates.
Riding the roller-coaster of agricultural economics, farmers
have learned to get whenever the getting is good. Ethanol
mania is the latest in a long line of schemes designed to
wring quick wealth out of a rural landscape that’s more suited
to slow, steady exploitation. Last year, the Lawrence, Kan.
Journal-World reported on the short-term pragmatism that
underlies the boom in western Kansas: “Wayne Bossert, manager
of the Northwest Kansas Groundwater District No. 4, in Colby,
has a counter view. ‘If you are going to make money, you are
going to use water,’ Bossert said. ‘If you want to make less
money, use less water. It’s an economic resource out here;
it’s about choices.’ Bossert said policymakers wanting to
reduce use of the aquifer needed to approach the problem with
eyes wide open. ‘We are going to have economic and social
impacts. Are you certain this is the way you want to go?’
. . . Bossert noted that irrigation is the foundation of industries
ranging from crops, fertilizer and seeds to equipment, land
and taxes.”
We are depleting irreplace-able water in the name of “energy
independence,” but so far the only result has been increased
dependence of agribusiness on federal and state governments,
via subsidies bestowed on every gallon of ethanol produced.
An exhaustive report on the vast tangle of past and current
biofuel subsidies, prepared for the International Institute
for Sustainable Development, concluded that “government subsidies
to liquid biofuels, particularly ethanol, started out as a
way to increase the demand for surplus crops. But lately they
have been promoted as a way to reduce oil imports, improve
the quality of urban air-sheds, reduce carbon dioxide emissions,
raise farmers’ incomes and promote rural development. That
is a tall order for a pair of commodities [ethanol and biodiesel]
to live up to. It is highly unlikely that they can.”
Yet another goal not listed in that statement—to ensure a
big return on investment for agribusiness—may be biofuel’s
chief accomplishment. As champion corn-grower Albracht puts
it, the ethanol boom may make it possible for him to produce
more, but it won’t necessarily boost his own net income. “With
$800 anhydrous [ammonia fertilizer per acre] and $3.60 diesel
for the tractor, we still won’t be getting ahead. Everybody
else has to get his cut first.”
Donald Worster, professor of history at the University of
Kansas and author of a shelf-full of books on the environmental
history of our drier regions, including Dust Bowl: The
Southern Plains in the 1930s, sees only a very limited
future for agriculture in the High Plains, noting, “It is
basically a mining economy wherever groundwater is the resource
to be extracted, and the ultimate result of such an economy
is always a ghost town.” If we had the legal tools, he says,
“We should reserve the remaining groundwater supply for human
and animal consumption during the desiccated future that seems
likely to develop with climate change.” But today there’s
no mechanism to do that.
Worster believes that as the region dries out, it “will require
a large government program to deprivatize a lot of farm acreage
and put it into the best vegetation cover we can devise. It
will be very difficult to farm much of the southern plains
within another 50 years, unless global climate change is arrested
very soon. The deprivatized, former agricultural land will
have little economic value, except for national parks and
light grazing.”
In 1987, Deborah and Frank Popper of Rutgers University sparked
furious debate across the nation’s midsection with their paper
“The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust” in the journal Planning.
Because the irrigation economy simply cannot last, they wrote,
“The federal government’s commanding task on the plains for
the next century will be to re-create the 19th century, to
reestablish what we would call the Buffalo Commons. More and
more previously private land will be acquired to form the
commons. In many areas, the distinctions between the present
national parks, grasslands, grazing lands, wildlife refuges,
forests, Indian lands, and their state counterparts will largely
dissolve. The small cities of the plains will amount to urban
islands in a shortgrass sea. The Buffalo Commons will become
the world’s largest historic preservation project, the ultimate
national park. Most of the Great Plains will become what all
of the United States once was—a vast land mass, largely empty
and unexploited.”
With the Ogallala shrunk to a size that can support only animal
grazing, small industry, and a limited human population, the
land could eventually restore itself, and the people who remain
could achieve a pleasant, if not lucrative, existence. But,
wrote the Poppers, “It will be up to the federal government
to ease the social transition of the economic refugees who
are being forced off the land. For they will feel aggrieved
and impoverished, penalized for staying too long in a place
they loved and pursuing occupations the nation supposedly
respected but evidently did not.”
Twelve years after publication of that paper, the Poppers
noted that the Buffalo Commons was “materializing more quickly
than we had anticipated.” However, their evidence for that
consisted entirely of an observed growth in the numbers of
bison grazing in the region. What they had identified as the
chief source of the region’s problems—the drive to wring excess
private profit out of a parched landscape—had not been addressed.
Now, almost a decade even farther down the road, the ethanol
industry threatens to wreck the region’s chances for a smooth
transition to its inevitably drier, quieter future.
Quieter, that is, except for the High Plains’ other great
natural resource: a wind that never stops howling and will
never be depleted. That has led Donald Worster to conclude
that “wind farms, carefully planned to avoid any destruction
of native prairie and wildlife habitat, offer probably the
most viable economic future for the plains.” However, he warns,
that can’t be the basis for another growth economy: “I doubt
such a future would support the level of population or the
number of towns that are currently hanging on.”
The vast resource of the Ogallala could be used to help the
region ease into such a modestly productive, long-term state.
But, saddled with the ethanol industry, the High Plains is
more likely to arrive at that future only after passing through
an economic crash and ecological ruin.
Stan
Cox is a freelance writer. This article first appeared at
Alternet.com. Source: Featurewell.com.
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