Cape Town and The South Plains: A Tale of Water Shortage

The Crisis Heard Around the World

The eyes of the world were turned to Cape Town, South Africa earlier this year as the city announced that they were running out of water. Dams and reservoirs were lower than ever before.

A one-in-a-million, three-year drought was unprecedented. “Day 0,” as it was called, became the new reality for the 3.4 million citizens. It was the crucial day they were all to avoid – when the city would turn off the taps and only spring wells would have water. Crackdowns were absolutely necessary if the luminous Day 0 was to be averted. A new end-all, be-all for the Cape Town citizens’ day-to-day lives.

Capetonians scrambled to save water where they could. The city started policing activity and households were given fines if they didn’t comply. A public, online map of the city held neighbors accountable by showing which households were well under their limit and those that were tip-toeing the line. Several citizens resorted to using their bath water to wash dishes and then again for toilet water. Facebook groups sprung up as quickly as the grass in the empty reservoirs sharing tips and tricks on saving water.

Despite the efforts, people are angry that this situation ever occurred. According to Nazeer Ahmed Sonday, a farmer in the Philippi Horticultural Area just outside of Cape Town that provides the entire city with 70 percent of their vegetables, the crisis was caused by water mismanagement.

“It was a total failure on the part of the government,” Sonday said. “They were miserably managing our resources and now we’re just supposed to trust them to fix it.”

The PHA sits on top of the Cape Flats Aquifer. Its fast recharge rate between 15 and 37 percent of a rainfall provides much-needed water to nearly all the farms in the area. However, Sonday said that the land is being sold to urban developers without any regard to how precious the land is.

“They don’t understand how important this land is for agriculture and food security,” Sonday said. “Now that the crisis is here, they’re drilling for water for the city without regard for us and our production.”

The PHA and other agricultural areas use the water from the same sources as the city does, but aren’t managed by the same department, says Kevin Winter, a senior lecturer at the University of Cape Town and lead researcher in the Urban Water Management Research Group.

“What’s happened in the drought is we’ve seen a separation between agriculture and Cape Town urban water management almost as if the two of them are separate or polarized,” Winter said. “Its always been problematic to me to have an agricultural sector which has relied very heavily on surface water and to use the same storage capacity and storage from our surface water that feeds the city.”

Winter said that unfortunately, agriculture needs water during particular times of the year – about the same time Cape Town does. So, it’s often incompatible with the ability to store water for some time and to manage it more effectively.

Cape Town is hoping, praying, for rain. Their hydrological year is just beginning said Williams, and it’s one of the only immediate hopes to end the crisis. Due to the severity of the drought and shortage of water stored, however, the crisis will loom over the city and its citizens for a long while. Long-term goals include creating several desalination plants along the coast. Those could take up to a year to get running, but with citizens working to reduce their use, farmers sharing their water sources, and new innovations being put into place daily, the city has been able to push back Day 0 every so often.

Nevertheless, the news about Cape Town spread fear. The combination of climate change and a growing population among other reasons sent shock waves around the world. Major news outlets began to ask if Cape Town was the first of many cities that would end up in the same situation.

There is one group, however, that is no stranger to water shortage: the farmers and ranchers of the South Plains. Sitting on top of one of the largest aquifers in the world, the Ogallala Aquifer, they’ve seen its depths decrease by over a 100 feet in the last 50 years. So much water used from an underground source because they barely get anything from the sky.

As Elmer Kelton said best in his 1971 book The Time It Never Rained:

“Each new generation tends to forget – until it confronts the sobering reality – that dryness has always been the normal condition in the western half of the state. Wet years have been the exceptions. Walter Prescott Webb, in his classic The Great Plains, noted how the land changes west of the 98th meridian, and how this has affected the people who live there, etching its marks upon their characters and impacting their culture. Traditionally it has taken a strong-willed, individualistic breed to live west of that line, especially when that living is tied closely to the soil, as is the case with the farmer and the rancher. Those not strong enough either did not cross the line or retreated after being bruised by the demands of that uncompromising land. Those who remained became tough, resilient, and almost militantly independent.”

These hardened West Texans bear droughts, weather abnormalities, and underground water shortages, although, their livelihoods depend upon the water and its availability. Even though these resilient farmers and ranchers use more water than the urban citizen, they’re the ones that take the hardest loss.

Day 0 In the South Plains?

The Ogallala Aquifer is the largest aquifer in North America according to the Texas Almanac and it sits under mid-America with the bottom resting underneath the South Plains. Over the last half-century, 100 feet of water has declined confirmed by a 2018 Ogallala Summit White Papers study. This aquifer has an extremely shallow depth to it and doesn’t recharge quick enough before the water is pumped back up to irrigate the 48 vast, flat counties of the South Plains and Panhandle regions of Texas. Not like it has much of a chance.

Rain in the South Plains is scarce, with an average rainfall of 18 inches a year reported by the U.S. Climate Data. So even a deviance from the regularly scheduled rains can be detrimental to the farmers and ranchers.

Texas Tech Agricultural Economics professor Ryan Williams says that the issue in West Texas has nothing to do with water availability – globally.

“It’s about certain types of water being available at certain times in certain places,” Williams said. And because water is bulky, it’s very difficult to move for the value of it.”

 

He said the fundamental problem is how to get the water where it’s needed in the form that it’s needed in at a particular time. The Ogallala Aquifer has water in concentrated veins, supplying more water in areas than others rather than being a big bathtub as some might think. Which means that there is water, Williams said, but it’s not in the specific areas that are needed.

This area hasn’t even been irrigating for that long. According to Williams, the South Plains only started participating in widespread irrigating in the 1950s. Before that, some small wells were available for people to water their animals, but it wasn’t irrigated agriculture.

