There’s a apply within the Excessive Plains when drought units in and shallow wells run dry. It’s known as “water mining,” and it entails tapping deep aquifers to maintain kitchen taps and farm irrigators working.
Now two small west-central Kansas cities — Hays and Russell — are in search of a brand new method to go the additional mile for freshwater.
Slightly than “mine” aquifers, the cities wish to embark on one thing extra akin to “water grazing,” the place non-local entities purchase massive tracts of farmland, halt crop and livestock manufacturing, and put the land to new work accumulating and storing water.
The apply, additionally known as “buy-and-dry,” just isn’t distinctive to Kansas. However the play by Hays and Russell has created a tempest in a state the place many farmers already face gripping drought and the place water rights are considered as a treasured commodity — even when customers pay nothing for the precise water related to these rights.
Consultants say the case is the primary of its variety in Kansas, and it’s put a highlight on Hays and Russell, that are about 30 miles aside and have a mixed inhabitants of roughly 25,500 folks. The state capital, Topeka, is a two- to three-hour drive east on Interstate 70.
The roots of the present struggle started greater than 25 years in the past. In 1995, after one of many worst droughts in its historical past, Hays bought an almost 7,000-acre ranch in rural Edwards County, about 75 miles south within the Arkansas River basin. It paid $4.3 million for the ranch, known as R9, and made clear it was a hedge towards future water shortages.
The area had skilled water deficits earlier than, together with from 2010 to 2015 when drought gripped a lot of Kansas for 248 weeks, in keeping with federal information.
However the water ranching idea sits poorly with some farmers who draw billions of gallons of water yearly for crops and livestock. Neighbors of the R9 ranch have watched the previous working panorama revert to a pure prairie over three a long time. Now some are mounting a marketing campaign towards what they view as an illegal taking of agricultural water for municipal use.
The dispute, which ultimately might go earlier than the Kansas Supreme Courtroom, displays a rising pressure in climate-stressed farm states like Kansas that should steadiness the irrigation wants of farmers with the wants of metropolis and suburb dwellers.
That pressure isn’t misplaced on Hays metropolis supervisor Toby Dougherty.“We’re rigorously managing our progress, and that’s on objective as a result of we all know water is an enormous concern,” Dougherty mentioned in a phone interview. “We don’t wish to prematurely develop ourselves right into a water catastrophe.”
Neither Hays nor Russell at present face the intense drought that has gripped a lot of western Kansas. In some locations, farmers have misplaced at the very least a 12 months’s value of revenue as their fields bake (Climatewire, July 8).
Hays’ out of doors water park and splash pad stay open as summer time warmth units in, however they might be closed if drought situations worsen, Dougherty mentioned. Town additionally has robust water conservation insurance policies — together with “cash-for-grass” terrascaping incentives and daytime restrictions on nonessential irrigation.
“We predict we do job managing what now we have,” mentioned Dougherty. Town’s annual water consumption is about 2,000 acre-feet, which interprets to about 650 million gallons. In contrast, the R9 ranch’s groundwater useful resource is estimated at practically 8,000 acre-feet, in keeping with courtroom filings.
“We’re not seeking to dramatically improve our water use,” he added, “however we wish to defend ourselves from the sorts of dry spells like we’re in proper now that appear to come back each 5 to 10 years.”
These spells might worsen.
Local weather change projections present the Kansas Excessive Plains getting hotter and drier over the approaching a long time — significantly in the summertime months when temperatures can attain triple digits and air-conditioned harvester cabs defend farmers from excessive warmth.
But Hays and Russell’s contingency plan for water safety has drawn the ire of farmers and agricultural pursuits. They disagree with a preliminary choice that may enable the switch of water rights and the pumping and piping of water from Edwards County 70 miles north to Hays and Russell.
A closing choice, to be made by a three-person evaluation board, might take as much as 20 months to finish, in keeping with Earl Lewis, chief engineer for the Kansas Division of Agriculture and a evaluation board member.
The primary spherical in what might be a protracted authorized battle went towards opponents of the water switch plan. A district courtroom choose in Edwards County discovered the previous chief engineer of the Kansas Division of Agriculture complied with state statutes in 2019 when he conditionally accredited the 2 cities’ grasp water plan, successfully forwarding it to the water rights board.
Micah Schwalb, an lawyer representing agricultural pursuits by a company known as Water PACK, mentioned he didn’t know whether or not his purchasers would search to attraction the ruling to the Kansas Courtroom of Appeals and probably the state Supreme Courtroom. However he famous they have been “anticipating a special final result based mostly on what occurred inside the confines of the sooner regulatory continuing and the clear prohibitions underneath the legislation towards approving a switch like that.”
Shwalb argued the Agriculture Division’s conditional approval of the water rights switch was rife with procedural legislation violations and questionable technical findings, together with hydrological fashions projecting modest adverse impacts on current water rights holders.
Dougherty countered that such arguments are unfounded, noting Hays and Russell agreed to restrict their water attracts from the R9 ranch to 4,600 cubic ft yearly, which is lower than was tapped by the earlier proprietor who farmed the land. He additionally insisted the cities weren’t imposing on neighboring farmers.
“We’re not taking anyone else’s water rights. These have been bought on the free market, now we have the proper to place this water to make use of,” he mentioned.
Lewis, who was not chief engineer when the conditional approval was signed, mentioned the state’s evaluation panel will “exhaustively evaluation” the provisions of a water rights switch choice, together with “what different possibility the [cities] checked out earlier than deciding that is one of the best choice.”
The panel additionally will look at water impairment and conservation issues, together with whether or not Hays and Russell have “good conservation and administration plans and usually are not going to be mismanaging the transferred water.”
Consultants and state officers say the pending choice will probably be a bellwether for Kansas, which has been allocating and adjudicating water rights for generations. It could additionally being among the many most consequential within the state’s water legislation historical past as a result of it entails each the reappropriation of extremely coveted water rights and the bodily motion of water from one basin to a different, a course of ruled underneath a separate statute known as the Kansas Water Switch Act.
“It’s a primary precept of Western water legislation you could’t change a water allocation to the detriment of the prevailing water rights holders,” mentioned Burke Griggs, an affiliate professor and water rights skilled on the Washburn College Faculty of Legislation in Topeka.
Griggs, who was an assistant lawyer normal for Kansas representing the state in federal and state water issues, mentioned the state faces two elementary points with water legislation. “The primary is [that] now we have extra water rights in western Kansas than now we have water to produce these rights” — a coverage known as over-appropriation that dates to the Nineteen Fifties and ‘60s when water was ample and understanding of local weather change was nonetheless in its scientific infancy.
The second is that farmers and different water customers have grow to be so depending on the state’s conventional floor water sources that they’re completely disappearing, placing much more strain on groundwater aquifers such because the Ogalalla that sustains Excessive Plains farmers from Texas to Nebraska.
“There’s a vicious cycle occurring,” Griggs mentioned. “If you happen to have been in southwestern Kansas proper now, you’d see the pumps going as laborious as they’ll to get extra water out of the bottom. On the similar time, now we have [a] local weather change downside that’s ensuing within the disruption and desertification of our local weather and our soils,” which leads an excellent better dependence on groundwater.
These realities are well-known to native and state officers, at the same time as water sources are being tapped with ever-higher stakes for agriculture, trade, family and enterprise consumption.
“Between Hays and Russell, you’ve gotten a $2 billion economic system up right here that’s rising and must proceed to develop,” mentioned Dougherty. “It’s within the state’s greatest curiosity to permit this economic system to develop. We’re not hurting anyone down there [in Edwards County]. We personal the water rights and consider now we have a proper to make use of them.”
