By Trevor Graff
KHI News Service

DONIPHAN COUNTY — Ken McCauley parked his Chevy pickup in the middle of a dirt road overlooking some of the world’s best corn growing acreage.

He examined a creek bed that was flanked by a narrow strip of woods and sloping hills covered with stubble from last year’s crop.

McCauley said his family has farmed here six generations. The 4,600-acre operation includes corn and soybean production.

“They picked a good place to stop,” McCauley said of his ancestors.

But it wasn’t family history or 220 bushels-per-acre corn that was the hot topic this particular day on this particular piece of Missouri River bottomland.

“I’ve said since I was a kid that we’d be fighting over water,” McCauley said. “When you start talking about an aqueduct, open water going across the state it’s enough to get everybody riled up in a hurry.”

Kansas officials are studying the possibility of an aqueduct, pipeline or canal that would carry water — perhaps across McCauley’s land — from the Missouri River at White Cloud to Ness County, 360 miles to the southwest.

McCauley’s farm is closer to St. Louis, Mo. or Cedar Rapids, Iowa than it is to Ness City.

Pumping uphill

The audacious project, if realized, would surpass in distance and cost the 336-mile Central Arizona Project, which is still considered the most expensive water transfer system ever built in the United States.

The Arizona project — started in 1973 — took 20 years and $4 billion to construct. It carries 1.5 million acre-feet of water per year from the Colorado River to Tucson and irrigates about 1 million acres of farmland. The federal government paid for it.

An earlier U.S. Corps of Engineers study looking at the feasibility of tapping the Missouri River to water western Kansas estimated it would cost $4.4 billion to build a system and about $475 million a year to operate it. Those were 1982 estimates.

McCauley said he and others he knows consider the idea of moving massive quantities of water uphill across the state a bad one and he doesn’t understand why western Kansas farmers can’t find better solutions to their water problems.

But the part of Kansas where McCauley lives gets about 35 inches of rainfall a year, enough most years to grow corn without irrigation.

In Ness County, on the High Plains, average annual rainfall is 22 inches and that diminishes as you move west.

Irrigation from the Ogallala Aquifer is what has sustained corn and other water-gulping crops in western Kansas and other portions of the Great Plains for more than 60 years — but the end is in sight for what some have called “water mining.”

“We’re looking at about 50 years to make some kind of changes in the way agriculture is done out there,” said Prof. James Sherow, an environmental historian at Kansas State University who wrote a 1990 book about the history of water use in the Arkansas River Valley.

“In other words, thinking about recapitalization and what new forms of agriculture need to take the place of this current one once the water situation no longer supports what’s going on today.”

Since the invention of center-pivot irrigation in the late 1940s, Kansas farmers have been drawing water from the aquifer far more rapidly than it is naturally recharged.

In some areas, the Ogallala, which is part of the larger High Plains Aquifer, can regain four to six inches of water a year. But that natural recharging falls well short of replacing what is being siphoned out of the ancient underground reservoir.

From 1996 to 2012, the average level of the aquifer in Kansas dropped 14 feet, according to the Kansas Geological Survey — and average of 9.33 inches per year. It dropped more than 51 inches in 2012 alone.

Scientists project that it would take more than 100,000 years to recharge some parts of the Ogallala that for practical purposes already have been tapped out.

Without the bounty of the Ogallala, western Kansas fields would revert to producing the relatively paltry yields of dry land farming and the natural aridity that prompted 19th century geographers to label it part of the Great American Desert — hence the strong interest in keeping the spigot on.

Others eye the Missouri

GMD No. 3 isn’t the only western entity with a covetous eye on the Missouri River.

The U.S. Department of the Interior in 2012 released a study of future water needs in the Colorado River Basin, which includes two Mexican and seven U.S. states, and concluded there wouldn’t be enough.

One of the proposed solutions was a pipeline from the Missouri River to help supply the Colorado Front Range, including Denver, which happens to be the largest city in the Missouri River Basin

But given the history of water struggles in the western U.S., no one can imagine major diversions from the Missouri could occur without a fight.

Shortly after the Kansas aqueduct idea was revived for discussion, Gov. Jay Nixon of Missouri responded with threats of litigation.

Kansas water officials say they haven’t started talking about it with their counterparts in Missouri or the several other states that bank North America’s longest stream.

“We haven’t had an opportunity to have a meaningful conversation with our downstream neighbors,” said Tracy Streeter, director of the Kansas Water Office. “I’d anticipate that their first move would be negative. I’d like to think that we could explain what we’re talking about and maybe find some benefit.”