Wells Dry, Fertile Plains Turn to Dust

UPDATE:

In a new NY Times report (login required, we learn that federal policy is actually worsening the depletion of American acquifers.

The Environmental Quality Incentives Program, first authorized in the 1996 farm bill, was supposed to help farmers buy more efficient irrigation equipment — sprinklers and pipelines — to save water.   But the new irrigation systems have not helped conserve water supplies.  Instead, farmers are using the subsidies to irrigate more land and plant thirstier crops.

Two Western Democrats — Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, and Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico — have introduced legislation that would ensure that water saved by taxpayer-financed irrigation systems would stay in underground water tables or streams and not be used by farmers to expand their growing operations.  Success seems unlikely in the Republican-led House, however.

As a point of reference, the United States Geological Survey says that while the population has nearly doubled over the last 50 years, water consumption has tripled. And farm irrigation accounts for 80 percent of the water use nationwide, according to the Agriculture Department. 

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The NY Times reports (login required) that while many Americans are distracted by shiny, new record stock market levels, the nation's historic 'bread basket' is rapidly withering away.
 
The High Plains Aquifer System (HPAS) is a vast yet shallow underground water table aquifer located beneath the Great Plains in the United States. One of the world's largest aquifers, it covers an area of approximately 174,000 square miles in portions of the eight states of South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas.
 
The Ogallala Formation of the HPAS underlies about 80 percent of the High Plains and is the principal geologic unit forming the High Plains Aquifer. About 27 percent of the irrigated land in the United States overlies this aquifer system, which yields about 30 percent of all ground water used for irrigation in the United States. The aquifer system also supplies drinking water to 82 percent of the 2.3 million people (1990 census) who live within the boundaries of the High Plains study area.
 
While farmers and others have been removing water from the HPAS at a breakneck pace for most of a century, present-day recharge of the aquifer with fresh water occurs at an exceedingly slow rate, suggesting that much of the water in its pore spaces is paleowater, dating back to the most recent ice age … and probably even earlier.
 
Read the rest of the Times story if you've got the stomach. But third-generation Kansas farmer, Ashley Yost, sums it up pretty neatly: “We’re on the last kick. The bulk water is gone.”
 
So what's that got to do with birds, you ask?  

Birds traveling the Great Plains Flyway rely on oases and wetlands fed by the HPAS. When this water is finally too deep to feed these surface resources, birds trying to navigate the area may be faced with hundreds or even thousands of miles of dry, barren desert. 

Also, when the nation is in economic free-fall after we can no longer feed ourselves, it may cut in to one's ability somewhat to spend time chasing rare birds and such?