(somber music) - The Ogallala Aquifer, it's the primary source of water on the High Plains.

- The big challenge with the Ogallala is it's not filling back up.

We can run out.

- [Narrator] Some have called the situation a race to the bottom of the aquifer.

- Sorry, that's a hard thing to hear.

The people who are the most poor and who have the fewer resources are gonna be the ones affected the most.

- This did not sneak up on us.

State engineers warned us of impending crisis in the '40s, in the '50s, in the '60s, in the '80s, in the 2000s.

- So there's a learned powerlessness.

I think we've been taught that there's nothing we can do about it.

And it took a while for me to come to the realization that that's not true.

It's a myth.

It's a falsehood.

(dramatic music) - [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.

(somber music) - I grew up hunting and fishing, and my dad took me and my brothers and sisters kinda to a bunch of different farms and ranches.

And we were just really privileged to see a lot of this landscape.

I learned how to fish in a creek south of McLean.

It's called Long Dry Sand Creek.

But this stretch of creek that I fish in wasn't dry.

It was like six feet deep in spots.

It was awesome.

And if you drive out there today, the creek is bone dry.

And so, yeah, we've had this kind of privileged look at the drying out of our landscape.

And so it's just haunted me my whole life.

- [Narrator] Two years ago, Masters and a friend, Warren Thetford, gathered some volunteers and began work on a ranch north of Amarillo along the Canadian River.

Their intention: to build leaky dams of earth, rock, trees, and plants that can slow runoff and keep rain where it falls, benefiting both the landscape and the aquifer beneath.

- My whole career has been in analyzing vegetation throughout the West, primarily on rangeland.

Will and I met sorta by chance in Amarillo a few years ago, and we came out here and we talked even back then, it's like, we can fix that right there now.

You know, we can get outta the truck right now and go out there and fix that.

- Our landscape is wealthy and our landscape is livable, so long as our landscape has water.

We are not in a water-scarce region.

The Ogallala Aquifer is huge, and we can talk about that for a second.

So the High Plains aquifer system underlies at least eight states: Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, South Dakota.

And so it is in a very real sense, it is a transboundary aquifer.

It doesn't exist underneath multiple nations, but it does under multiple sovereign federalist states.

There was a whole lot of water, and there is still a whole lot of water in the High Plains aquifer system.

- Ogallala Aquifer is this kinda wonderful apron of sediments that come from the Rocky Mountains, that holds an amazing amount of water that has turned this part of Texas and the High Plains of the United States in general into a bread basket of the United States for agriculture.

- What happened is, the Rocky Mountains went up, and once they went up, they started eroding.

This happened about 50 million years ago is when the mountains came up.

So for about 10 million years, the rivers coming off the mountains carried sands and gravels and silt and deposited it as a large blanket, slightly tilted towards the east.

And in some places, much thicker than in other places.

The places where it was deposited to the greatest thickness was where the river valleys used to be, where the rivers ran.

- [Narrator] Scientists can determine the amount of water in an aquifer by gauging its saturated thickness, the distance between the water table and the aquifer's base.

The footage provides a glimpse of fossil water, water that has not touched the Earth's atmosphere in more than 10,000 years.

(somber music continues) - We can actually date the water because it has carbon dioxide in it.

So we can actually use radiocarbon dating to date the water.

It's not a lake, as we think of lakes.

This is the spaces between the grains are filled with water.

In some places, the grains are boulders as big as your head.

In other places, the grains are little particles of silt.

(somber music continues) - Early explorers, when they first saw the High Plains, they called it the Great American Desert.

There was no water.

You know, when you came up that cliff and just saw this massive, featureless plain, you know, a sea of buffalo grass and no water.

- It was thought that it would always remain a desert.

But then, people started drilling wells and finding water beneath that land surface and started producing that water.

- For a few decades early on, Plainview was like the oasis of the High Plains, and they'd had these lakes that were maintained by opening wells and pumping groundwater.

And so yeah, for a few decades, "Hey, come live here, water's abundant."

- [Narrator] In Plainview and many other communities on the plains, the myth of the Great American Desert was giving way to the myth of the garden.

