After reading this important story from Charles Laurence for the UK Telegraph, you will understand the necessity of industrial scale farming and genetically modified seeds, except that even after all that, the water beneath the High Plains isn't coming back, 20 percent of the world's food supply will disappear, the Colorado River will be the West's last lifeline, and T. Boone Pickens aims to make a mint in the process.
Here's an excerpt:
Here's an excerpt:
[I]t was only in the 1940s, after the Dust Bowl (the result of a severe drought and excessive farming in the early 1930s), that the US Geological Survey worked out that the watering holes were clues to the Ogallala [Aquifer], now believed to be the world's largest body of fresh water. They were about to repeat the dreams of man from the days of Ancient Egypt and Judea to turn the desert green, only without the Nile or Jordan. With new technology the wells could reach the deepest water, and from the early 1950s the boom was on. Some of the descendants of Dust Bowl survivors became millionaire landowners.
'Since then,' says David Brauer of the US Agriculture Department agency, the Ogallala Research Service, 'we have drained enough water to half-fill Lake Erie of the Great Lakes.' Billions upon billions of gallons – or, as they prefer to measure it, acre-feet of water, each one equivalent to a football field flooded a foot deep – have been pumped. 'The problem,' he goes on, 'is that in a brief half-century we have drawn the Ogallala level down from an average of 240ft to about 80.'
Brauer's agency was set up in direct response to the Dust Bowl, with the brief of finding ways to make sure that the devastation never happens again. If it does, the impact on the world's food supply will be far greater. The irrigated Plains grow 20 per cent of American grain and corn (maize), and America's 'industrial' agriculture dominates international markets. A collapse of those markets would lead to starvation in Africa and anywhere else where a meal depends on cheap American exports. 'The Ogallala supply is going to run out and the Plains will become uneconomical to farm,' Brauer says. 'That is beyond reasonable argument. Our goal now is to engineer a soft landing. That's all we can do.'
