- 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.

- We gotta feed the world, we gotta feed the world, we gotta... We're gonna feed the world to the point we can't feed ourselves.

- You just assume when you turn on the tap, it's gonna show up.

So I think we have to reverse that trend and get people in cities as aware of their water use as agricultural users and then we can go from there.

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

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - [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.

- The big water is the Ogallala.

It's the motherload, and it's invisible.

We're not connected to it.

Like if it was a lake or a river, we would see it more.

I mean, we have maps, but we can't see it every day.

But that's where we draw life from.

- Does that help or hurt that we can't see it every day?

- Well, it hurts in the sense that it's hard to treat it as a gift, and we think of it as a commodity.

Turn on the water, there it is.

City planners or whoever always looking for more water and they all believe there is more, even if it has to come from long distances.

- A lot of people are under the impression that the Ogallala would react, like many of the aquifers downstate.

That if you reduce production, you're gonna restore the level of water that's in storage of the aquifer.

And we don't believe that's true with the Ogallala.

It's not just reduction of production and use of the Ogallala.

It would require additional rainfall.

It would require any effort to increase recharge to the aquifer.

The Ogallala is a vast aquifer that covers multiple states.

And the recharge source of the Ogallala used to be connected to the ice melt in Colorado, and the mountains areas.

I've been advised, I'm not a geologist, but I've been advised that's no longer connected.

And so the source of that recharge and how the aquifer used to operate, is no longer there.

We can't look back.

We have to look forward.

And we have to work together, and we have to meet our producers where they are.

- [Karen] Scientists have said it would take thousands of years for natural recharge to refill the Ogallala Aquifer.

- The two things that we've learned is that people have chronically overstated the amount of water in the region, and they've sold this doomsday scenario of it doesn't pay to save it because it's gonna take 10,000 years to recover, so we might as well use it.

So they wanna view it as pumping oil.

So we have a very mining culture about it here.

And we've gotta get away from that mining culture to a conservation/preservation culture.

- The hope, I think, perhaps naive hope, is that, "Oh, well, we'll self-regulate."

And some of that could be installing new forms of irrigation systems that are more efficient, or some of that could just be saying, "I'm only gonna pump out 18 acre-inches in my growing season."

But you can't make somebody want to self-conserve whenever they're looking at a dry thirsty crop and a bill, and they're saying, "Well, I gotta pay that bill."

- The High Plains aquifer system is being depleted because our government policy is to deplete it.

The laws encourage extraction.

The rule of capture encourages extraction.

The subsidies encourage extraction and economic development.

And again, we're trapped in this race to the bottom.

We've imposed this legal system that works really well in terms of generating economic activity.

But it's not sustainable.

- [Karen] Some farming subsidies do incentivize water conservation.

Others don't.

- The way that crop insurance is structured, it actually forces more water use to be able to get your claim put through.

- The government allocates many billions of dollars to landowners and land users in the form of the Farm Bill.

And so we have a good number of subsidy programs that pay our land users to build fence, build road, clean up fence, build wells, do all kinds of things, that are supposed to be for soil and water conservation.

Why is the government funding what doesn't work?

- There's no incentive at this point to try to do things like plant a cover crop, to fallow a piece of ground for a 12-month period of time to let that ground can harvest more rainfall.

If we fallow a piece of ground, and we cover it for a period of 12 months, and allow that soil to harvest rainfall, then the subsequent corn crop will very likely be much better in terms of yield and quality than if you tried to grow crop after crop after crop.

- [Karen] Conservation proponents acknowledge they would have to restore thousands of playas and build thousands of leaky dams along watersheds to seeing meaningful widespread aquifer recharge, rather than hyperlocal results.

- It's not like a one and done approach.

And so there's more work to do.

There is no competing with the US government.

And so if we're gonna scale it under the Farm Bill, it's gonna have to be part of that subsidy package.

- If we hope not to gut these small rural towns, we need to be aggressive.

- Towns are going to struggle.

And we already see small towns struggling in the High Plains.

Olton is an example of a town that has been struggling with a depleting Ogallala Aquifer.

So they're seeing their wells starting to fail.

- It's part of the solution, right?

We have a rough idea what our recharge is.

We know how many playas we have.

We know approximately how many are functional, how many are not functional.

And by making more functional, we obviously are helping to improve how much recharge is going to our aquifer.

At current irrigation rates and current uses, we do know that playas can support communities, and it can support more rangeland farming.

A lot of communities don't own the playa lakes.