By 1920, more than 1,000 farms surrounded Plainview in Hale County, but the lake had been closed, having become too costly to maintain.

- When we started pumping the water, producing the water, we didn't know how much water we could produce and produce in a sustainable way.

We didn't know how much water was percolating in from the land surface to replenish the aquifer.

That, unfortunately, led to an overproduction of the system, to today, where we're pumping six times as much water than what's percolating back in.

It's, you know, really 100% of the source of water for agriculture and then a pretty substantial source of water for municipalities.

I think like Amarillo, it's something like 80% of the supply is coming from the Ogallala.

And it's similar for Lubbock.

Out of all the water we use in Texas, 40% comes from the Ogallala Aquifer.

So it's just this massive supply of water.

Something north of 90% of the water is being used by farmers, by producers to grow crops.

(somber music) - Everything here is dependent upon agriculture, and if you think about, just look around.

You can see that everywhere you drive, there's agriculture.

You see it in the fields.

You pass by animal feeding operations.

You pass by banks and businesses that are there just because agriculture exists in the region.

- If you draw a circle of radius, let's say, 120 miles around the City of Amarillo, you've got about 1/4 to 1/3 of all of the fed cattle in the United States are produced within that circle.

So we're producing a heck of a lot of beef.

Dairy is also really, really important.

I think the Texas dairy industry is fourth or fifth among the states in total milk production, and if you include eastern New Mexico, if we wanted to annex eastern New Mexico, we'd end up with probably the fourth largest what we call a milkshed.

So it's really important to this region, and it's really important to the United States as well.

- A lot of how states manage their water resources goes back to critical decisions that were made in the state constitutions.

And so in Texas, the state constitution notes that the state owns surface water, but is silent on groundwater.

And that was ultimately left up to the courts.

I don't think it was anything nefarious that happened in Texas back in the day.

It was just, you know, people weren't thinking about these things when they wrote the constitution.

- [Narrator] In 1901, Houston & Texas Central Railroad Company began pumping 25,000 gallons of water per day from an aquifer beneath Denison, Texas.

The well supplying the water to the homestead of W.A.

East went dry and East sued.

In 1904, the Texas Supreme Court ruled in favor of the railroad, because the justices could not fathom a way to regulate groundwater.

- [Narrator] "The existence, origin, movement, and course of such waters and the causes which govern their movements are so secret, occult, and concealed that an attempt to administer any set of legal rules in respect to them would be involved in hopeless uncertainty and would therefore be practically impossible."

Frank A. Williams, associate judge of the Texas Supreme Court.

- [Narrator] The court ruling created what's known as the rule of capture.

- You can take as much as you want, regardless of the impacts to your neighbors.

- So Texas is pretty unique in its right of capture.

Many other Western states will, even if they regulate it slightly different from surface water, they do still include groundwater as sort of water held by the public trust.

- We cannot tell our producers not to pump water.

Under the rule of capture, they can pump.

- [Brent] What we're talking about here is geological water, water that was deposited here a long time ago and we're mining it.

- We've known for really over 100 years that the production of water from the Ogallala is unsustainable.

People were starting to notice in the '20s and the '30s that the water levels in the wells, every year would lower.

That's a telltale sign of unsustainable groundwater production.

When, you know, the oil in your car that you measure with your dipstick is going down every time you measure it.

So surface water is owned by the state, and it's regulated through the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

And it is regulated in a way that is sustainable.

So like Lake Meredith has something called a firm yield, which is how much water can you produce outta that on an annual basis and it'll get you through a repeat of the drought of record.

(somber music continues) - [Narrator] Drought that occurred in Texas from 1949 through 1957 is considered the state's drought of record because of its duration and intensity.

It has been used as a benchmark for water planning in the state ever since.

(somber music continues) Amarillo and Lubbock rely upon their own groundwater well fields and upon the Canadian River Municipal Water Authority, which was created in the 1950s.

Known as CRMWA, the authority has delivered water from Lake Meredith and from its own groundwater well fields to member cities since 1968.

