Ogallala aquifer running dry

[Frederick Jackson]

I now add one more element to the deadly cocktail of elements that are leading us to doomsday, this being the exhaustion Ogallala aquifer that provides water for the American grain belt. It is near term and I had no idea.

(NaturalNews) The United States of America, like most modern nations, is a country accelerating towards agricultural collapse followed by mass starvation. At so many levels, its present-day patterns of consumption, resource extraction and environmental exploitation are physically unsustainable. But one area that merits special attention due to its imminent collapse is the subject of water security.

America has historically possessed plenty of water to grow enough crops to feed not only its own citizens but even export substantial quantities of grain to the rest of the world. But that's about to change. Cheap water is running out, and with it goes food production, food security and the ability for a nation to feed itself.

"The Ogallala Aquifer spreads across eight states, from Texas to South Dakota, covering 111.8 million acres and 175,000 square miles," reports NBC News. (1) "It's the fountain of life not only for much of the Texas Panhandle, but also for the entire American Breadbasket of the Great Plains, a highly-sophisticated, amazingly-productive agricultural region that literally helps feed the world."

Unfortunately, it's also running out of water. That same NBC News story goes on to report, "Billions could starve," echoing an article I wrote for Natural News three years ago in which I stated, "America's breadbasket is on a collision course with the inevitable."

Once again, the warnings many people first read on Natural News are now coming to pass. But it's already too late to stop the collapse. We are now staring down the gun barrel of the inevitable.

"The scope of this mounting crisis is difficult to overstate," reports NBC. "If groundwater production goes unabated, vast portions of several counties in the southern High Plains will soon have little water left in the aquifer to be of any practical value."

Using up water that's 10 million years old
Most Americans have no concept that water might run out. The very idea just doesn't compute; especially to many city-dwellers who give zero thought to where their own tap water comes from in the first place.

Water doesn't come out of the tap by magic, of course: it has to be transported from somewhere else. Similarly, the water used to irrigate farms across Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas and Nebraska doesn't fall out of the sky as you might think: it's pumped up from the ground, using up 10 million year-old water that can't be replenished from rainfall.

The Ogallala water aquifer, you see, isn't "recharged" by rainfall or surface water. It's a completely separate plumbing system that took millions of years to accumulate water. That water will be siphoned off by U.S. farmers in less than a century, it turns out, leaving the landscape all but useless for conventional agriculture, a destructive farming practice founded in extremely abusive and wasteful water exploitation.

Terms like "Dust Bowl" and "doomsday" are no longer considered fear mongering when it comes to the near future of this region, by the way. Once the water runs out, the real cost of decades of conventional agriculture kick in, causing widespread ecological collapse of the region into a near-desert-like conditions.

Modern farms, you see, are disastrous failures when it comes to water retention. Exposed, bare soils bleed water by the hour, and the loss of trees across the region -- which were clear-cut for farming and ranching -- multiplies the severity of the problem. Millions of acres that were once biodiverse, sustainable grasslands where drought-resistant plants retained soils and moisture have become barren agricultural wastelands on the verge of collapsing into runaway deserts.

As this happens, food prices across America and around the world will skyrocket. Mass starvation will become a grim reality in a nation that once boasted the ability to help feed the world.

Frankenweeds grow really well in poor soils
Ironically, the one thing that might save America's breadbasket from collapsing into a desert is the very same class of superweeds that grew out of the mass chemical dousing of farmlands with glyphosate and herbicides. Superweeds -- sometimes called "Frankenweeds" -- go hand in hand with GMOs because exposure to glyphosate (Roundup) breeds superweeds in the same way exposure to antibiotics breeds drug-resistant superbugs.

Interestingly, today's more fearsome superweeds are actually Frankensteinian versions of amaranth plants.

The huge superweed shown below, on the left, is a Parmer Amaranth proudly discovered by this Iowa State student. As you can see, the weed is taller than the student, and it produces literally tens of thousands of seeds.

Can these seeds be used as a food source? I don't know, but there are obviously many varieties of amaranth which are good food sources. (I used to grow purple amaranth plants in Ecuador, where they provided excellent feed for the free-range chickens.)