It's gonna have to at some point be neighbors helping neighbors, where municipalities are gonna need a partnership with neighboring landowners, either through leasing water rights or so forth.

- [Karen] How large are playa lakes?

- On average in this region it's 17 acres.

However, you know, I just restored a playa that was 250 acres, a couple months ago.

But we've done them as small as 3 to 7 acres.

So, you know, they do vary quite a bit in size.

And probably for our projects, they average about 25 to 30 acres.

- It's the best money we could spend, if we're looking at it from a taxpayer perspective.

The playa advantage is this.

If you can recharge the water in the area, and get that water optimized, the recharge of that water table, that is the cheapest source of water, new water, on an annual basis that we have here.

This is not the 10,000-year problem that we've been told, that's gonna take 10,000 years to solve it.

It's a much more solvable problem.

- [Karen] Amarillo has plans for more groundwater wells in the future, as does the Canadian River Municipal Water Authority, commonly known as CRMWA.

- For our well field, we have 43 high-capacity wells out there.

We are in the process of drilling four new wells.

Essentially what we're trying to do with these new wells is replace lost capacity.

So our existing wells out there, they're operating and obviously the water table's dropping and we lose about roughly a half of well production capacity per year from the well field.

- What we try to do is to incrementally add water rights to offset depletion of those water rights.

That is just replacing the inventory of what's being used over time.

There are other strategies that are very much in play in that.

Now we're looking for expansion into the Roberts, Ochiltree county into the 2060s.

- How does Amarillo's reaching further into Roberts County and Ochiltree County affect the folks in those areas?

- It's mostly ranchland.

So it is an asset that those ranchers or the landowners have that they can divest from the surface and sell to us, and still do exactly what they were doing on the surface for agriculture.

It's beneficial from that perspective that they can continue ranching, and doing the things that they do.

But it's also beneficial in that long range plan that we're not over there, competing with the heavy irrigation component.

And that makes us better ability to be partners with Ag.

We know that we're looking for additional CRMWA supply in the 2030s.

We're looking for aquifer storage, and possibly direct potable reuse in the 2040s.

- The direct potable reuse is taking water from the wastewater treatment plant and completely cleaning it up, to where you then put it back into the drinking water distribution system.

People will call it toilet to tap.

There's concerns of what might be in the water.

But it's pretty much stripped of everything.

Once it goes through the full process, it's as clean, if not cleaner than rainwater at that point.

Texas has been a leader in this.

Texas had the second direct potable reuse plant in the world in Big Spring, Texas, by the Colorado Municipal Water District, where they take treated wastewater from Big Spring, completely treat it, and then it goes into a raw water supply pipeline that goes to its member cities, including Midland.

El Paso is building a huge direct potable reuse plant.

And then a number of communities across the state, including central Texas, are looking at this technology.

- [Karen] Some wastewater can be treated and reused in other ways.

- Now, not potable water, which is your drinkable water, but this reuse water is being placed on city parks, the golf course, even the school ground.

That's saved four million gallons a month on its own.

- [Karen] Clovis also looked toward playa lake restoration.

- When you consider water, you have to look at every possible water source.

Playa restoration in itself is a major undertaking, but it's important work.

First and foremost is the recharge value to the aquifer, even if it's minimal.

- Look around.

Where are the alternative sources of water out here?

The '68 Water Plan proposed bringing the Mississippi River to the High Plains, to get the aquifer back into a sustainable pumping scenario and meet demands.

There continues to be discussions about importing large amounts of surface water here.

- [Karen] Recently, some local discussions have focused on updating a 40-year-old proposal to divert flood water from the Missouri River to six Ogallala Aquifer states, including Texas.

- We're looking at potential of flood water from the Missouri River.

In the couple of the drought years or dry years we've had here in the northern Panhandle, they've actually had flood events.

If we had had a project on board a few years ago, the Missouri River faced one of its largest flooding events.

And if we could have moved some of that flood water to here, it would've potentially made an impact.

As we've looked at it some more, we've engaged Congress, at least our representatives, to help us move forward on this process.

- That almost sounds like a Hail Mary pass.

Are we in a crisis?

- That's a very good question.

I would say not yet.

But I don't think you wanna wait until you're in a crisis to start to develop a crisis plan.

And I think it does warrant an additional look to see what the costs are, and is it feasible to move the water multi-state.

- A cost of moving water from anywhere to the Texas Panhandle is huge.

Infrastructure is the number one cost of getting it up and running.