The authority operates Lake Meredith, Sanford Dam, and a 400-mile pipeline system to deliver water to Amarillo, Borger, Pampa, Plainview, Lubbock, Slaton, Tahoka, O'Donnell, Lamesa, Levelland, and Brownfield.

- In 2023, we delivered approximately 62 million gallons per day on average.

On a peak day this summer, we'll do up as much as 90 million gallons per day.

75% of that is groundwater and 25% Lake Meredith.

- [Narrator] Blending lake water with well water is essential for taste and quality.

- Evaporation is a major issue up in this part of the world, as much as eight feet per year.

And so the evaporation takes all of the good stuff, the water, and leaves the minerals.

And so over time, these minerals just continue to accumulate.

The well field was originally built as a water quality project to blend with the lake water.

I think we completed it in 2001, and that was really the beginning of a 23-year-and-counting mega-drought.

And so you know, it started as a supplemental project, and in 2012 and 2013, we were unable to use Lake Meredith because the chloride contents were just so high and we were 100% groundwater.

So we were really glad to have it at that period of time.

At that point, we were completely well water for two years.

- More water evaporates from the lake than we actually pump.

- [Narrator] Chlorides will continue to rise.

- So we have to deal with that, whether it's blending, as we can now, or future infrastructure improvement.

But we'll continue to use that lake for its original purpose, and that's a public water supply, until such point that it's not economically feasible to do either, prevent the chlorides, blend the chlorides, or have some method of treating it to remove the chloride.

- [Narrator] The city owns rights to the groundwater beneath 230,000 acres of land in the Texas Panhandle.

- We're the third largest water rights holder in the State of Texas behind the State of Texas and CRMWA.

And so Amarillo's positioned very well for future water supplies.

- [Narrator] Amarillo gets 57% of its water supply from Lake Meredith and the water authority's wells.

The rest comes from city-owned well fields and facilities.

On an average day, the city delivers around 50 million gallons of water to its customers.

That's enough water to fill 76 Olympic swimming pools.

(somber music continues) - In wintertime, that drops down to around 30 million a day.

And in summertime, that average is a little over 70 million a day.

- It is alarming to me that there are a lot of people in cities across Texas that wouldn't even be able to tell you where their water source is.

- They just want it to be there when they turn on the tap.

But to your point, I mean, we always get asked, "How's the lake doing?"

But nobody ever asks how the well field's doing.

- Because of declining water levels in the Ogallala, the legislature in 1949 passed legislation that allowed for the creation of locally-controlled groundwater conservation districts.

And so those groundwater districts have the ability to regulate well spacing, so how far wells are apart from each other, as well as how far a well is from your property line, to kinda manage my pumping impacts on your property.

- We have spacing requirements.

We have production limits.

We have reporting requirements for the producers within the district.

- [Narrator] Besides setting rules and issuing well permits, groundwater districts must create a groundwater management plan.

- And that is overseen by the state and says you have to develop certain provisions, address certain objectives and goals, so that the state can look at groundwater districts as a whole and see if they're being successful in achieving their purposes.

- [Narrator] How well can they do their job?

- Well, I think it depends on what a groundwater district wants to do.

So it is a bottom-up sort of proposition.

We have groundwater districts that are one county.

We have groundwater districts that are multiple counties.

We have some that I would say are very aggressive about conservation across the state, and some less so.

They are political entities, which I think always has a risk associated with it.

The positive is, they're representing the local needs.

The flip side is, those local needs may not be consistent with keeping water in the ground or longevity.

- When I was appointed to this position of center director, I inherited a seat at the table for the Panhandle Water Planning Group, which is Region A in the State of Texas.

Every five years, a new water plan is developed by, I think, 16 regions around the state.

We're just one of those.

And I have a higher education seat on that, on that particular planning group.

- Talk about the stakeholders that have a part in that planning.

- There are seats at the table for agriculture, agricultural producers, for environmentalist groups, for municipalities, let's see, for water districts.

Those are the ones I can recall off the top of my head.

- What they tried to do was sort of bring all of the groundwater districts in one aquifer or one big area of an aquifer together so that they would be planning the same water source together.

That goal is called the desired future condition.

