(somber music) - The Ogallala Aquifer, it's the primary source of water on the High Plains.

- The big challenge with the Ogallala is it's not filling back up.

We can run out.

- [Narrator] Some have called the situation a race to the bottom of the aquifer.

- Sorry, that's a hard thing to hear.

The people who are the most poor and who have the fewer resources are gonna be the ones affected the most.

- This did not sneak up on us.

State engineers warned us of impending crisis in the '40s, in the '50s, in the '60s, in the '80s, in the 2000s.

- So there's a learned powerlessness.

I think we've been taught that there's nothing we can do about it.

And it took a while for me to come to the realization that that's not true.

It's a myth.

It's a falsehood.

(dramatic 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.

(somber music) - I grew up hunting and fishing, and my dad took me and my brothers and sisters kinda to a bunch of different farms and ranches.

And we were just really privileged to see a lot of this landscape.

I learned how to fish in a creek south of McLean.

It's called Long Dry Sand Creek.

But this stretch of creek that I fish in wasn't dry.

It was like six feet deep in spots.

It was awesome.

And if you drive out there today, the creek is bone dry.

And so, yeah, we've had this kind of privileged look at the drying out of our landscape.

And so it's just haunted me my whole life.

- [Narrator] Two years ago, Masters and a friend, Warren Thetford, gathered some volunteers and began work on a ranch north of Amarillo along the Canadian River.

Their intention: to build leaky dams of earth, rock, trees, and plants that can slow runoff and keep rain where it falls, benefiting both the landscape and the aquifer beneath.

- My whole career has been in analyzing vegetation throughout the West, primarily on rangeland.

Will and I met sorta by chance in Amarillo a few years ago, and we came out here and we talked even back then, it's like, we can fix that right there now.

You know, we can get outta the truck right now and go out there and fix that.

- Our landscape is wealthy and our landscape is livable, so long as our landscape has water.

We are not in a water-scarce region.

The Ogallala Aquifer is huge, and we can talk about that for a second.

So the High Plains aquifer system underlies at least eight states: Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, South Dakota.

And so it is in a very real sense, it is a transboundary aquifer.

It doesn't exist underneath multiple nations, but it does under multiple sovereign federalist states.

There was a whole lot of water, and there is still a whole lot of water in the High Plains aquifer system.

- Ogallala Aquifer is this kinda wonderful apron of sediments that come from the Rocky Mountains, that holds an amazing amount of water that has turned this part of Texas and the High Plains of the United States in general into a bread basket of the United States for agriculture.

- What happened is, the Rocky Mountains went up, and once they went up, they started eroding.

This happened about 50 million years ago is when the mountains came up.

So for about 10 million years, the rivers coming off the mountains carried sands and gravels and silt and deposited it as a large blanket, slightly tilted towards the east.

And in some places, much thicker than in other places.

The places where it was deposited to the greatest thickness was where the river valleys used to be, where the rivers ran.

- [Narrator] Scientists can determine the amount of water in an aquifer by gauging its saturated thickness, the distance between the water table and the aquifer's base.

The footage provides a glimpse of fossil water, water that has not touched the Earth's atmosphere in more than 10,000 years.

(somber music continues) - We can actually date the water because it has carbon dioxide in it.

So we can actually use radiocarbon dating to date the water.

It's not a lake, as we think of lakes.

This is the spaces between the grains are filled with water.

In some places, the grains are boulders as big as your head.

In other places, the grains are little particles of silt.

(somber music continues) - Early explorers, when they first saw the High Plains, they called it the Great American Desert.

There was no water.

You know, when you came up that cliff and just saw this massive, featureless plain, you know, a sea of buffalo grass and no water.

- [Narrator] In 1820, U.S. Army Major Steven Harriman Long, a government surveyor, led an expedition from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains.

The explorers produced a map with the words Great American Desert emblazoned across the nation's Great Plains.

Botanist and geologist Edwin James compiled the group's report, cementing the myth of the desert.

- [[Narrator] "In regards to this extensive section of the country, we do not hesitate in giving the opinion that is almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course, uninhabitable by people depending upon agriculture for their sustenance."

Edwin James.

- It was thought that it would always remain a desert.

But then, people started drilling wells and finding water beneath that land surface and started producing that water.

- For a few decades early on, Plainview was like the oasis of the High Plains, and they'd had these lakes that were maintained by opening wells and pumping groundwater.

