The aquifer that grows half the wheat in the country is dropping a foot a year.
What's wrong. What it costs the patient. What we're doing about it. This page lays out Doc's record on ogallala aquifer in three layers: the diagnosis, the prescription, and the receipts.
Ask any wheat farmer in western Kansas what their grandkids will farm in 2050 and the answer comes back to one aquifer.
What we're doing about it.
- EQIP Water Conservation Act (S. 2696) — original cosponsor
- USDA Groundwater Recharge & Sustainability Project — Wichita + Greeley counties
- Senate Western Caucus member
In detail.
The Ogallala Aquifer underlies most of western Kansas and is the single largest source of irrigation water in the High Plains. Roughly 30% of all U.S. groundwater irrigation comes from the Ogallala. Kansas's portion is dropping by an average of 1.2 feet per year, per the Kansas Geological Survey, and in some southwest Kansas counties the decline is closer to 2 feet annually. At current draw rates, parts of the aquifer have less than fifty years of irrigated agriculture left. Half of America's wheat acreage either sits on top of the Ogallala or depends on the markets it supports. This is a Kansas problem with a national consequence.
Doc is an original cosponsor of the EQIP Water Conservation Act (S. 2696), which directs the USDA's Environmental Quality Incentives Program to prioritize water-saving practices in stressed aquifer regions. The bill targets the irrigation efficiency upgrades — low-pressure pivots, soil moisture probes, drought-tolerant crop rotations — that actually reduce draw without taking land out of production.
On the executive-branch side: Doc worked with USDA to launch the Groundwater Recharge and Sustainability Project in Wichita and Greeley counties, a pilot program that pays growers for adopting documented conservation practices and measures the recharge results against a Kansas Geological Survey baseline. As a Senate Western Caucus member, Doc has been at every Senate Ag hearing on Western water and has consistently advocated that water-conservation dollars route through working farms — not through buy-outs that pull Kansas land out of agriculture entirely.
There is no single bill that saves the Ogallala. There is a decade of incremental policy that either does or does not. Doc treats it as a doctor would treat a chronic condition: monitor the numbers, deploy the interventions that work, and don't pretend any single dose will fix it.