(somber music continues) And so in other words, hey, you all get together and decide what you want this to look like in the future.

- It's how much water we have in storage now and how much we hope to have in 50 years from now.

It's a balancing test.

You address nine basic factors.

Of course, you're looking at, we call them user groups.

And those are the people that are using groundwater within your district, what they use it for, what you anticipate their current and then projected needs are going to be, and how you plan to achieve them.

- Of course, the further out we go, the less reliable probably our estimates are, but we do the best we can in identifying trends in population, human population, as well as livestock numbers and then the availability of water, especially groundwater, but surface water as well, to the extent that it exists in the Panhandle.

- [Narrator] I'm gonna go back to the desired future conditions.

Is that aggressive enough for the state of our aquifer at this time?

- That's a very good question.

And that's something that is vetted in-depth, each round of planning.

So it's very much a joint and collaborative process, where all the information that is available, all the estimates of the current and projected demand, use of the aquifer, is considered.

- The bigger the group is, the bigger the society is, the more compromises you have to make.

So maybe it's the best that could be done at the time.

- [Narrator] Is 50% in 50 years aggressive enough?

- I think that depends on who you ask.

There's a lot of complexity in that.

And the first thing is that the science is not of an aquifer is not consistent.

It's not a monolith.

So 50% means, and we're already seeing this, that a lot of landowners are not going to have water or good quality water under their land.

So depending on where your land is, that may essentially mean zero in 50 if you're like that.

- If we project that in 50 years, we'll have at least 50% of what we have today remaining, that's what that really refers to.

So if we had 100 feet of saturated thickness now, 50 years from now, we would hope to have at least 50 feet of saturated thickness underneath us.

Then, if you projected that forward another 50/50, we would go from 50 feet of saturated thickness down to 25 in the next 50 years.

And you can see that the way that that plays out, it doesn't ever go to zero.

You're just cutting in half and half and half.

So I think the 50 in 50 is a reflection of the physical reality of the aquifer.

It becomes harder and harder to pump it, harder and harder to find it, and it won't go to zero because we can't afford to drive it to zero.

(somber music continues) - Our first project was on private ranch land north of Amarillo, and so it's just on the north side of the Canadian River.

So this ranch has been in existence since 1910, and in 1910, there were nine streams that had live water that always flowed.

Today, there are no streams with live water.

- Anybody that's been out here a long time knows a lot of places that they've seen firsthand that are a wreck of what they were 50 years ago.

Springs that have gone dry, creeks that have gone dry, beautiful cottonwood groves that are all dead.

- We can look at some like historic aerial images.

And so there's some images of around the 1950s, you can see roughly what the watershed condition was like in the 1950s.

And it is just dramatically different from today.

It's like hard to believe.

It's hard to comprehend.

And I think that is like the problem is the degradation is so slow.

It's like multi-generational.

We don't know what we lost.

The streams are incised.

And so you have this kind of like old broad drainage, and over the past century, because of roads and because of grazing and different practices, decreased in size.

And so it's like instead of having a broad channel, it's like a gully.

You have a broad channel with a V or a U in the bottom of it.

And so now, whenever it rains, all the rain goes down this incised channel.

It rapidly drains the landscape.

- [Narrator] Ogallala Life crews built 120 dams on the ranch.

- It's basically a check dam.

We're putting a bunch of stuff in the path of the water to slow the drainage from the landscape.

They're built outta rocks and dead wood, and we're capturing sediment.

And so we don't want to stop the water.

We wanna slow the water down, and we wanna catch the sediment and the nutrients.

And so on some of these watersheds, we have, like it was a dam, and it was like this high.

Now, the dam is full to capacity with sediment.

And so the upstream part of the dam is just the ground.

And that ground is like a sponge, kind of marshy.

And that's the point is create these little, like a distributed chain of wetlands that can soak up flood water.

- [Narrator] The natural dams spread the water, giving it more opportunity to saturate the land and drip through to the aquifer beneath, providing hyperlocal results.

- Measuring the recharge isn't hard, because you'll see, like you'll see spring start to flow again.

You can also measure the wells and see rises in the water table.

