(excited music) - Ultimately with an aquifer like the Ogallala to extract less is the way of conserving.

- I've had farmers tell me it was gut wrenching to think about even, "I'm not going to be doing any more irrigation farming?

I'm going to walk away from everything I've ever known?"

- We don't have the reliability of the same amount of water that we once did 10 years ago.

That's a rude awakening.

- All I've ever wanted to do is farm.

It's just bred in me, I guess - If we have to totally rely on rainfall from Mother Nature, that really raises the bar and makes it much, much more challenging.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Funding for "The Rain We Keep" has been provided by the Tecovas Foundation, the Carol K. Engler Foundation, and by viewers like you.

Thank you.

(mysterious music) - The math gets a bit staggering and I'll use my calculator so we can actually look at the numbers here.

So I'll use our well as an example and that way I'm not throwing anybody else under the bus.

Our irrigation well is considered to be actually a small well, it produces on average a hundred gallons a minute.

The beginning of the year, I might get 120 gallons, but as that summer goes on, it depletes down to something like 80, sometimes even 70.

It's been as low as 50.

But let's just say on average, 100 gallons a minute, I'm getting 6,000 gallons every hour.

If I run my well for 24 hours, which is not uncommon, say in August, especially when it's super hot and you're just trying to get to the end of the year, We'll multiply that by 24, every day, I'm pumping out 144,000 gallons of water.

Now, let's say I water for a week, which that's also not totally uncommon, that well will run 24 hours a day for one week straight.

We multiply that by seven.

That's 1,008,000 gallons of water.

So I use that in a week.

Again, we're small scale with 100 gallons a minute.

There are farms around here that can pump out seven times, eight times that amount.

But to me, this is kind of an abstract number.

What is a million gallons of water really?

So what I decided to do is to look up how much the average Texan uses.

And according to the state of Texas, we use about 92 gallons of water a day, which I thought was quite a bit.

But even if we say 92 gallons a day, how long would it take me as the average Texan to use a million gallons a day?

So we'll divide that by 92.

It would take me 10,956 days to use that amount of water or in years if we divide it by 365, 30 years, I'm 30 years old or 33 years old right now.

So in one week, I can pump out as almost as much water as I have used in my entire life using 92 gallons of water a day.

We are one farm and we are one small farm compared to everybody around us.

So whenever we talk about the pumping of water, it's really an extraction in the same way that we extract any kind of material out of the earth and we're doing it faster than it's recharging.

'Cause if I'm just doing that amount, imagine what a 500-gallon amount pivot would produce.

- The hardest part about changing transitioning from irrigation farming is it's generational.

- Great-granddad homesteaded this quarter we are on in 1917, and he farmed for a while.

Then my granddad, my dad, and now me farming.

We started irrigating back in the '60s and started out row watering and which was wasted a lot of water and eventually converted over to sprinklers and which were sprinklers that weren't very efficient.

And then we've gradually migrated to sprinklers with drops.

- We put irrigation lines, put PVC pipelines all over the farm every quarter mile, and we would have hydrants out of the ground and you'd put this hydrants on it and connect pipe.

And so it was a kind of a Lego pipe kit that you'd put it all together and you open the valve and run water and it would line it right up in the row.

- I grew up on my grandfather's cotton farm on the South Plains.

It was a small cotton farm.

And when I was a little boy, we used to irrigate with a ditch.

He had good water on his farm.

That water quickly diminished.

And I tell everybody, as soon as I got old enough, we started to irrigating with gated pipe.

And then the water resources that we had became further diminished.

So that farm today is all in subsurface drip irrigation.

So within the period of maybe one generation, the water resources that were under my grandfather's farm disappeared.

We've always grown dryland crops in this part of the world, but the percentage of the acreages that are going to be grown without irrigation water just continues to increase.

- You look at groundwater wells on properties around here, when they were drilled back in the '60s and '70s, they might have been yielding 500 to 800 gallons per minute and they're producing 85 to 150 gallons per minute now.

And you see farmers having to link multiple wells together in order to provide enough water for one circle, one irrigated circle.

And really, we've come a long way on the basis of being able to extract relatively cheaply groundwater, but we're having to go deeper, deeper to find it, and it's costing more and more to pump it.

And our wells aren't yielding what they used to yield.

- When we switched over to center pivots and we went to this quad leap of technology, this leap ahead, it really put the water closer to the ground.

Well, what it did, it made us much more efficient with our water, but it also allowed us to spread the water over more acres.

- It didn't change what you're pulling outta the ground.

- Exactly.

It did not change it.

There's a conflation between conservation and efficiency.