If someone could use selective breeding to develop a food-producing superweed, it might actually save millions from starvation as the American breadbasket collapses into agricultural ruin over the next few decades.

Can Americans learn to live with less?
Or, perhaps, Americans will have to learn to be more resourceful like the Native American Indians who once lived freely across the continent. Native Americans ate mesquite pods which grow abundantly in poor, dry soils.

The pods can be harvested each summer and are regularly eaten by wild boars and other animals. Mesquite trees easily survive harsh drought conditions and can out-compete almost any tree or shrub when it comes to surviving serious drought.

I've eaten my share of mesquite pods, by the way. I used to grow them in Arizona and grind them into flour to make tortillas. They also grow on the Big Island in Hawaii, where the mesquite trees that tap into ocean water produce incredibly sweet pods that almost taste like they were mixed with brown sugar.

Almost nobody in America knows anything about eating mesquite pods today, but believe me when I say that those who want to stay alive over the next few generations are going to become very familiar with desert cuisine: mesquite, nopal cactus stir-fry, aloe vera gel smoothies and much more.

Modern humans are nearly incapable of planning for a future that's any different from their present
The days of cheap, easy food grown with cheap, easy water are soon coming to a catastrophic end. But of course almost nobody will plan in anticipation of this because humanity is an infant species with no foresight and little willingness to make the future a better place if it means giving up any conveniences of living large right now.

When the water does run out, by the way, the people will ask, "How could this have happened to us?" as if their own insatiable craving for Big Macs, green lawns and steak dinners had nothing to do with it.

Expecting mainstream American adults living in 2014 to grasp how they have set the nation on a collision course with desertification, agricultural collapse and mass starvation is like expecting preschoolers to understand where their pee pee goes after they visit the little boys' room. You might as well not even try to explain it to them, because you'll only waste your time and annoy the blissfully ignorant.

You might as well try to explain how fractional reserve banking works, or detail the history of Bayer and its Nazi roots. Nobody is listening for the simple reason that they are incapable of understanding anything beyond their next meal, their next paycheck and their next booty call.

Besides, isn't there a soccer game on TV that's far more important anyway?

Sources for this story include
(1) http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/last-dro...

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/045907_water_security_agricultural_collapse_mass_starvation.html#ixzz36v3H5Gyp

[gittarpikk]

That was a very good and informative post.... unfortunately it seems to be the upcoming reality...

[Lifebringer]

I bet those corporate people don't have to worry about water as long as their checkbooks hold. Listen, it's pretty simple. STOP BUYING BOTTLED WATER AND INSTALL FILTERS ON WHAT WE USE NOW. The plastic bottles stop, and the eminent domain for life giving resources aren't penned against the citizens for corporate ownership. You see when they started bottling the water in the 80's, they knew they would eventually cross city and state distribution channels, because they were selling world wide. Sorta like taking the nails out your foundation one nail at a time, and expecting it to still hold. Draining our life resources, poisoning our air, and destroying our seas and mammals. That is about as far, as I want them to go, how about your guys. Time to take the message of solution to the next levels. Stop buying bottled water and buy water filters worldwide, and they will go broke. They can take it to the bunkers, but eventually even that will rot, because water bacteria can develop after a certain amount of time. If we want it stopped where "flesh and blood people" can live, then stop buy temporary containers/plastic bottles of water feeding the greedy eminent domain corporate agenda.

Otherwise those NeoNazi's will have humans on rationed water, as they sell water on the shelf around the world to stay rich.

[ghostrider]

Sadly bottled water has a shelf life of three days , after that it's no better than tap water ...

[Zionbrion]

I don't think the aquafer going dry has much to do with bottled water, its more because of heavy use through agriculture. This same thing is not just happening to this one, but all over the world, I cant remember which ones exactly but I have heard of numerous through documentaries.
If humanity stays on its path it will soon be water wars instead of wars for oil.

[LivioRazlo]

Posted by ghostrider (here)
Sadly bottled water has a shelf life of three days , after that it's no better than tap water ...