The harder thing is to measure the recharge that we are responsible for.

And so like what is our impact versus what is just the general recharge, because we got 20 inches of rain.

The way we're doing it is remote sensing and looking at changes in vegetation.

- It's a cheap and easy way to do this.

One thing that I do see hope in all this is that you can build these dams, and in one or two years, there's like new trees sprouting up.

There's a big patch of sunflowers that wasn't there before, and you got a covey of quail hanging out there.

- Instead of having like roughly kind of desert terrain on both sides and a gully, you have riparian corridor with willow and cottonwood and tall grasses.

On a local scale, I think that it is achievable and beneficial.

The problem is, how do we scale it to a bioregional level?

And that is why we need the public engaged.

- But if you wanna understand Southern High Plains, the Southern Great Plains, it's really about the groundwater, about the aquifer.

Even rivers like the Canadian River that run through, they're being replenished by the outcroppings of the aquifer.

- Folks talk about, often talk about groundwater and surface water as two separate things.

In Texas, legally, they're treated as two separate things.

Policy-wise, they're treated as two separate things, but the reality is they are joined and connected together.

Flows in a river, in a stream can leak into an aquifer and recharge an aquifer, and then water in an aquifer can also come up and feed a spring or feed a perennial stream.

The Canadian used to be raging river known for massive floods, basically.

I mean, they would rain in the Rocky Mountains and just send these rip-roaring floods downstream that would go all the way into Oklahoma and wipe out communities in Oklahoma.

- [Narrator] Aware of the Canadian's long history of flooding and alarmed at the growing number of irrigation wells across the region, Texas Panhandle leaders put together a project to build Sanford Dam on the river and create Lake Meredith near Fritch in the 1950s and '60s.

Spring Creek rancher, John F. Allen, shot a film about creation of the Canadian River Municipal Water Authority and construction of the dam.

The lake's namesake, Austin A. Meredith, narrated.

- [Austin] Although rainfall on the stake plains is infrequent, when it does rain, it comes primarily from thunderstorms, dumping inches over small areas in a short time that flow into creeks, which flow into rivers.

The Canadian River crosses the Texas Panhandle, and it periodically floods up to half a mile wide and 10 feet deep.

In the late '40s, it was estimated that 400,000 acre feet of rainwater was lost every year.

Wasted water, which if contained, could help satisfy the needs of Panhandle residents.

- When Texas had developed an agreement on the Canadian with Oklahoma, Oklahoma was like, "You can have all that water."

And so Lake Meredith, it's a water supply reservoir, but it's also a flood control that's protected everything downstream as well as Oklahoma.

And the New Mexican reservoirs also help in that as well.

- [Narrator] In New Mexico, the Canadian funnels through dams at Canchas Lake near Tucumcari and Ute Lake at Logan.

Did we know what we were doing when we were putting up dams?

- No, and I think that is like really good warning for people like me, or environmentalists, and that is "the road to hell is paid with good intentions."

I think that people that built our dams did think that they were providing, well, they did, they provided a few decades worth of water supply to our communities.

That's great.

I think the people that built dams were also political people, and that dams are instruments of political power, and so the building of large reservoirs on our rivers is very literally an act of colonization.

- Meaning?

- We're subjecting the landscape to state control, and the people that live on the landscape need to rely on the state for the provision of water.

So it's about governance.

(light music) - We tend to over reservoir rivers, and so it's helping on flood control, but then there's not as much water Our watershed is 6,050 square miles.

It's mostly in Texas and New Mexico, but it does cross into a sliver of southwestern Oklahoma.

Everything that doesn't fall into Ute then ultimately comes our way.

- Lake Meredith has been struggling a lot over the last 30 years, and I think it's a collection of issues.

There's warmer temperatures, there's upstream reservoirs, but groundwater production is part of it, because there used to be springs along the canyon that would go in and feed the lake and those springs no longer flow, because of the groundwater pumping.

Downstream of Lake Meredith, you still see springs, you do see perennial flow.

That's all groundwater flow except during severe storms, and expectation would be that would decline over time.