But what people don't realize, any system, our system, CRMWA, our number one expense over time is the fuel, electricity to move the water.

- [Karen] How hard is the politics on this?

- It's gonna be extremely difficult, I think.

Heck, in Texas, we have a hard time with politics across county lines.

I would imagine that it's gonna be a difficult, not impossible, but it's gonna be a difficult matter.

- People don't wanna give up their water.

They wanna keep it.

We've even seen that on a city level, where companies have tried to buy treated wastewater from cities on long-term contracts, and the city has declined, because they want to keep the possibility of reusing that themselves.

- One wrinkle in this that makes it a little difficult is if you talk Canadian River Municipal Water Authority, they'll frequently tell you something like, we have 200 years of water, at the current rate.

And if you think that way, then you think there's no crisis.

I don't need to do anything different.

- When you see those sorts of estimations, I don't doubt that they're done in good faith with the science.

To me that's always very dicey, because you can know how much you have, or have an idea of how much you have.

Even that, I think, is harder and harder to do, because we don't know, once you start dewatering, what might happen to geology.

But also that's highly impacted by how we use the water in between.

These are projections, it is projected out.

I don't want people to have a false sense of security about what water is available.

- An average household in the United States loses about 10% of its water uses due to water loss and leaks in the home.

A lot of that's leaking toilets, or pipe breaks, and you're not aware of it.

- [Karen] Advanced water meters being installed across the city of Amarillo should help.

- That is our biggest conservation, and probably the number one conservation tool that we can do such that we, the city, and our citizens, will have the ability to know when they use water and how much.

And with that data and information, everybody can make better decisions, especially that citizen who needs to conserve dollars for other things.

We can get alarms from 'em on our system in the billing office right now.

So right now, if we see unusual use, say somebody who uses the minimum for a month, and they use that in one day, we can call 'em.

- The most expensive thing that we grow is turf grass.

- Lawns.

- Lawns.

- Fescue lawns.

- [Karen] A 2018 report shows single family households in Texas use as much as 192 billion gallons of water each year for landscape irrigation.

- So there's a cultural aspect of lawns, which is that people like seeing green things throughout the year, and they spend water.

I say spend water, almost like it's money.

'Cause to me, it's a more valuable commodity than even money for us.

So do they know how much they're spending to keep lawns green?

- So here's the biggest argument for rainwater collection.

Use it for landscaping.

If we just took the needs of landscaping off of our public systems or our domestic systems, we would have a lot more Ogallala water for the future.

The problem is not that it doesn't rain, it's that when it rains, you don't store enough of the harvested water, and you don't have it when you need it.

In any community, the biggest water users usually have the biggest roofs.

So in this village, the biggest water users are the school, and they have big roofs.

And the church, they also have big roofs.

So if we could just harvest the water off our roofs in these communities, and use that for landscaping, and take that pressure off the public system, we would get a lot further.

- Every water source you can gain makes all the difference in the success that your community experiences.

We are doing rainwater harvesting.

In fact, Central Curry Soil and Water Conservation District, which is our local soil and water conservation district, has that opportunity where it's a shared cost to put in rainwater harvesting.

Will farmers take advantage of that?

I believe so.

Some already have, and I believe more will.

- I grew up hoeing weeds in cotton fields in the summer, and seeing this place as more of a chore, small town America, more as a chore.

I'm an artist and I wanted to get to New York City, or to LA, a big city.

I actually began to appreciate this place more after having moved away.

I had never imagined that farming could be a creative act, but it absolutely can.

- [Karen] Simpson's art connections brought other artists to the farm.

An artist collective known as M12 installed an artwork called "The Tap" in a small silo there.

It features a well drilled into the Ogallala.

- They thought of this piece as a public artwork that's almost like a pilgrimage, a place to go and have secure water.

We fill small cups, and in a way, we commune with each other and with the water that is giving and sustaining life here in our area.

After that, it's really about talking about the numbers.

How much are we pumping out out of the ground?

What are the consequences of pumping up millions of gallons of water, perhaps a day, for making cotton or corn grow in this area?

(gentle music) But also in that conversation is the potential that one day, it would deplete, that one day we'll go to the tap, open it up, and air comes out.

And we let it trickle so we can hear the water.

This is anxiety-inducing, but after we go through the numbers, they realize that, "Oh, actually, this is nothing."

Every drop does count.

I'm not saying that it doesn't.

But whenever people are asked to conserve water, and we should, in our daily lives, flushing toilets and such, but we realize actually that's not the thing that's gonna totally solve this issue.

