By Stan Cox, AlterNet
Posted on March 22, 2008, Printed on March 22, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/79957/
With corn selling at record-high prices, Steve Albracht
expects to have no trouble paying his electric bills this year.
Albracht irrigates 1,000 acres of corn near the town of Hart in
the Texas Panhandle and expects to shell out $180 to $240 per
acre to run his pumps through the spring and summer. "In this
area," says Albracht, "the water table has dropped, but nobody's
cutting back on watering yet. There's still plenty down there."
Albracht won the 2005 National Corn Yield Contest in the
"irrigated" category, producing a whopping 352 bushels per acre.
In a region that gets an average of less than 18 inches of rain
annually, Albracht and his neighbors apply anywhere from 28
inches to more than 3 feet of water to their corn each year.
With the prospect of a highly profitable harvest, Albracht says
he can afford to water generously this year. And he'll need to,
he says, "because it's been a dry winter."
For once, times are good in the High Plains. Corn and other
grains are selling like precious metals, and there is every
reason to believe that prices will stay high. At the heart of
the boom is the U.S. government's decision to rely on corn-based
ethanol to meet a big part of the nation's demand for
"renewable" fuels.
Most recent controversy over ethanol has focused on the its
poor energy return; in growing corn and turning it into ethanol,
you have to burn three calories to get four. With prices of fuel
and other inputs rising fast, corn farmers won't be getting rich
(except for those who happen to have oil wells on their
property.) But selling their corn for such high prices, they can
afford to sow more acres and burn more propane, diesel or
electricity to pump more water than ever. A torrent of cash will
be flowing through the nation's corn-growing regions, but the
biggest price will be paid in water.
Thirst for corn
To hear agribusiness boosters and politicians tell it,
corn-based ethanol is a miraculous solution to the nation's
hunger for liquid fuels. But as miracles go, it's not all that
impressive. When Jesus, according to Biblical reports, converted
approximately 150 gallons of water into an equivalent quantity
of wine, his conversion rate was about a cup of ethanol per
gallon of water invested (given the typical alcohol content of
wine). Compare that to current processes that use irrigated corn
as their carbon source and get less than a teaspoon of ethanol
for each gallon of water consumed.
In dry areas of the High Plains where irrigation is the most
crucial to corn production and the ethanol-to-water ratio even
lower, agriculture is dependent on a one-time drawing of
groundwater that hasn't seen daylight for 11,000 years or more.
The vast Ogallala aquifer, stretching from not far south of
Steve Albracht's Texas farm all the way up into South Dakota, is
being mined at a rate that, in some areas, will drain it
sometime in the relatively near future -- at least before the
oil wells of the Persian Gulf run dry.
The Ogallala was trapped underneath the High Plains around
the time of the last ice age. The formation holds enough ancient
water to fill Lake Huron, the second-greatest of the Great Lakes
-- or at least it did before being exploited for agriculture. In
the High Plains, raising a single bushel of irrigated corn
slurps up 2,000 to 3,000 gallons of water, and more corn than
ever is being raised there.
With national corn acreage having shot up 15 percent just
from 2006 to 2007, pressure on water resources is increasing.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture
projects that the land area sown to corn will remain at
historically high levels of 90 million acres or more through at
least 2017. The incentive: the price, which has rocketed up from
around $2.00 to more than $5.00 per bushel. And USDA forecasters
now see high corn prices as near-permanent.
Most of the region's corn currently goes to cattle feedlots,
but from this point onward, prices will be kept high by the
ethanol industry. In western Kansas, for example, ethanol
production plants have a total capacity of 143 million gallons
per day, but new plants already
planned or
under construction will add more than 700 million gallons
per day, most of that from irrigated corn or sorghum. In the
eastern half of the state, where the Kansas River is already
considered a toxic hazard because of fertilizer contamination,
corn ethanol capacity is slated to grow from 101 to 667 gallons
per day in the near future.
The Energy Independence and Security Act, passed by Congress
just before Christmas, requires that the nation produce 15
billion gallons of corn ethanol per year by 2015. While meeting
only 10 percent of Americans' gasoline consumption, that level
of production would require massive, permanent increases in the
amount of land sown to corn, as well as ramped-up water
consumption and pollution.
That new law will also be a big nail in the coffin of the
Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which since the mid-80s has
been paying farmers to reseed millions of acres of highly
erodable cropland to diverse mixtures of native perennial
grasses and other plants. CRP has done more to conserve soil and
protect water in agricultural regions than any other federal
intiative. But the USDA now estimates that farmers will plow up
5 million acres of CRP land in the next four years alone to
plant corn and other biofuel crops.
According to the calculations of the Washington-based group
Environmental Defense, increasing irrigated corn acreage by 10
percent to 20 percent in the High Plains will have an effect on
water resources similar to that of plopping onto its landscape a
city the size of metropolitan Denver (which would be equivalent
to doubling the human population of the entire region).
