Legal Gears Grind Over Ogalalla In SW Kansas; Depleting An Aquifer For $2 Corn

[hatrack]

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The brothers are embroiled in an eight-year dispute over the right to pump from the aquifer, a case that could open the floodgates to legal challenges on individual claims to the resource. Last month, the Kansas Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from the defendant, an oil company based in Garden City, Kan. The case now sits at the district court in Haskell County, where a judge will decide whether the oil producer, American Warrior Inc., can be permanently banned from pumping.

When the state Legislature passed the Kansas Water Appropriation Act in 1945, it was difficult for lawmakers to forecast the massive development and groundwater extraction that would come in the 1960s and 1970s. Maintaining those generous senior rights would become harder and harder as the aquifer began to drain -- without substantially reducing the pumping by junior water rights holders. The closely watched water rights case now sits at the district court, which will look at whether "first in time, first in right" groundwater rights holders are able to seek injunctive relief, in this case by shutting down a junior rights holder's wells. This case will also revisit the legal definition of "impairment," which in this situation is not defined in the state's groundwater law. "It's really about whether the law walks where the law talks," said Burke Griggs, an assistant attorney general for the state who has written extensively on Kansas water law.

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Legal battles are a last-ditch attempt at survival here in this arid corner of the Sunflower State. Lawmakers are pushing water conservation, with mixed results. Some officials in southwestern Kansas, including the manager of Groundwater Management District 3, have promoted the construction of an $18 billion aqueduct that would bring water from wetter eastern Kansas to the west. The costly project is viewed as a non-starter by many political leaders, including Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee.

Plummeting corn prices in the last two years have also put pressure on farmers. The 2012 drought drove corn values to record highs. But as supply boomed in the following year, prices have sunk. Growers are driven to maximize the amount of corn per acre while weighing the value of their decisions for future generations. "It doesn't make sense to deplete a resource for $2 corn," said Gerry Franklin, a corn and wheat grower in Sherman County in northwest Kansas, near the Colorado and Nebraska borders.

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http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060034623

[SoLeftIAmRight]

1. depleting the water and soil to ship corn to china is insane - so what do we do?

we subsidize the system - we are so screwed