And so yeah, for a few decades, "Hey, come live here, water's abundant."

- [Narrator] In Plainview and many other communities on the plains, the myth of the Great American Desert was giving way to the myth of the garden.

By 1920, more than 1,000 farms surrounded Plainview in Hale County, but the lake had been closed, having become too costly to maintain.

- When we started pumping the water, producing the water, we didn't know how much water we could produce and produce in a sustainable way.

We didn't know how much water was percolating in from the land surface to replenish the aquifer.

That, unfortunately, led to an overproduction of the system, to today, where we're pumping six times as much water than what's percolating back in.

It's, you know, really 100% of the source of water for agriculture and then a pretty substantial source of water for municipalities.

I think like Amarillo, it's something like 80% of the supply is coming from the Ogallala.

And it's similar for Lubbock.

Out of all the water we use in Texas, 40% comes from the Ogallala Aquifer.

So it's just this massive supply of water.

Something north of 90% of the water is being used by farmers, by producers to grow crops.

(somber music) - Everything here is dependent upon agriculture, and if you think about, just look around.

You can see that everywhere you drive, there's agriculture.

You see it in the fields.

You pass by animal feeding operations.

You pass by banks and businesses that are there just because agriculture exists in the region.

And if you think about just even, you know, us eating at a restaurant, that's agriculture.

When we talk about regional impacts, we're talking about that ripple effect through the economy.

So agriculture, of course, for every dollar that they generate, it's not just that dollar that they generate that is the impact to the economy.

It's all of the businesses that supply inputs, you know, for production.

And so it's the seed dealers.

It's labor.

It's transportation.

It's feed for animals.

It's veterinary services.

- We pump water about 20 million acre-feet from Ogallala Aquifer every year.

I mean, in the entire region, which is High Plains region.

And it contributes towards 30% of the crops we raise in the entire U.S. - Acre-feet is a way of measuring the amount of water.

And it's about 325,000 gallons, a area the size of an acre to a depth of one foot.

- [Narrator] That amount would cover a standard football field 12 inches deep.

- Billions of dollars of value is produced here and exported to provide food, fiber, milk, cheese, beef.

- If you draw a circle of radius, let's say, 120 miles around the City of Amarillo, you've got about 1/4 to 1/3 of all of the fed cattle in the United States are produced within that circle.

So we're producing a heck of a lot of beef.

Dairy is also really, really important.

I think the Texas dairy industry is fourth or fifth among the states in total milk production, and if you include eastern New Mexico, if we wanted to annex eastern New Mexico, we'd end up with probably the fourth largest what we call a milkshed.

So it's really important to this region, and it's really important to the United States as well.

- Our crops generate anywhere from $1,000 to $2,500 per acre-foot of water used.

And our livestock operations, they generate $93,000 to $165,000 per acre-foot of water used.

And of course, that's the direct water.

They need water to drink and they also require the indirect water through feed grains.

- And that feed grain we produce in Texas Panhandle lasts only 120 days for our livestock industry.

Which means, for the rest of 240 days, we import feed grains from other states.

And that is called virtual water import.

- Well, virtual water is, it is real water, like when you hold that gallon of milk, you can say there's 50 gallons of water here, even though there's just a gallon in the jug.

You're not being dishonest.

It's just the way that you think about it.

It's just a record of the history of what it took to produce the milk.

And so that water was spent primarily on feed and forages for dairy cattle in order to be able to produce the milk.

There's the water that went into producing energy for cold storage, processing, and all the steps along the way.

It's almost more like we're buying the water than we are the corn.

And that means that we're effectively conserving that water here that we didn't have to spend.

- A lot of how states manage their water resources goes back to critical decisions that were made in the state constitutions.

And so in Texas, the state constitution notes that the state owns surface water, but is silent on groundwater.

And that was ultimately left up to the courts.

I don't think it was anything nefarious that happened in Texas back in the day.

It was just, you know, people weren't thinking about these things when they wrote the constitution.

- [Narrator] In 1901, Houston & Texas Central Railroad Company began pumping 25,000 gallons of water per day from an aquifer beneath Denison, Texas.

The well supplying the water to the homestead of W.A.

East went dry and East sued.

In 1904, the Texas Supreme Court ruled in favor of the railroad, because the justices could not fathom a way to regulate groundwater.

