Untitled Document
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 figures that he will 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, he can afford to water generously this
year — and, he says, he’ll need to, “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 recent controversy over ethanol has been 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 (except for those who happen to have oil
wells on their property) won’t be getting rich. But in 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 tapped 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 by 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 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 million to 667 million 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 will also be a big nail in the coffin of
the Conservation Reserve Program, 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, an increase in 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 faster exploitation of
the Ogallala. The U.S. Geological Survey has reported that by 2005 the most
heavily exploited areas, accounting for almost a 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
streambeds. Across much of the region, irrigation has drawn aquifers down
so far that the flow of water has reversed and now moves 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 percent 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 will
most likely 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 water 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 U.S.
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 1 billion gallons of soy biodiesel annually by 2016. Even that
mammoth effort would hardly achieve “energy independence,”
displacing only 13 percent of our current gasoline consumption and less
than 2 percent of diesel’s. 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 increase 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 increase, 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 from a rural landscape that’s more suited to slow, steady exploitation.
In the name of “energy independence” we
are wasting irreplaceable water, but so far the only result has been
increased dependence of agribusiness on federal and state governments by
way of 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 Steve
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 (1979, Oxford University Press), 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 with which 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 from a parched landscape — had not been
addressed. Now, almost a decade even further 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.
Saddled with the ethanol industry, though, 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 plant breeder and writer in Salina,
Kan. His book Sick Planet: Corporate Food and
Medicine was just published by Pluto
Press.
This article appears in Apr 3-9, 2008.
