Another Fine Example On Why Our Alternative Fuel Policy Pretty Much Sucks!

Because of federal support of ethanol production, large swathes of middle America, from Kansas through Texas, have converted to growing corn. And corn production requires far more water than many other cash crops and that dry central farming region has heavily relied on irrigation to raise bumper crops of corn…until the last few years as the extended drought has required additional irrigation and the high plains aquifer has begun to flat out run out of water.

From the May 19th edition of the New York Times:

“Looking at areas of Texas where the groundwater has really dropped, those towns are just a shell of what they once were,” said Jim Butler, a hydrogeologist and senior scientist at the Kansas Geological Survey.

The villain in this story is in fact the farmers’ savior: the center-pivot irrigator, a quarter- or half-mile of pipe that traces a watery circle around a point in the middle of a field. The center pivots helped start a revolution that raised farming from hardscrabble work to a profitable business.

Since the pivots’ debut some six decades ago, the amount of irrigated cropland in Kansas has grown to nearly three million acres, from a mere 250,000 in 1950. But the pivot irrigators’ thirst for water — hundreds and sometimes thousands of gallons a minute — has sent much of the aquifer on a relentless decline. And while the big pivots have become much more efficient, a University of California study earlier this year concluded that Kansas farmers were using some of their water savings to expand irrigation or grow thirstier crops, not to reduce consumption.

A shift to growing corn, a much thirstier crop than most, has only worsened matters. Driven by demand, speculation and a government mandate to produce biofuels, the price of corn has tripled since 2002, and Kansas farmers have responded by increasing the acreage of irrigated cornfields by nearly a fifth.

At an average 14 inches per acre in a growing season, a corn crop soaks up groundwater like a sponge — in 2010, the State Agriculture Department said, enough to fill a space a mile square and nearly 2,100 feet high.

Sorghum, or milo, gets by on a third less water, Kansas State University researchers say — and it, too, is in demand by biofuel makers. As Kansas’ wells peter out, more farmers are switching to growing milo on dry land or with a comparative sprinkle of irrigation water.

But as long as there is enough water, most farmers will favor corn. “The issue that often drives this is economics,” said David W. Hyndman, who heads Michigan State University’s geological sciences department. “And as long as you’ve got corn that’s $7, then a lot of choices get made on that.”

Of course I’ve railed against corn production for ethanol a number of times, but mostly because it artificially increases the cost of food production…but here we also have the unintended consequences of destroying our sources of fresh water for a basically unsustainable push for biofuels.

And this is just another warning that the eyes of the nation beyond the Waukesha’s of the world will soon be focused on Lake Michigan…just sayin!

Share:

Related Articles

4 thoughts on “Another Fine Example On Why Our Alternative Fuel Policy Pretty Much Sucks!

  1. We’ve simply got to get off oil, even oil diluted with ethanol. Build charging stations along the highways…how is this any different than building the Federal Expressways in the first place? Encourage more rail delivery, going underground in high traffic areas when necessary.

  2. Couldn’t agree more Ed. While the water thing and the burning our food thing makes ethanol dumb, the energy used to produce it seems to be more than we get out of it, making it even dumber. I’ve seen numbers from 1.25 gallons of gas used to create 1 gallon of the dumb stuff to 6 (Really!). Using that last figure means that when we burn 1 unit of ethanol we “save” -6 units of fossil fuels. Dumb.

  3. Thank you for this post, Ed. You’re probably not far off the mark with your Great Lakes prediction. It’s infuriating. Add to the corn production problem the food industry as well. Nearly everything Americans consume contains corn. Much of it processed and unhealthy but blissfully cheap…

    Prioritizing smart, sustainable water management policies seems like such a no-brainer, doesn’t it? And not just policies but long term irrigation management. What’s thoroughly mind-boggling is how much damage we do in such a short period of time due to our short-sighted avarice. I can’t help but think on the amazingly sophisticated irrigation systems from the ancient world – Sumerians, Etruscans, Carthaginians, Mesopotamians, Mycenaeans, Egyptians…. the Mesopotamians transformed a desert into the “fertile crescent” and the Carthaginians transformed North Africa into the “bread basket of the civilized world” ….and they maintained those systems for thousands of years….Incredible. Those irrigation systems provided those cultures with abundant wealth, I might add. And yet, we take a continent teeming with some of the most enviable water resources the world has ever seen and what do we do?

    Another perspective reported by National Geographic over a year ago, but part of their series on global water issues:

    http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/01/120123-mississippi-river-basin/

    More perspective on how extraordinarily fortunate we are given our resources:

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/energysource/2013/04/01/investors-are-the-key-to-solving-the-worlds-water-problems/

    And won’t we be lucky when social entrepreneurs and the gentlest of barracuda investors rescue us from the looming water-mess of our own making?

Comments are closed.