Vanishing rivers
After World War II, irrigation technology reached a level
that allowed for faster exploitation of the Ogallala. The U.S.
Geological Survey has
reported that
by 2005, the most heavily exploited areas, accounting for almost
a tenth of the entire region, had seen the water table drop
between 50 and 270 feet farther beneath the surface. Farmers in
some of the prime agricultural areas with the richest, thickest
water deposits -- in western Kansas, eastern Colorado, and the
Oklahoma and Texas panhandles -- have had to spend more and more
money and fuel to bring water from greater and greater depths.
Flowing through the natural shortgrass vegetation of western
Kansas, once-great rivers like the Arkansas are fed not just by
surface streams but also by water tables that reach up and away
from their streambed. Across much of the region, irrigation has
drawn aquifers down so far that the flow of water has reversed,
now moving down and out of rivers into the surrounding dry
ground. Rivers are actually dropping underground, leaving only
dusty beds visible for much of the year.
In Kansas, a significant portion of the Ogallala's area has
already shrunk below the threshold -- 30 to 50 feet thick --
that can support large-scale irrigation. Kansas lies downstream
from Colorado and Nebraska, and has fought bitter water battles
with both states in recent years. Those border regions in which
struggles over water have been fiercest are precisely the
regions being eyed for new ethanol plants and bigger plantings
of thirsty corn.
Farther south, the situation is even worse. The USDA has
recorded water-table drops of 100 feet in the Texas Panhandle,
and by 2025, several counties at the southern fringe of the
Ogallala in west Texas will have lost 50 percent to 60 percent
of their water that's available for pumping. Agricultural
economists at nearby Texas Tech University predict that unless
restrictions are put in place, farmers will most likely respond
to water shortages (and high corn prices) by drilling more wells
and depleting the water even faster than that.
Chemical tide
Unlike the High Plains, the Corn Belt of Iowa, Minnesota,
Illinois and surrounding states receives enough rain to
naturally replenish most groundwater used to irrigate crops.
There, the bigger issue is quality, not quantity of water. Maps
of nitrate pollution in streams and groundwater fit closely to
maps of nitrogen fertilizer use across the country, especially
in the Corn Belt. The National Academy of Sciences found that
recent increases in corn production have already led to greater
pollution of surface and groundwater. The risk is
"considerable,"
says
the academy, that expansion of corn ethanol production will
add to the nitrate load of the Mississippi River and expand the
oxygen-depleted "Dead Zone" in the Gulf of Mexico a thousand
miles downstream.
A study conducted last year at the request of Sen. Saxby
Chambliss, R-Ga., painted a scenario in which the conversion to
biofuels is even more aggressive than what's currently mandated
by the Energy Independence and Security Act: 20 billion gallons
of corn ethanol and 1 billion gallons of soy biodiesel annually
by 2016. Even that mammoth effort would hardly achieve "energy
independence," displacing only 13 percent of our current
gasoline consumption and less than 2 percent of diesel. But it
would achieve the long-term cultivation of almost 100 million
acres of corn, with 47 percent of the nation's crop going
straight to ethanol plants.
Under that scenario, fertilizer and pesticide use would
increase substantially across the Corn Belt and in the High
Plains as well. Toxic nitrates in groundwater would rise
accordingly, by 11 percent in the states around the Great Lakes
and 8 percent in the southern plains -- areas where a critical
need to lower, not raise, nitrate levels already exists.
A recent
study found nitrate pollution to be by far the worst in
those aquifer-dependent regions of Texas where irrigated corn
and sorghum are now grown and will likely increase in acreage as
ethanol plants clamor for more and more grain. University of
Kansas scientists found that pollutants have been concentrated
in that state's portion of the Ogallala by "evapotranspiration,
oil brine disposal, agricultural practices, brine intrusion and
waste disposal," as well as nitrates, chlorides and sulfates.
'Everybody else has to get his cut'
Riding the roller-coaster of agricultural economics, farmers
have learned to get whenever the getting is good. Ethanol mania
is the latest in a long line of schemes designed to wring quick
wealth out of a rural landscape that's more suited to slow,
steady exploitation. Last year, the Lawrence, Kan.,
Journal-World
reported on the short-term pragmatism that underlies the
boom in western Kansas:
Wayne Bossert, manager of the Northwest Kansas Groundwater
District No. 4, in Colby, has a counter view. "If you are
going to make money, you are going to use water," Bossert
said. "If you want to make less money, use less water. It's
an economic resource out here; it's about choices." Bossert
said policymakers wanting to reduce use of the aquifer
needed to approach the problem with eyes wide open. "We are
going to have economic and social impacts. Are you certain
this is the way you want to go?" he said ... Bossert noted
that irrigation is the foundation of industries ranging from
crops, fertilizer and seeds to equipment, land and taxes.
