Sustainable agriculture in western Kansas

It's been very interesting taking a brief trip out through western Kansas this week, during a visit to a number of industry facilities. Western Kansas is a traditionally dry landscape, with sandy loam soils and an average annual rainfall in the range of 20 inches. First native range for the roaming buffalo, western Kansas became predominantly cattle country until the advent of groundwater irrigation throughout the region in the early half of the twentieth century, resulting in the widespread use of flood irrigation and then sprinkler irrigation.

Driving through western Kansas now, the majority of farming ground utilises centre pivot groundwater irrigation supported by the Ogallala Aquifer, and although this has allowed generations of farmers to engage in profitable and productive farming, there is growing concern regarding the sustainability of the continued use of this aquifer. Along with this proliferation in commodity crop production over the past century has come availability of feed for widespread lot feeding of cattle and subsequent processing plants for those cattle. Hence, western Kansas consists mostly of cropping, along with lot feeding and processing of cattle as the main agricultural industries.

The sustainability of such agricultural industries is of concern to many stakeholders here in Kansas and the broader United States including primary producers, corporate companies, government, consumers and rural communities, with the potential impact of diminished or depleted water supplies fatal to these industries. Water efficiency has subsequently become an important area of focus for many of these stakeholders with innovation in water technologies continually being developed. It will be interesting to see the inevitable change in water use practices here over the next twenty years. Whether farming and intensive cattle production and processing will still be a part of the western Kansas landscape at that time is anyone's guess.