It's like when fuel economy increased on vehicles, then you would think, "Well if we're using less gallons per mile, then we'll drive less miles.

We'll conserve more oil."

But that didn't happen.

People just drove more because they're like, "Oh, well now it's cheaper to drive a mile and I wanted to go further anyway."

So instead of using less fuel, we use more.

And that's because the focus was not on conservation, the overall amount that's being used, but how much you're getting for each unit that you're using, the efficiency.

So it applies so much for our area because if you go around some of the different, the banks that do lending for irrigation equipment and the companies that are selling irrigation equipment all the way from, you know, expensive subsurface drip in fields to just, you know, micro irrigation in people's homes, a lot of the discussion on those is about efficiency.

And the common phrase you'll hear is get more crop per drop.

That's an efficiency argument.

But the paradox is that despite all the different ways that we've used water more efficiently, the amount that we've used has just increased.

And to me, it says that we should be more honest.

And if we're saying we're wanting to increase efficiency, then we can say honestly, yeah, we've increased efficiency.

But if we're saying that because we've increased efficiency, we've conserved more water, then I would say, well show me where you've conserved the water 'cause if you look at the trends, it looks like we're just using more water.

- Put us in a farmer's shoes about trying to decide whether to transition to dry land as opposed to continue to irrigate.

- There's really no decision you have the water or you don't, the growers are gonna use the water resources that they have.

If it's, you know, a little bit of water, they're gonna use it.

If it's a lot of water, they're gonna use it.

If it's no water, they're gonna figure out how to make that work.

So we're being forced into this.

You know, we've been talking about dryland crops and how we're going to transition, you know, wholesale into dryland crops in this region for years and years.

But until the water's gone, that's not gonna happen.

- How much of our area is dry land at this point?

- You know, it's difficult to say for sure, but the estimates I've heard are 60% or greater.

And even the crops that are irrigated are irrigated with limited water resources.

They call it deficit irrigation.

The water resources that we have are not really good enough to meet the crop water demands.

So if you combine deficit and dryland acres together, it's the vast majority of acres we have in this part of the world.

- Go to Google Maps and back out a pretty long ways and see that irrigated land is gonna be the green circles that you see when you back out in Google Earth.

And it's not a very big percentage.

There's a lot of land out there that is growing without benefit of irrigation.

And a lot of it is going back to rangeland as well, or some kind of pasture.

We're drying up from the south to the north, of course, folks down in the Lubbock area of influence, they are our future.

And it would include the reaches of the Ogallala Aquifer that extend over into Eastern New Mexico as well.

- It's a creeping disaster where, you know, there's farmers on the thinner fringes of the aquifer that are, you know, gradually seeing their water resource go away and then they go away and then the process repeats itself as the pool shrinks.

- There's a, like if you had a big saucer bowl and you filled it full of water and you started putting straws in there and drawing that water down, where's the water gonna deplete first?

Along the edge of that, - [Narrator] In the summer of 2023, some Portales, New Mexico water customers in surrounding Roosevelt County turned on the taps and little came out.

- New Mexico Christian Children's home.

Directly affected.

You've got all these children there and you've got just a little bit of sprinkling out of a shower head and you've got dripping out of a little bit of water trying to make your way through.

How do we get a bath?

- [Narrator] Extreme drought pushed the Portales groundwater production system to its limit, forcing the city into its most strict drought contingency stage for nearly a year.

- No watering of yards, no washing of vehicles, no excessive use of any water at all.

It was just basically your basic needs.

- I knew that our aquifer was in a state of decline, but you kinda put out of sight, out of mind.

People have a tendency to turn on the faucet.

If we got water, we're all good for that day.

We lose 3.6% per year in aquifer decline.

Our city wellfield loses 105 gallons per minute per year for the past 22 years.

We have 43 active wells.

They average 67 gallons per minute.

So we're literally losing the equivalent of one and a half wells per year.

- [Narrator] A pipeline now under construction should bring water from Ute Lake, south to Portales, Clovis, and other Eastern New Mexico towns.

- I think we put all our eggs into the basket of the Ute project.

It's targeted to be completed in 2030.

They're gonna require two years testing.

So it would not be available to us projected wise until 2032.

- [Narrator] Several years ago, two reports mapping the Ogallala Aquifer in New Mexico concluded that Portales and Clovis would run out of groundwater before they could be connected to the Ute pipeline.

- What we were being warned about was to create stopgap measures to get us to that time.

But I definitely think we don't need to be planning around that being our saving grace.

- It's all projections, it's estimates, so it's never concrete where they can say with absolute exactness, this is what's going to happen in this year and you're going to lose water by this time.