There are other big water users, and they're the ones sort of with the bigger straws.

It puts the immense and dire situation into perspective, I think, in a way, that maybe people weren't ready for.

They're used to watering a backyard or a small garden.

This is not that.

(gentle music) - How do we coexist as producing the food we need in the region?

I think that's where we start.

We start talking about local food systems, local, local.

Let's take care of local first, and then let's sell the extra, instead of selling everything, and then trying to figure out where we're gonna buy back what we need with the profits of that.

If we're going to become gypsy agriculture, where we pump an area dry, we move over to another area.

and we're gonna pump it dry, what are we solving?

We're not solving anything.

(gentle music) - This is a water crisis.

I cannot emphasize this enough.

Accept that it is.

Call it out for what it is.

And then take action to change the current status.

- I am concerned over the fact that we've let it go this far before we started trying to find a solution.

- Before we draw the last drop of water, it will be quite a while, but there will be a time, coming fairly soon, where we won't have enough water do the things that we're used to doing, like irrigating large fields.

- [Karen] Coming fairly soon?

- I'm thinking maybe a generation or two.

So we really need to be a lot smarter about how we monitor and regulate our groundwater.

- [Karen] Is there political will to set policy?

- Probably not at the moment, no.

But maybe there will be some urgency when we see the end coming.

- No policymaker wants to be the bearer of bad news, right?

They may be thinking about their next election, or they just don't want a panicked community.

But I'm definitely an advocate for being a truth-teller.

You can't solve the problem if everybody doesn't understand what the problem is.

And not talking about it doesn't make the problem go away.

And people are amazing.

I mean, anybody that's lived out in West Texas, these are tough, adaptable people.

Use them as a tool to come up as teammates in solving these problems.

(gentle music) - There really is a serious issue that we're facing.

And I think it really needs to involve not only hydrologists, but economists, and lawmakers and everybody else.

Everybody needs to be all in on this problem.

- So much of the water challenge is that it's always highly reactive.

If the water's gone, it's already gone.

A lot of people like to think about risk management.

What I like about risk management is it is shifting us away from the response part, hopefully to something that's more proactive.

So you have to start with the risk assessment.

It's gonna be a rough conversation.

Everyone needs to be at the table.

All the cards need to be put out on the table.

And then you can kind of think about the risk assessment or the risk response.

The hard conversations are, as a region, there has to be decisions made about what should the priorities of the water be.

Somebody told me once, "Well, there is no priority of uses."

And my response was, "Yeah, tell that to me the minute that it starts to run out."

(gentle music) (water dripping) - Innovation is the way forward.

Trying new things, maybe even trying old things in new ways, recognizing that our long term is gonna be going back to a landscape that looked, maybe looks different than it did, but it's gonna be centered on animals.

It's gonna be centered on growing livestock.

And farming is gonna have to adapt in those innovative ways.

(gentle music) - There's a way to make a living here, to live from the land, but to live within the budget of the groundwater.

To not exhaust it, to not deplete it.

To use, but also make sure there is water for generations to come.

- We have to make it work.

And the hope comes from being able to convey that to the people, and get them to all join in on conservation efforts.

- We're a resilient people.

We're going to, again, we're going to adapt.

I think back to, it was my great-grandfather on both sides of my family, by the way, that came to this part of the world to grow crops.

And we didn't have irrigation then.

And then they came here, not really knowing what to expect.

I'm sure they just knew that they were committed to doing whatever it took to make this work.

We're the same people.

It'll be different, but we'll make it work.

- My family gives me hope because they're willing to change as much as I want to change.

And I would hope that the next generation even pushes my generation further and says, "You thought you were doing enough, but you weren't.

Here's how we can move forward."

I get a lot of hope from younger people.

They're not gonna put up with our bull crap.

Excuse the...

They'll change it for the better, I hope.

And then, there are some evenings and mornings, whenever the heat hasn't settled in yet.

It's not 100 degrees yet, and I'm able to walk outside as the sun's coming up, and see the prairie grass and see that that is a future.

Yeah, there is stability in that.

There's something that exists where I'm a part of it, but it doesn't necessarily need me.

It could do just as well without me.

That kinda gives me hope.

All the other crops, they're screaming for help, when it's August and it's 100-plus degrees.

So I like the things that feel like they're resilient.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] For more about water conservation on the High Plains, listen to "The Rain We Keep" podcast, available on all major podcast platforms.

(water splashing)