Could you provide some information for this claim? I was under the impression that bottled water could last quite some time. I have been stocking up on gallons of distilled/reverse osmosis water from Walmart for any coming collapse - hope it doesn't go bad. On that note, I did manage to get a 55 gallon drum given to me, just got to find the right information to turn it into a rain collector/purifier.

[wnlight]

Soccer-football? Nada mas importante! Or so it says on my TV here in Ecuador. Actually, I do not believe in wasting water, nor do the farmers i grew up with in the Midwest USA. Nearly all the fields I have seen are no-till now-a-days. Except the rice fields in Arkansas where they wastefully plow each year and give their top soil to the neighbours. The Oglala aquifer is very important and will be missed. Farmers will have to drill deeper to find new aquifers.

[Frederick Jackson]

Posted by Lifebringer (here)
I bet those corporate people don't have to worry about water as long as their checkbooks hold. Listen, it's pretty simple. STOP BUYING BOTTLED WATER AND INSTALL FILTERS ON WHAT WE USE NOW. The plastic bottles stop, and the eminent domain for life giving resources aren't penned against the citizens for corporate ownership. You see when they started bottling the water in the 80's, they knew they would eventually cross city and state distribution channels, because they were selling world wide. Sorta like taking the nails out your foundation one nail at a time, and expecting it to still hold. Draining our life resources, poisoning our air, and destroying our seas and mammals. That is about as far, as I want them to go, how about your guys. Time to take the message of solution to the next levels. Stop buying bottled water and buy water filters worldwide, and they will go broke. They can take it to the bunkers, but eventually even that will rot, because water bacteria can develop after a certain amount of time. If we want it stopped where "flesh and blood people" can live, then stop buy temporary containers/plastic bottles of water feeding the greedy eminent domain corporate agenda.

Otherwise those NeoNazi's will have humans on rationed water, as they sell water on the shelf around the world to stay rich.

I am 100 percent with you on the bottled water. The bottled water business has already done damage to the aquifer in Minnesota I believe. And the horrible joke is that the bottled water is no better than -- in fact it is inferior to -- many municipal water supplies. This is certainly true for where I am right now in Alexandria, Virginia. (An exhaustive analysis of many bottled water brands and the local municipal water was published in the Washington Post 20 years ago. And I do not think the analysis even included the amount of the BPA or other toxic plastic contamination in the bottled water.)

[blufire]

Water is a natural resource and just like all other resources we are mindlessly and ignorantly rapidly depleting them. Our natural world and its resources are finite (limited).

‘They’ are only supplying what WE are demanding.

We are too many.

We are deep into a global climate change that is cyclical . . . . we have been here many times before.

‘They’ are not causing this climate change but they are most certainly preparing for the inevitabilities and are and will continue to use this chaos and tragedy to their advantage. One advantage being ushering in the One World structure.

Focusing on meaningless things as bottled water shows the truth of how oblivious we are of what is truly happening and at a rapidly increasing pace.

Wake up people and look around with eyes that have no preconceived or narrow ideas.

[sigma6]

Stop mass production farms, local community aquaponic greenhouses, collectively owned and operated, distributed across the country will be the future. Will probably be the only way to get healthy fish. Fish will replace cows...

[wnlight]

The best way to cut back on the wasteful, corporate, mega-agriculture business is to stop the farm subsidy. That money goes to the corporations. The small farmers get very little of it. I say this after living on a small farm for years. We grew corn and soy beans that fed North Americans and the world. Our small farm was 280 acres. The corporates are 10,000 acres and up - way up.

Frederick J: There are exciting, new ways to take water from the air without consuming energy. This can happen even in the desert. And, of course, free energy could desalinate water for acreage near such sources.

sigma8 Fish farms produce unhealthy fish. Fish of the open oceans are being quickly depleted. The Great Lakes fisheries are dead. We need a new way to sustainably produce healthy and enjoyable fish at a price that the common person can afford. I do not know the answer to this problem, and hopefully someone does soon.

Cattle are here to stay. I know that it takes about four acres of rich Illinois farmland to produce food to grow one steer for the market. That same four acres could grow enough vegetarian food to sustain several people. (The exact amount depends on what you like in your diet.) Now and then, I enjoy a nice, tender beef steak or a nice tuna steak - medium rare, please. Both are expensive.