But they did come close, because they predicted that Portales itself would be where they are today in 2023 was their prediction.

They also predicted that irrigation farming would not be sustainable in specific areas more so quickly than others.

Portales far exceeded Clovis in that regard and more irrigation farming has ceased in Portales than Clovis.

So this data pinpointed areas where you could say you've got five to 10 years left for that type of irrigation farming.

- [Narrator] One of the reports came from the United States Air Force, which was seeking information about the long-term viability of Cannon Air Force Base at Clovis and a 66,000-acre bombing range at nearby Melrose.

The Air Force, Clovis and Curry County joined with other federal, state and local partners to find and fund solutions.

- The Ogallala Land and Water Conservancy focuses especially first and foremost on saving the ground water that still remains in the Ogallala aquifer as much of it as we possibly can, while also focusing on resources that exist on the land such as wildlife, doing some playa restorations.

Those are probably our primary focus.

Banking groundwater is a concept where you just leave the groundwater where it resides.

We pay farmers so they can cease irrigation farming and actually make the transition from more lucrative type of farming to dryland or pasture land.

- [Narrator] The conservancy uses a complex formula to determine how much to pay landowners.

The calculation takes into account the amount of water and cost of fertilizer, labor, maintenance, and other factors in bringing a crop to harvest.

- We started our third year since we haven't been irrigating.

We just knew there was something had to change.

- When those wells, 53 of them currently, and I'm about to add five more, when you put more and more wells together and you can just keep them in close proximity, you can see how much easier it's going to be to build the infrastructure to get that water to that pipeline.

- It would be hard for us to just quit irrigating without being compensated with all the expense you've got tied up in the irrigation.

- One mile radius irrigation sprinkler system costs almost quarter million to half million depends on, you know, all the things or which system you are going to put on.

And that irrigates only 500 acres.

- This is totally a novel concept.

It compensates the farmer fairly for the value of the water because giving up irrigation farming and moving to dryland or you know, just transitioning to pasture land, maybe you're going to increase your ranching operation, maybe you're gonna go to grassland.

Whatever it is, you're not gonna have the same value you had in irrigation farming.

So this transition comes at a great cost.

We knew this.

So not only do we pay the landowner for that water value, 100% of that value, appraised value, but we let them keep 20%, although we pay them 100%, they can keep 20% of the groundwater.

From that 20%, they can water their livestock, they can also use it for domestic use, but they have a certain amount left.

We're projecting about 10% left to actually sell.

And they will sell it if they so choose to our public or it's a private water utility.

- You put yourself in the shoes of a farmer, you know, there are lots of bills.

Obviously, if you produce more crop then you make more money and there's lots of overhead associated with growing crops.

So the growers are trying to, you know, to make money while they can and that's gonna require water.

- There's a lot of farmers who maybe are trying to make that transition from conventional agriculture to no-till agriculture.

And they may go to the landowner 'cause oftentimes, the farmer does not own the land - they're renting the land from somebody - and say, "Hey, I wanna make this change.

But what it means is this year, we shouldn't plant cotton on this plot of land and then next year, we'll put it in cotton and we'll rotate it onto another block.

And so we could have more of a rotational cover cropping system."

But the landowner who may have a loan out from the bank on that land may say, "Well, I gotta pay the banker.

And right now cotton prices are good and the banker's telling me that I can insure this cotton crop, whether it makes a crop or not.

So we're gonna plant cotton wall to wall, road to road, bar ditch to bar ditch."

At the end of the day, the money is driving or the economy is driving the entire system, not necessarily how we think the land should be used as far as what's best for the soil or the ecosystem around us.

- Agriculture is an industry.

That's why the size of agriculture farms are, in number of acres has increased to make it more economically feasible and profitable.

The average size of the farm in north of I-40 in this area is about 6,500 acres to 6,700 acres.

We have bigger machines.

That's why the smaller farms like you know, 100-acre or one quarter section, 160 (acres), they won't be feasible economically.

So either they are selling that part to the big corporations or the big partner companies.

So the size of the farm in terms of number of acres, that's why the number of farmers are reducing in U.S., but the size of farm is increased.

- The future of irrigation is high tech and it's using remote sensing, it's using satellite imagery, it's using sensors that are mounted on the sprinkler system and those are the kinds of things that we're working on with artificial intelligence working in the background to help us narrow our options.

- [Narrator] North Plains Groundwater Conservation District helps farmers see new advances in action.

- We're the only groundwater district that operates a demonstration farm for the purpose of demonstrating conservation technologies and strategies.