- [Narrator] "The existence, origin, movement, and course of such waters and the causes which govern their movements are so secret, occult, and concealed that an attempt to administer any set of legal rules in respect to them would be involved in hopeless uncertainty and would therefore be practically impossible."

Frank A. Williams, associate judge of the Texas Supreme Court.

- [Narrator] The court ruling created what's known as the rule of capture.

- You can take as much as you want, regardless of the impacts to your neighbors.

- So Texas is pretty unique in its right of capture.

Many other Western states will, even if they regulate it slightly different from surface water, they do still include groundwater as sort of water held by the public trust.

- We cannot tell our producers not to pump water.

Under the rule of capture, they can pump.

- [Brent] What we're talking about here is geological water, water that was deposited here a long time ago and we're mining it.

- We've known for really over 100 years that the production of water from the Ogallala is unsustainable.

People were starting to notice in the '20s and the '30s that the water levels in the wells, every year would lower.

That's a telltale sign of unsustainable groundwater production.

When, you know, the oil in your car that you measure with your dipstick is going down every time you measure it.

So surface water is owned by the state, and it's regulated through the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

And it is regulated in a way that is sustainable.

So like Lake Meredith has something called a firm yield, which is how much water can you produce outta that on an annual basis and it'll get you through a repeat of the drought of record.

(somber music continues) - [Narrator] Drought that occurred in Texas from 1949 through 1957 is considered the state's drought of record because of its duration and intensity.

It has been used as a benchmark for water planning in the state ever since.

(somber music continues) Amarillo and Lubbock rely upon their own groundwater well fields and upon the Canadian River Municipal Water Authority, which was created in the 1950s.

Known as CRMWA, the authority has delivered water from Lake Meredith and from its own groundwater well fields to member cities since 1968.

The authority operates Lake Meredith, Sanford Dam, and a 400-mile pipeline system to deliver water to Amarillo, Borger, Pampa, Plainview, Lubbock, Slaton, Tahoka, O'Donnell, Lamesa, Levelland, and Brownfield.

- In 2023, we delivered approximately 62 million gallons per day on average.

On a peak day this summer, we'll do up as much as 90 million gallons per day.

75% of that is groundwater and 25% Lake Meredith.

- [Narrator] Blending lake water with well water is essential for taste and quality.

- Evaporation is a major issue up in this part of the world, as much as eight feet per year.

And so the evaporation takes all of the good stuff, the water, and leaves the minerals.

And so over time, these minerals just continue to accumulate.

The well field was originally built as a water quality project to blend with the lake water.

I think we completed it in 2001, and that was really the beginning of a 23-year-and-counting mega-drought.

And so you know, it started as a supplemental project, and in 2012 and 2013, we were unable to use Lake Meredith because the chloride contents were just so high and we were 100% groundwater.

So we were really glad to have it at that period of time.

At that point, we were completely well water for two years.

- More water evaporates from the lake than we actually pump.

- [Narrator] Chlorides will continue to rise.

- So we have to deal with that, whether it's blending, as we can now, or future infrastructure improvement.

But we'll continue to use that lake for its original purpose, and that's a public water supply, until such point that it's not economically feasible to do either, prevent the chlorides, blend the chlorides, or have some method of treating it to remove the chloride.

- [Narrator] The city owns rights to the groundwater beneath 230,000 acres of land in the Texas Panhandle.

- We're the third largest water rights holder in the State of Texas behind the State of Texas and CRMWA.

And so Amarillo's positioned very well for future water supplies.

- [Narrator] Amarillo gets 57% of its water supply from Lake Meredith and the water authority's wells.

The rest comes from city-owned well fields and facilities.

On an average day, the city delivers around 50 million gallons of water to its customers.

That's enough water to fill 76 Olympic swimming pools.

(somber music continues) - In wintertime, that drops down to around 30 million a day.

And in summertime, that average is a little over 70 million a day.

- It is alarming to me that there are a lot of people in cities across Texas that wouldn't even be able to tell you where their water source is.

- They just want it to be there when they turn on the tap.

But to your point, I mean, we always get asked, "How's the lake doing?"

But nobody ever asks how the well field's doing.

- Because of declining water levels in the Ogallala, the legislature in 1949 passed legislation that allowed for the creation of locally-controlled groundwater conservation districts.

And so those groundwater districts have the ability to regulate well spacing, so how far wells are apart from each other, as well as how far a well is from your property line, to kinda manage my pumping impacts on your property.