If there's not as much water in the aquifer, there's not gonna be as much water coming out of the aquifer to feed the river and feed springs.

And that has environmental consequences, but it also has consequences for folks that use that surface water downstream.

- We had a lot more rainfall in the first 35 years after this dam was constructed than we have since 2000.

So yes, I mean, we would love to go back to those days of high inflow.

- So we're just getting whatever natural flow is coming in from- - It's rainfall, primarily.

I mean, there may be some spring flow or there is some spring flow, but for the most part, it's rainfall.

And then usually, it occurs from the heavy rainfall events.

Let's say we get 20 inches of rain per year, we want that all to happen in one day, whereas maybe in the agricultural world, you want that half inch per week or whatever that may be.

Sometimes, an agricultural drought and the water supply drought can be different.

We want it all to happen as quickly as possible because it doesn't have a chance to soak in and collects on the surface and runs off to the lake so we can store it.

(light music) - Without getting too complicated, the projections on climate change, the nature of rainfall, instead of getting six or eight or 10 rain events during the year, and including some soaking rains, that what's projected for maybe as soon as 25 or 30 years from now is we're gonna get three or four big rains.

the droughts are gonna get fiercer and longer, which means plants are gonna need more water, which means there's gonna be more pumping.

So we could see the Ogallala deplete faster.

- If these climate change projections are right, and runoffs gonna double, well, we've gotta get more serious about doing this quickly.

We're gonna get about 10% less rain in 30 years.

So that's a problem.

But that's not really the problem.

The problem is that we're gonna get it all at once.

And when you get it all at once, that percentage of runoff jumps from 20% to 40%.

And so the range land out here is gonna get even more degraded.

- Across the High Plains region, more than 20,000 Playa Lakes could also help keep rain where it falls and recharge the aquifer.

- We don't have mountains, we don't have rivers, but we have the most playas in all the world.

So what does that mean?

For us, it means our playas are like the Amazon.

They're the lungs.

They're the entry points to the Ogallala Aquifer.

If a playa is healthy and functioning, it recharges water into the aquifer.

So I think our belief and our understanding was that, no, they're just kind of wasteland.

They're mud holes, but actually, they're the lungs.

- Conservatively, you could say all land recharges some water to the aquifer very slowly.

But a playa basin will recharge 10 to 100 times as much water as upland soils.

- People like to think of the water table as a big bathtub, and they like to think of, okay, it doesn't matter where you're pumping from in the bathtub.

You'll eventually pump it down if you have enough pumping capacity.

And what we learned was that is not an accurate way of looking at it.

What we really have in the aquifer below us, it is not homogeneous at all.

There are areas of, you know, there's areas of sand and rock down there, and what the deal is that water actually columns.

It does move sideways.

As a farmer, we think in terms of grain.

So if you put grain in the middle of a bin, it falls from that point and it builds, it stacks up like that.

Water does much the same thing underground.

- [Narrator] After restoring playa lakes and natural grasses on some of his land, Grotegut began seeing hyperlocal results.

His well levels were rising.

- The High Plains Underground Water Conservation District has a well monitoring program.

They measure thousands of wells across the region every year.

We were seeing some rises.

And when we started seeing some rises in the area, and other parts of the county were going down, even not very far from us, wells were still going down.

Fortunately, we found out that, yeah, if you do these things, that you can get your water cycle working better and you can get your water table to come up some, and you can balance what you're pumping.

(excited music) - Ultimately with an aquifer like the Ogallala to extract less is the way of conserving.

- I've had farmers tell me it was gut wrenching to think about even, "I'm not going to be doing any more irrigation farming?

I'm going to walk away from everything I've ever known?"

- We don't have the reliability of the same amount of water that we once did 10 years ago.

That's a rude awakening.

- All I've ever wanted to do is farm.

It's just bred in me, I guess - If we have to totally rely on rainfall from Mother Nature, that really raises the bar and makes it much, much more challenging.

- The math gets a bit staggering and I'll use my calculator so we can actually look at the numbers here.

So I'll use our well as an example and that way I'm not throwing anybody else under the bus.

