20-Year Retrospective: K-State Professors Revisit Western Kansas Aquifer Study

1/16/2004

From: Jeffrey Peterson, 785-532-4487; Daniel Bernardo, 785-532-6702; Keener A. Tippin II, 785-532-6415; all of Kansas State University

MANHATTAN, Kan., Jan. 16 -- Twenty years ago, researchers in the High Plains Ogallala Regional Aquifer Study predicted that crop prices would continue to rise, spurred by widespread food shortages. Energy prices would also climb.

As a result, irrigators would cut back on water use because energy was needed to pump water. But at the same time farmers would not be hurt by this trend because the crops they produced would be more valuable.

Some of those predictions came to fruition while others did not. Irrigators have indeed reduced water usage over the last 20 years, despite the fact that energy prices have fallen in real terms. Meanwhile, crop prices and the value of production have gone down.

Now a pair of Kansas State University researchers, Jeffrey Peterson, an assistant professor of agricultural economics, and Daniel Bernardo, professor of agricultural economics, have utilized a unique opportunity to compare the projections forecasted from the original study, completed in 1982, with the changes that actually occurred over that time span. Their latest analysis appears in the Fall 2003 natural and social sciences journal, Great Plains Research. In the most recent analysis, Peterson, and Bernardo attempted to delve deeper into the previous analysis to determine what might have caused the discrepancy.

Peterson became interested in the study two years ago when he began doing research on aquifer decline. Over the course of reading the research that had been previously written, he came across the original High Plains Ogallala Regional Aquifer Study.

"It was fascinating to read their predictions about what would happen to the economy in western Kansas and what would happen to the aquifer," Peterson said. "One of the years they had made predictions for was the year 2000 and the idea occurred to me that maybe we could compare the predictions to the data for 2000."

According to Bernardo, when the study was originally published in 1982, there was concern the region was heading for a doomsday scenario where there would no longer be any pumping of water and therefore none of the associated industries that are supported by the water supply would continue to exist. This would impact cattle feeding, meat packing and growing of crops using irrigation.

"The interesting thing is that today we're at a similar level of heightened concerned but really haven't seen the type of decreased production in terms of acres of production nor a decline in the agricultural economy that was projected 25 years ago," Bernardo said. "So we're at another point of the cycle where once again these concerns have been raised and people are again contemplating and projecting a doomsday in 10 or 20 years that again will have insufficient water resources to support the western Kansas economy."

Peterson said comparing economic issues of these two time periods was interesting.

"One of the big national and even international concerns of prominence during the 1970s was always anxiety about a food shortage," Peterson said. "The notion was that we needed to have water in this huge agricultural region in order to produce enough food to go around. Those concerns have gone away."

He said one of the conclusions of the original study is that despite the size of the region and its production level, it does not have a measurable effect on international food prices and the availability of food.

Can the pair be expected to make any predictions for the next 20 years? Peterson emphasizes that the research previously done is not inadequate. He said one of the big contributions of the study was that it revealed the relationships between several different factors "so that you could say that if 'X' happens then 'Y' will be the result."

"The problem with making those predictions is that they didn't have reliable notions of what 'X' was going to be 20 years in the future," Peterson said. "That's something that we're not going to be able to change if we make forecasts now, but there are a couple of things that have happened in those 20 years that might enable us to build more valuable models. We have a lot more computing power now. Even if we don't know what 'X' is going to be, that enables us to run many scenarios for possible values of 'X' and produce search results saying 'we don't know what 'Y' is going to be, but here is a plausible range of values.'"