The board was very adamant that they wanted the new improved North Plains groundwater demonstration farm, what we call the Water Conservation Center.

It was important that it was demonstrations, in other words, not theoretical type research, but something that growers could use this season.

If they saw something here that was being demonstrated that they felt could help them, here, it can be tested and demonstrated on a commercial scale, regular-size fields, not little plots.

So we feel like it adds something to the research that goes on that's also critically important.

that's done by some of our partners, Texas A&M AgriLife and other partners.

It gives growers something they can apply today.

- This is my parents' farm and they inherited it from my grandparents and it's probably been farmed for, in our family, at least for the past three generations.

We did mostly conventional farming.

Cotton, mostly in this area up until 2001, whenever my parents started to do an agritourism business.

And mostly that was just because they were a little bit in debt from the production agriculture and wanted to try out some other things to pay the bills.

And year after year, it just became more profitable.

So now we're more of a small-scale agriculture operation, about 100 acres and do primarily and solely agritourism.

- Has it been hard to calculate the economics of this change?

- Hmm, admittedly no, for us.

And that's just because the agritourism has been profitable enough that it's allowed us to take the risks with saying, "Well, we can lay out 50% of our farm land for prairie grass, which is not necessarily making us money."

- [Narrator] The Simpsons started with a corn maze, but soon replaced the corn with a less thirsty plant.

The Simpson family uses subsurface irrigation, sows cover crops to keep soil in place between growing seasons and plants prairie grass on unfarmed acres in anticipation of adding livestock.

- We also started seeing wildlife come in that we hadn't seen before.

Bobwhite quail, which was amazing to see and to hear, we were seeing horned toads.

I hadn't seen a horned toad since I was a kid.

That initially was like this big light-bulb moment of, well, we need to plant as much prairie grass as we possibly can on any land that we're not needing to make a living off of.

And then perhaps begin to integrate that prairie grass into the larger farming operation.

Some people also use the term regenerative agriculture, which is a little bit more complex.

It involves not just your crop rotation and no tilling, it also involves animal integration into your agriculture system.

And so that's moving animals around your farm like cows, sheep, goats followed back behind with chickens that are basically fertilizing your land as you're growing crops.

- We're gonna have to utilize these native grasses.

That's gonna be an interplay into the future of the region of those getting back to natural ecosystems and trying to manage crops in ways that mimic natural ecosystems, which is really where we're heading.

It's just become more and more self-evident that diversity's a good thing.

And then having animal agriculture back on the land and having them cycling the nutrients.

- [Narrator] Simpson thinks back to his great grandparents.

- My dad puts it like our grandparents used to use, or his grandparents.

I mean, they had a cow that they got milk from and they had chickens they got eggs from, and they also farmed and they probably couldn't pump out as much water as we can pump out today.

There are a lot of factors that have allowed us to change our agricultural practices.

One being that we can pump out a lot of water.

The other being we have larger equipment, we have genetically engineered seed.

All of these things are coming into play that say, "Oh, you can just do one thing and do it as efficiently as you possibly can and ignore all the other sort of parts that could be integrated into an ecosystem of a farm."

But yes, probably my great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents had more of a holistic regenerative agriculture that we're just now being reminded of how important that actually was.

- You've talked about the commons.

What do you mean by the commons?

- There is a natural, an economic and social wealth that none of us own.

We use it, we build lifestyles out of it, we build livings out of it, but it doesn't really belong to us.

The water is one, the soil, and we have private property and all these things of course, but we don't ultimately own these things.

And they're so important because they're the same key assets that our grandparents, our forebearers and Native Americans, everyone use these same things that we're using now and we're going to need them in the future.

The thing is, some of them are depleted or in decline, but they can be reinvested in, they can be restored.

And that's what brings life to a community.

That's what helps to reinvigorate the community.

Those resources belong in a way to everyone, the future, as well as to past and the present.

- What is the tragedy of the commons?

- Well, it depends on who you read, but it's the idea that people won't use it in an equitable way or certainly not a way that'll make it regenerate and last.

So you'll have people who take more and the tragedy is a great resource suddenly is depleted or destroyed.

- The real solution in the deal is really about education.

And that's where the education of, let's be good neighbors, let's balance supplies.

Let's not gut the country for short-term economic gain.

We have to start giving about our fellow man, and we have to hope they reciprocate - [Narrator] Next time on "The Rain We Keep."

- If you're using any of the water from the Ogallala, you're mining the aquifer.

- We really had to use it up in 100 years or less.

(light airy music) - We're gonna feed the world to the point we can't feed ourselves.

- Do not discount the value of every drop of water.

(gentle music)