Our irrigation well is considered to be actually a small well, it produces on average a hundred gallons a minute.

The beginning of the year, I might get 120 gallons, but as that summer goes on, it depletes down to something like 80, sometimes even 70.

It's been as low as 50.

But let's just say on average, 100 gallons a minute, I'm getting 6,000 gallons every hour.

If I run my well for 24 hours, which is not uncommon, say in August, especially when it's super hot and you're just trying to get to the end of the year, We'll multiply that by 24, every day, I'm pumping out 144,000 gallons of water.

Now, let's say I water for a week, which that's also not totally uncommon, that well will run 24 hours a day for one week straight.

We multiply that by seven.

That's 1,008,000 gallons of water.

So I use that in a week.

Again, we're small scale with 100 gallons a minute.

There are farms around here that can pump out seven times, eight times that amount.

But to me, this is kind of an abstract number.

What is a million gallons of water really?

So what I decided to do is to look up how much the average Texan uses.

And according to the state of Texas, we use about 92 gallons of water a day, which I thought was quite a bit.

But even if we say 92 gallons a day, how long would it take me as the average Texan to use a million gallons a day?

So we'll divide that by 92.

It would take me 10,956 days to use that amount of water or in years if we divide it by 365, 30 years, I'm 30 years old or 33 years old right now.

So in one week, I can pump out as almost as much water as I have used in my entire life using 92 gallons of water a day.

We are one farm and we are one small farm compared to everybody around us.

So whenever we talk about the pumping of water, it's really an extraction in the same way that we extract any kind of material out of the earth and we're doing it faster than it's recharging.

'Cause if I'm just doing that amount, imagine what a 500-gallon amount pivot would produce.

- I grew up on my grandfather's cotton farm on the South Plains.

It was a small cotton farm.

And when I was a little boy, we used to irrigate with a ditch.

He had good water on his farm.

That water quickly diminished.

And I tell everybody, as soon as I got old enough, we started to irrigating with gated pipe.

And then the water resources that we had became further diminished.

So that farm today is all in subsurface drip irrigation.

So within the period of maybe one generation, the water resources that were under my grandfather's farm disappeared.

We've always grown dryland crops in this part of the world, but the percentage of the acreages that are going to be grown without irrigation water just continues to increase.

- You look at groundwater wells on properties around here, when they were drilled back in the '60s and '70s, they might have been yielding 500 to 800 gallons per minute and they're producing 85 to 150 gallons per minute now.

And you see farmers having to link multiple wells together in order to provide enough water for one circle, one irrigated circle.

And really, we've come a long way on the basis of being able to extract relatively cheaply groundwater, but we're having to go deeper, deeper to find it, and it's costing more and more to pump it.

And our wells aren't yielding what they used to yield.

- When we switched over to center pivots and we went to this quad leap of technology, this leap ahead, it really put the water closer to the ground.

Well, what it did, it made us much more efficient with our water, but it also allowed us to spread the water over more acres.

- It didn't change what you're pulling outta the ground.

- Exactly.

It did not change it.

There's a conflation between conservation and efficiency.

It's like when fuel economy increased on vehicles, then you would think, "Well if we're using less gallons per mile, then we'll drive less miles.

We'll conserve more oil."

But that didn't happen.

People just drove more because they're like, "Oh, well now it's cheaper to drive a mile and I wanted to go further anyway."

- Put us in a farmer's shoes about trying to decide whether to transition to dry land as opposed to continue to irrigate.

- There's really no decision you have the water or you don't, the growers are gonna use the water resources that they have.

If it's, you know, a little bit of water, they're gonna use it.

If it's a lot of water, they're gonna use it.

If it's no water, they're gonna figure out how to make that work.

So we're being forced into this.

You know, we've been talking about dryland crops and how we're going to transition, you know, wholesale into dryland crops in this region for years and years.

But until the water's gone, that's not gonna happen.

- How much of our area is dry land at this point?

- You know, it's difficult to say for sure, but the estimates I've heard are 60% or greater.

And even the crops that are irrigated are irrigated with limited water resources.

They call it deficit irrigation.

The water resources that we have are not really good enough to meet the crop water demands.