- We have spacing requirements.

We have production limits.

We have reporting requirements for the producers within the district.

- [Narrator] Besides setting rules and issuing well permits, groundwater districts must create a groundwater management plan.

- And that is overseen by the state and says you have to develop certain provisions, address certain objectives and goals, so that the state can look at groundwater districts as a whole and see if they're being successful in achieving their purposes.

- [Narrator] How well can they do their job?

- Well, I think it depends on what a groundwater district wants to do.

So it is a bottom-up sort of proposition.

We have groundwater districts that are one county.

We have groundwater districts that are multiple counties.

We have some that I would say are very aggressive about conservation across the state, and some less so.

They are political entities, which I think always has a risk associated with it.

The positive is, they're representing the local needs.

The flip side is, those local needs may not be consistent with keeping water in the ground or longevity.

- When I was appointed to this position of center director, I inherited a seat at the table for the Panhandle Water Planning Group, which is Region A in the State of Texas.

Every five years, a new water plan is developed by, I think, 16 regions around the state.

We're just one of those.

And I have a higher education seat on that, on that particular planning group.

- Talk about the stakeholders that have a part in that planning.

- There are seats at the table for agriculture, agricultural producers, for environmentalist groups, for municipalities, let's see, for water districts.

Those are the ones I can recall off the top of my head.

- What they tried to do was sort of bring all of the groundwater districts in one aquifer or one big area of an aquifer together so that they would be planning the same water source together.

That goal is called the desired future condition.

(somber music continues) And so in other words, hey, you all get together and decide what you want this to look like in the future.

- It's how much water we have in storage now and how much we hope to have in 50 years from now.

It's a balancing test.

You address nine basic factors.

Of course, you're looking at, we call them user groups.

And those are the people that are using groundwater within your district, what they use it for, what you anticipate their current and then projected needs are going to be, and how you plan to achieve them.

- Of course, the further out we go, the less reliable probably our estimates are, but we do the best we can in identifying trends in population, human population, as well as livestock numbers and then the availability of water, especially groundwater, but surface water as well, to the extent that it exists in the Panhandle.

- [Narrator] I'm gonna go back to the desired future conditions.

Is that aggressive enough for the state of our aquifer at this time?

- That's a very good question.

And that's something that is vetted in-depth, each round of planning.

So it's very much a joint and collaborative process, where all the information that is available, all the estimates of the current and projected demand, use of the aquifer, is considered.

- The bigger the group is, the bigger the society is, the more compromises you have to make.

So maybe it's the best that could be done at the time.

- [Narrator] Is 50% in 50 years aggressive enough?

- I think that depends on who you ask.

There's a lot of complexity in that.

And the first thing is that the science is not of an aquifer is not consistent.

It's not a monolith.

So 50% means, and we're already seeing this, that a lot of landowners are not going to have water or good quality water under their land.

So depending on where your land is, that may essentially mean zero in 50 if you're like that.

- If we project that in 50 years, we'll have at least 50% of what we have today remaining, that's what that really refers to.

So if we had 100 feet of saturated thickness now, 50 years from now, we would hope to have at least 50 feet of saturated thickness underneath us.

Then, if you projected that forward another 50/50, we would go from 50 feet of saturated thickness down to 25 in the next 50 years.

And you can see that the way that that plays out, it doesn't ever go to zero.

You're just cutting in half and half and half.

So I think the 50 in 50 is a reflection of the physical reality of the aquifer.

It becomes harder and harder to pump it, harder and harder to find it, and it won't go to zero because we can't afford to drive it to zero.

(somber music continues) - If you live here, then you're using water.

And if you think of water as like a vote, everyone has a vote.

Everyone has a say in what's going on with water, whether you're using a lot or a little.

And it's believing that and advocating through saying what's important to you and asking questions to people that are more knowledgeable or that are in power.

That needs to happen.

I think a lot of things will change when people just believe that they have something to contribute.

(water sloshing) - [Narrator] Next time on "The Rain We Keep:" (thunder crashing) - There's a common misperception that there is no recharge to the Ogallala Aquifer.

- Because for recharge, we need rainfall.

(water hissing) (somber music) - Don't think we get rain, you just need to be here the day it all comes.

- Pumping is a fact of life here.

But there's a way to balance it.

(somber music)