Channel: Food Farmer Earth

Category: Entertainment

Tags: production agriculturewater irrigation for farmingcooking up a storywest texas producerstexas high planstexas tech universityogallala aquiferfinite water resourcewater scarcity on the texas high plainsfood farmer earth

Description: From the archives: The Ogallala Aquifer is a massive underground, freshwater reservoir that extends across eight states from South Dakota to Texas. Critical for large-scale production agriculture, nowhere is the aquifer more in danger of running dry than in the Texas High Plains. Lucia Barbato of the Texas Tech University Center for Geospatial Technology explains the Ogallala Aquifer using sophisticated maps of the region. This underground water supply is critical for irrigation tor area farmers and it’s a finite freshwater resource that’s running dry. This is an extended interview from the 30 minute documentary we filmed in 2010 about the efforts of area stakeholders, producers (farmers), scientists, universities and state and federal government agencies, to more accurately measure water usage and find ways to extend the life of aquifer for agricultural purposes. Watch Water Scarcity For Farmers on the Texas High Plains: youtu.be/cWVhEwaikpA Partial Transcript: This is a challenging land. It always has. It is today. The challenge is that while we are over at the southern end of the aquifer that's a virtually finite water supply. Because of the ability to tap that resource and use it for irrigation. A lot of it's already been used, it's a very rapid rate. We use it far in excess of it’s ability to recharge. And today we're dependent on that for agriculture as we know it. But that's changing, that change has got to come as rapidly as the decline, because we've got to learn other ways of keeping this land productive. The Ogallala Aquifer extends all the way up into South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and they have a lot more water in some areas than we do here in West Texas, the Ogallala Aquifer in the southern part of Texas is cut off by the, the, the area over here that's been drained and eroded. And over here by the Pecos River. So really this is the only extent, that, that, that's left. So, we're not getting recharged anymore from the Rocky Mountains. When people hear the word aquifer. They just think water it's a giant coke bottle underneath the, the ground, and you just stick your straw in your well and you know you suck your, your water up through your well, but that's not the case, what aquifer really looks like is imagine that coke bottle and you fill it up with little stones and gravel. And then what your aquifers composed of, are those stones and rocks and gravel and the water just exists in the interstitial pore spaces of those rocks that together comprise the aquifer. And that aquifer is contained in an area underground so the aquifer might be two to 400 feet below the surface where you're standing right now. And then it'll be about a couple hundred feet thick and in a good area, and then you'll have clay with a clay layer, and that will be your Aqua clewd or Aqua tarde. And then you'll have other sediments below that so your aquifers contained in a limited area. Well what's happening here is we're going back in time about 10 million years. And imagine if you will the Rocky Mountains are twice as high as they are today. And so there was great amounts of erosion happening. And so with that erosion, large amounts of sediments and debris were coming off the Rocky Mountains, along with that water and they carved great channels across the Great Plains, and you're seeing a couple of those channels coming across West Texas, all through Bailey lamb and Lubbock County, parmer and Castro particularly, and even down here across the bottom, representing these great channels, and then over time, those sediments filled in those channels. So what you're looking like you're looking at here is as if you're on the Colorado Plateau, looking down and down the Colorado River into these old paleo channels. And so this is what the Yahweh staccato looked like to about 10 million years ago. So now let's come fast forward again, and I'm going to take this one down and show you what happens next, those channels are all filled in now with sediments, so where you see the darker blue is the thicker sediments, or you see the lighter blue. It's where it's thinner, maybe 2030 feet at the most of all the rock and all the water that's in between those gravels, and that constituent that that comprises our aquifer. So, our aquifer could be up to 300 feet thick in those channels. Okay, so that's where our water is, this is where it's not so much. So, if we take a look now at the land use the land use for our area. When you flew over you saw those giant circles with the cotton inside them. Those are center pivots, and those are irrigated with those large sweeping arms, and each one of these circles represents a center pivot... Follow us: ... twitter twitter.com/cookingupastory Facebook facebook.com/cookingupastory Pinterest pinterest.com/foodfarmerearth Website RSS Feed cookingupastory.com/feed Cooking Up a Story channel on YouTube youtube.com/cookingupastory