So if you combine deficit and dryland acres together, it's the vast majority of acres we have in this part of the world.

- Go to Google Maps and back out a pretty long ways and see that irrigated land is gonna be the green circles that you see when you back out in Google Earth.

And it's not a very big percentage.

There's a lot of land out there that is growing without benefit of irrigation.

And a lot of it is going back to rangeland as well, or some kind of pasture.

We're drying up from the south to the north, of course, folks down in the Lubbock area of influence, they are our future.

And it would include the reaches of the Ogallala Aquifer that extend over into Eastern New Mexico as well.

- It's a creeping disaster where, you know, there's farmers on the thinner fringes of the aquifer that are, you know, gradually seeing their water resource go away and then they go away and then the process repeats itself as the pool shrinks.

- You put yourself in the shoes of a farmer, you know, there are lots of bills.

Obviously, if you produce more crop then you make more money and there's lots of overhead associated with growing crops.

So the growers are trying to, you know, to make money while they can and that's gonna require water.

- There's a lot of farmers who maybe are trying to make that transition from conventional agriculture to no-till agriculture.

And they may go to the landowner 'cause oftentimes, the farmer does not own the land - they're renting the land from somebody - and say, "Hey, I wanna make this change.

But what it means is this year, we shouldn't plant cotton on this plot of land and then next year, we'll put it in cotton and we'll rotate it onto another block.

And so we could have more of a rotational cover cropping system."

But the landowner who may have a loan out from the bank on that land may say, "Well, I gotta pay the banker.

And right now cotton prices are good and the banker's telling me that I can insure this cotton crop, whether it makes a crop or not.

So we're gonna plant cotton wall to wall, road to road, bar ditch to bar ditch."

At the end of the day, the money is driving or the economy is driving the entire system, not necessarily how we think the land should be used as far as what's best for the soil or the ecosystem around us.

- Agriculture is an industry.

That's why the size of agriculture farms are, in number of acres has increased to make it more economically feasible and profitable.

The average size of the farm in north of I-40 in this area is about 6,500 acres to 6,700 acres.

We have bigger machines.

That's why the smaller farms like you know, 100-acre or one quarter section, 160 (acres), they won't be feasible economically.

So either they are selling that part to the big corporations or the big partner companies.

So the size of the farm in terms of number of acres, that's why the number of farmers are reducing in U.S., but the size of farm is increased.

- This is my parents' farm and they inherited it from my grandparents and it's probably been farmed for, in our family, at least for the past three generations.

We did mostly conventional farming.

Cotton, mostly in this area up until 2001, whenever my parents started to do an agritourism business.

And mostly that was just because they were a little bit in debt from the production agriculture and wanted to try out some other things to pay the bills.

And year after year, it just became more profitable.

So now we're more of a small-scale agriculture operation, about 100 acres and do primarily and solely agritourism.

- Has it been hard to calculate the economics of this change?

- Hmm, admittedly no, for us.

And that's just because the agritourism has been profitable enough that it's allowed us to take the risks with saying, "Well, we can lay out 50% of our farm land for prairie grass, which is not necessarily making us money."

- [Narrator] The Simpsons started with a corn maze, but soon replaced the corn with a less thirsty plant.

The Simpson family uses subsurface irrigation, sows cover crops to keep soil in place between growing seasons and plants prairie grass on unfarmed acres in anticipation of adding livestock.

- We also started seeing wildlife come in that we hadn't seen before.

Bobwhite quail, which was amazing to see and to hear, we were seeing horned toads.

I hadn't seen a horned toad since I was a kid.

That initially was like this big light-bulb moment of, well, we need to plant as much prairie grass as we possibly can on any land that we're not needing to make a living off of.

And then perhaps begin to integrate that prairie grass into the larger farming operation.

Some people also use the term regenerative agriculture, which is a little bit more complex.

It involves not just your crop rotation and no tilling, it also involves animal integration into your agriculture system.

And so that's moving animals around your farm like cows, sheep, goats followed back behind with chickens that are basically fertilizing your land as you're growing crops.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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) - 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.

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)