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Thursday, March 10, 2011 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
the Editor of NaturalNews.com
America's breadbasket aquifer
running dry; massive agriculture collapse inevitable
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger,
NaturalNews Editor
(NaturalNews) It's the largest underground freshwater supply in
the world, stretching from South Dakota all the way to Texas. It's
underneath most of Nebraska's farmlands, and it provides crucial
water resources for farming in Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and even
New Mexico. It's called the Ogallala Aquifer, and it is being
pumped dry.
See the map of this aquifer here: http://www.naturalnews.com/images/O...
Without the Ogallala Aquifer, America's heartland food
production collapses. No water means no irrigation for the
corn, wheat, alfalfa and other crops grown across these states to
feed people and animals. And each year, the Ogallala Aquifer drops
another few inches as it is literally being sucked dry by the tens
of thousands of agricultural wells that tap into it across the
heartland of America.
This problem with all this is that the Ogallala Aquifer isn't
being recharged in any significant way from rainfall or
rivers. This is so-called "fossil water" because once
you use it, it's gone. And it's disappearing now faster than ever.
In some regions along the aquifer, the water level has dropped so
far that it has effectively disappeared -- places like Happy,
Texas, where a once-booming agricultural town has collapsed to
a population of just 595. All the wells drilled there in the
1950's tapped into the Ogallala Aquifer and seemed to provide
abundant water at the time. But today the wells have all run
dry.
 Happy,
Texas has become a place of despair. Dead cattle. Wilted crops.
Once-moist soils turned to dust. And Happy is just the beginning
of this story because this same agricultural tragedy will be
repeated across Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas and parts of Colorado
in the next few decades. That's a hydrologic fact. Water doesn't
magically reappear in the Ogallala. Once it's used up, it's gone.
"There used to be 50,000 head of cattle, now there's
1,000," says Kay Horner in a Telegraph report (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/83...).
"Grazed them on wheat, but the feed lots took all the water
so we can't grow wheat. Now the feed lots can't get local steers
so they bring in cheap unwanted milking calves from California and
turn them into burger if they can't make them veal. It doesn't
make much sense. We're heading back to the Dust Bowl."
The end of cheap food in
America?
It's a sobering thought, really:
That "America's breadbasket" is on a collision course
with the inevitable. A large percentage of the food produced in
the United States is, of course, grown on farmlands irrigated from
the Ogallala. For hundreds of years, it has been a source of
"cheap water," making farming economically feasible and
keeping food prices down. Combined with the available of cheap
fossil fuels over the last century (necessary to drive the
tractors that work the fields), food production has skyrocketed in
North America. This has led to a population explosion, too.
Where food is cheap and plentiful, populations readily expand.
It only follows that when food becomes scarce or expensive
(putting it out of reach of average income earners), populations
will fall. There's only so much food to go around, after all.
And after the Ogallala runs dry, America's food production will
plummet. Starvation will become the new
American landscape for those who cannot afford the sky-high prices
for food.
Aquifer depletion is a global
problem
It's not a problem that's unique to
America, by the way. The very same problem is facing India, where
fossil water is already running dry in many parts of the country.
It's the same story in China, too, where water conservation has
never been a top priority. Even the Middle East is facing its own
water crisis (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/...).
This has caused food prices to skyrocket, leading directly to the
civil unrest, the riots and even the revolutions we've seen taking
place there over the last few months.
The problem is called aquifer depletion (http://www.eoearth.org/article/Aqui...),
and it's a problem that spans the globe. It means that today's
cheap, easy food -- grown on cheap fossil water -- simply isn't
sustainable. Once that water is gone, the croplands that depend on
it dry up. Following that, erosion kicks in, and the winds blow
away the dry soils in a "Dust Bowl" type of scenario.
A few years after that, what was once a thriving agricultural
operation is transformed into a dry, soilless death pit where
nothing lives.
"The Ogallala supply is going to run out and the Plains will
become uneconomical to farm," says David Brauer of the
Ogallala Research Service, part of the USDA. "That is beyond
reasonable argument. Our goal now is to engineer a soft landing.
That's all we can do." (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/83...)
Such is the legacy of conventional agriculture, which is
based almost entirely on non-sustainable practices. Its insane
reliance on fossil water, petroleum fertilizers, toxic pesticides
and GMOs will only lead our world to agricultural disaster.
Be prepared and be safe
I want all NaturalNews readers to be
prepared, informed and safe when facing our uncertain future. We
know that trouble is stirring around the world, and much of it is
either caused by or will lead to food shortages.
The GMO companies, of course, will exploit this situation to their
advantage, claiming that only GMOs can grow enough food to feed
the world. This is a lie. GMOs and patented seeds only enslave
the world population and lead to great social injustice. The days
of food slavery are fast approaching for those who do not
have the means to grow at least a portion of their own food.
As part of our effort to help people become more self-reliant --
with greater food security -- throughout 2011 and 2012 I plan to
bring you more articles, videos and webcast events that focus on home
food production, self-reliance, family preparedness and
sustainable living. Recently we announced a live webcast event on financial
preparedness but the available seats at that event sold out
in a matter of days (http://www.naturalnews.com/Economic...).
Based on the huge demand for this event, we have decided to roll
out a second preparedness event in April, focused on food
preparedness and security. Watch for an announcement on that
soon.
In the mean time, I am personally working on growing more of my
own food and will be creating a new series of videos and
articles based on some of what I learn along the way. From living
in South America and producing quite a large amount of food there,
I have a fair amount of experience on home food production, but of
course there's always more to learn, right?
My gut feeling on all this is that learning to grow and store
some portion of your own food is going to become a crucial
survival skill over the next few years. And that means
understanding water, soil, open-pollinated seeds, organic
fertilizers, soil probiotics, insect pollination, growing with the
seasons, sprouting, food harvesting, food drying, canning, storage
and much more. It's a whole set of skills that have faded away in
America in just two generations, leaving very few people who now
know how to live off their own land.
What's becoming increasingly obvious from events such as the
drying up of aquifers is that home food production is going to
become a critical survival skill. I want NaturalNews readers
to know and practice these skills as much as possible so that you
can experience the comforts (and freedoms!) of genuine food
security.
Watch for more stories about preparedness, home food production
and self-reliant living here on NaturalNews.
Sources for this story include:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/83...
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/031658_aquifer_depletion_Ogallala.html#ixzz1GDk6fvks
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