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The aquifer that makes agriculture in the Great Plains possible is running out of water, primarily from overirrigation. That has farmers considering different crops. Calen Moore of the Kansas News Service reports.
CALEN MOORE, BYLINE: Western Kansas is sprawling with grain crops, small towns and essential food and fuel industries. Even hundreds of miles away, ingredients grown in western Kansas are part of everyday life. I'm in rural southwest Kansas, but I asked my co-worker Stephen Koranda, on the other side of the state near Kansas City, to see what he could find at his local grocery store.
(SOUNDBITE OF CARTS CLANGING)
STEPHEN KORANDA, BYLINE: All right. I'm going to grab a cart and head on in.
MOORE: And right away, he started noticing things that were likely from western Kansas.
KORANDA: Whole wheat bread.
MOORE: Wheat is one of the big ones.
KORANDA: Into the meat section. Ooh, lots of beef.
MOORE: That's very likely from western Kansas, too, one of the country's top beef producers. The list goes on - soybean oil, corn syrup, milk. All of these products rely on irrigation, which allows dry western Kansas, a state prone to drought, to grow corn, soybeans and other commodity crops at a large scale.
And it's not just Kansas, but a lot of Nebraska and Texas corn crops depend on irrigation. Logan Simon, agronomist for Kansas State University, says that might need to change since the water of the aquifer is tapped at a rate much faster than it can naturally be replenished. So he's been researching alternative crops.
LOGAN SIMON: All of the crops that we're looking at here are going to be providing some sort of benefit in the form of a reduction in the water required.
MOORE: It's not a simple task. Grain elevators and feed lots are built for crops like corn and soybeans, which require billions of gallons of water from irrigation not per year, but per day. The Ogallala Aquifer, the only source of water for this region, has been running dry for decades due to excessive irrigation for crops that need more water than the region receives.
It means some areas in Kansas may only have a couple decades of water left. Alex Millershaski is a young farmer in southwest Kansas, and his water supplies have plummeted.
ALEX MILLERSHASKI: We used to have 20-some wells on the farm, and we're only pumping four now.
MOORE: For farmers like Millershaski, getting creative will keep their farms going. He's been attending an alternative crop school run by Kansas State University. It focuses on crops like canola, black-eyed peas and cotton as alternatives that grow well here. Southwest Kansas farmer Heath Koehn has bought in. He decided for the first time to grow something he's never grown before - a canola crop.
HEATH KOEHN: The wheat price was terrible, and I've got some limited irrigation, and I was, like, well, I wanted to, like, kind of diversify some of that and not just have all my eggs in one basket.
MOORE: Growing canola requires about 40% less water than corn, and new biofuel markets fueled by canola have recently spread to Kansas. So if these alternative crops can solve so many problems on the frontier, why don't all farmers just make the switch?
CHAD HART: You have to be willing to accept more risk to establish that alternative crop because there aren't these built-in mechanisms that we usually have.
MOORE: Agriculture economist Chad Hart from Iowa State University explains that commodity crops like corn and soybeans are the most economically efficient, despite their water costs. Plus crop insurance, government subsidies and bank loans are all built on traditional crops, not the possible alternatives. Those dollars make up nearly a quarter of a farmer's income.
HART: They ensure not only crop farm yields, but they also ensure the prices that the farmers will capture.
MOORE: But despite the risks, the next generation of farmers seem intrigued by the challenge of growing something new. For NPR News, I'm Calen Moore in Liberal, Kansas.
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