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About a quarter of the United States’s irrigated cropland sits on top of the Ogallala Aquifer in the Great Plains. But water levels are dropping, and states are taking different approaches to monitoring how much groundwater irrigators are pumping out.
Rapidly dropping reservoir levels in the West are capturing national media attention, but the nation’s underground aquifers are also under threat.
Universities are finding new ways to educate users about irrigation technology via Extension programs.
Candace Krebs The Ag Journal One farmer claimed to have learned more in one day of master irrigator training than he had in five years of farming on his own. For another, the light bulb came on when he realized by making one simple change he could save $10,000 a year. Colorado Master Irrigator program manager Brandi Baquera was thrilled to share those glowing endorsements during a panel presentation at the virtual Ogallala Aquifer Summit in late March. She always believed the program’s “one-stop shop” format was exactly what the region’s irrigated farmers needed. The first class of th...
Candace Krebs The Ag Journal Education and collaboration were repeatedly emphasized during the second-ever Ogallala Aquifer Summit, a virtual gathering space where hundreds of concerned farmers, researchers and resource managers shared ideas about how to preserve the vitality of a rural region that overlies one of the most heavily pumped underground reservoirs in the world. Roughly 95 percent of all freshwater currently withdrawn from the eight-state aquifer goes to irrigate commodity crops. Since the first aquifer summit in 2018, previous participants have expanded on several innovative prog...