The Ogallala Aquifer

[Mike]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/8359076/US-farmers-fear-the-return-of-the-Dust-Bowl.html

 

[tenbach79]

We pump out of the ogallala aquifer and in the last 10 yrs our water table has went down. The home place the bottom of the hole is 265ft and the you go down 187ft to the water. Still pumps good some guys around our parts have had windmills go dry. Scary thing when you get some guy that comes in and can throw his cash around and buy up land with the intention of sending it to a big city.

 

[Big Swede]

We've been irrigating from Ogallala for 40 years here in SD. I called the Water Rights Division a few years ago for a report on the water table here. They measure if about 5 times a year for the last 40 years. It fluctuates some, about 10 feet up and down. The dry years it drops a little and the wet years it comes up above the average. We're lucky to be in an area with a lot of water. Some places aren't so lucky.

 

[Big Swede]

I forgot to mention tenbach79, our water table here is about 100 ft and we hit bedrock at 300 ft. That's a lot different from your situation.

 

[tenbach79]

Yes it is, we have meters on all our wells now to measure how much we are pumping out of the ground. We shut down a well about 3 miles south of are place and the water table really dropped on it. Dont remember what it finally was at when we shut it down but it really dropped. Was pumping around 1600 gpm and when we shut it down But we had to put all those meters on our wells because of the law suit with Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado. But we had a meter on our well about 10 years before all this happpened just to keep track for our own use.