We are wasting irreplaceable water in the name of "energy
independence," but so far the only result has been increased
dependence of agribusiness on federal and state governments, via
subsidies bestowed on every gallon of ethanol produced.
An exhaustive
report on the vast tangle of past and current biofuel
subsidies, prepared for the International Institute for
Sustainable Development, concluded that "government subsidies to
liquid biofuels, particularly ethanol, started out as a way to
increase the demand for surplus crops. But lately they have been
promoted as a way to reduce oil imports, improve the quality of
urban air-sheds, reduce carbon dioxide emissions, raise farmers'
incomes and promote rural development. That is a tall order for
a pair of commodities [ethanol and biodiesel] to live up to. It
is highly unlikely that they can."
Yet another goal not listed in that statement -- to ensure a
big return on investment for agribusiness -- may be biofuel's
chief accomplishment. As champion corn grower Steve Albracht
puts it, the ethanol boom may make it possible for him to
produce more, but it won't necessarily boost his own net income.
"With $800 anhydrous [ammonia fertilizer per acre] and $3.60
diesel for the tractor, we still won't be getting ahead.
Everybody else has to get his cut first."
The fate of the plains
Donald Worster, professor of history at the University of
Kansas and author of a shelf-full of books on the environmental
history of our drier regions, including Dust Bowl: The
Southern Plains in the 1930s (1979, Oxford University
Press), sees only a very limited future for agriculture in the
High Plains, noting, "It is basically a mining economy wherever
groundwater is the resource to be extracted, and the ultimate
result of such an economy is always a ghost town." If we had the
legal tools, he says, "We should reserve the remaining
groundwater supply for human and animal consumption during the
dessicated future that seems likely to develop with climate
change." But today there's no mechanism to do that.
Worster believes that as the region dries out, it "will
require a large government program to deprivatize a lot of farm
acreage and put it into the best vegetation cover we can devise.
It will be very difficult to farm much of the southern plains
within another 50 years, unless global climate change is
arrested very soon. The deprivatized, former agricultural land
will have little economic value, except for national parks and
light grazing."
In 1987, Deborah and Frank Popper of Rutgers University
sparked furious debate across the nation's midsection with their
paper "The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust" in the journal
Planning. Because the irrigation economy simply cannot
last, they wrote,
The federal government's commanding task on the plains for
the next century will be to recreate the 19th century, to
reestablish what we would call the Buffalo Commons. More and
more previously private land will be acquired to form the
commons. In many areas, the distinctions between the present
national parks, grasslands, grazing lands, wildlife refuges,
forests, Indian lands, and their state counterparts will
largely dissolve. The small cities of the plains will amount
to urban islands in a shortgrass sea. The Buffalo Commons
will become the world's largest historic preservation
project, the ultimate national park. Most of the Great
Plains will become what all of the United States once was --
a vast land mass, largely empty and unexploited.
With the Ogallala shrunk to a size that can support only
animal grazing, small industry and a limited human population,
the land could eventually restore itself, and the people who
remain could achieve a pleasant, if not lucrative, existence.
But, wrote the Poppers, "It will be up to the federal government
to ease the social transition of the economic refugees who are
being forced off the land. For they will feel aggrieved and
impoverished, penalized for staying too long in a place they
loved and pursuing occupations the nation supposedly respected
but evidently did not."
Twelve years after publication of that paper, the Poppers
noted that the Buffalo Commons was "materializing more quickly
than we had anticipated." However, their evidence for that
consisted entirely of an observed growth in the numbers of bison
grazing in the region. What they had identified as the chief
source of the region's problems -- the drive to wring excess
private profit out of a parched landscape -- had not been
addressed. Now, almost a decade even farther down the road, the
ethanol industry threatens to wreck the region's chances for a
smooth transition to its inevitably drier, quieter future.
Quieter, that is, except for the High Plains' other great
natural resource: a wind that never stops howling and will never
be depleted. That has led Donald Worster to conclude that "wind
farms, carefully planned to avoid any destruction of native
prairie and wildlife habitat, offer probably the most viable
economic future for the plains." However, he warns, that can't
be the basis for another growth economy: "I doubt such a future
would support the level of population or the number of towns
that are currently hanging on."
The vast resource of the Ogallala could be used to help the
region ease into such a modestly productive, long-term state.
But, saddled with the ethanol industry, the High Plains is more
likely to arrive at that future only after passing through an
economic crash and ecological ruin.
Stan Cox is a plant
breeder and writer in Salina, Kansas. His book Sick Planet:
Corporate Food and Medicine will be published by Pluto Press
this week.
© 2008 Independent Media
Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/79957/
|