Williams said he believes when it doesn’t become economically viable to irrigate, the farmers will go back to rain-fed agriculture. And unlike Cape Town, the South Plains has been planning for low water situations. There are programs and plans in place or in the works from organizations like the Natural Resource Conservation Service, the High Plains Water District, and the Texas Water Development Board.

This region is not headed to a Cape Town situation, said Williams, unless we do “stupid stuff.”

Mother Nature’s Mercy

In 2013, Lubbock beat 63 cities – including 2nd place winner Fairbanks, Alaska – to be crowned the toughest weather in America in a bracket competition set up by the Weather Channel. Unsurprisingly, the term climate change has no pull here when there can be tornadoes, droughts, abrupt temperature changes, blizzards, floods and haboobs (large dust storms) on any given day. No day is guaranteed a “normal” weather day.

 

Texas Tech Agricultural Economics Professor Ryan Williams spoke about the unpredictability of West Texas weather.

“We don’t know if it’s going to rain or not,” he said. “We’ve never known if it was going to rain or not.”

Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Agent Dana Porter said this area has always been the harder one for meteorologists to predict.

“We’re fascinating,” Porter said. “We’re a very interesting area to be in weather wise for sure. Which, in turn, affects agriculture and water resources and all that.”

This makes it challenging for farmers and ranchers who depend on the weather to get their crop through to harvest. They are feeling it particularly this year as no rain providing more than an inch has not come since September of 2017 according to the Natural Resource Conservation Service. As May progresses, some areas are receiving rainfall occasionally from scattered thunderstorms, but when the hot, westerly winds hit, it dries up quickly.

Cotton farmers Joe McFerrin and Aaron Kirby from Cotton Center said Texans are feeling the pressure due to the lack of rain.

“We’re dry,” Kirby said. “We just haven’t had any moisture. With this wind, it’s going all away. We’ve spent a lot of money. What we get versus what we’re having to spend is so out of whack. Mother Nature is not helping; we hope and pray it rains – soon.”

McFerrin said that without any help from rain, their winter wheat is probably going to do two-thirds their normal yield, and the summer crop might be worse as the underground water is almost gone.

“It’s extremely hard to get stuff up,” McFerrin said. “This single-digit humidity, high winds, 90 to 100s daily temperature; it’s like holding a blow dryer over our heads to dry the hair Mother Nature’s doing. It keeps getting hotter and faster, and it’s pretty scary.”

He still has hope.

“The Lord could bring rain,” he said, “but we know we don’t have enough without a God-given rain to make a crop.”

Shelley Berry, a manager for Gill C Farms, said that the lack of rain definitely ads to stress levels.

“It’s a big cornerstone,” Berry said. “Without the rain, it just takes a toll on everybody.”

 

Aside from farmers, ranchers in the Panhandle dealt with a large, deadly fire in March 2017 that scorched 1.2 million acres, killed and injured an uncountable number of cattle, and took the lives of six people – four from Texas. A storm system with 50 mph winds lit up the tall grass fed by the previous year’s rain.

As of this writing, media reports indicate new fires are blazing across the Panhandle. Scattered thunderstorms with more lightning than rain and pushed with 30+ mph winds are the perfect conditions for new fires and more devastation.

Williams said this kind of weather is part of a growing trend and indicative of some sort of climate change.

“I think we are going to see increasing desertification of this part of the world,” Williams said. “We’ve seen the desert of northern Mexico, Arizona, and southern New Mexico creeping northeast over a period of the last few years. But what impact that has on rainfall, I don’t know.”

The Price of Water

When this land keeps its promise of little to no rain, farmers have to scale back – and that comes at a cost.

Water is precious to the farmers in this area. They know how scarce it is and yet, cannot afford to scale back. Their livelihoods depend upon water from the mercy of the sky and the ground says Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Agent Dana Porter.

“If you tell [a farmer] they can’t pump and irrigate their crop, that’s like telling an office worker ‘you can only run your computer x many hours a day,” Porter said. “You can’t work like that – you’re affecting people’s livelihoods.”

Porter said that just like many families in the city, farmers need an income. If a new conservation practice isn’t economically feasible, there’s no question whether to use it or not. That’ll be a flat no from many farmers.

It’s not that farmers don’t value water and conservation, Porter said. It’s just that they have a lot of other voices in their head and pressures when making these decisions.

“It’s a complex issue,” Porter said. “I think people, especially growers know how complex it is. They’re the ones making the decisions in the middle of the night or early in the morning dealing with this and doing the math and choosing what crop I’m going to grow this rotation, what insurance is available, what’s the seed cost – and what about their other varieties. There’s all this information, and they’re just going ‘what am I going to do?'”

One of these decisions is based on crop prices. In 2016, according to the USDA, cotton prices drastically dropped and several farmers decided to plant corn (even though it takes much more water to grow). When corn prices dropped too low for production costs, back to cotton the farmers went, choosing the lesser of two evils.

Cotton farmer Joe McFerrin said prices for cotton are better this year – if farming conditions were normal.

“The cost of production is better under normal conditions, but not under drought conditions,” McFerrin said. “Prices need to come up just for us to break even. We’re especially playing catch up from 2017 as we have less money in our pocket than when we started.”

He said that if he has another year like the last two, he might retire for social security and go super lean on the farm by only farming a fraction of what he does now, maybe even give it to his kids. If he did not have to retire, though, he said why would he? It takes all the money just to break even.

Outside of the cost of commodity prices, the cost of electricity just to irrigate is another story. Hale Center cotton farmer Monty Booher says it might ruin him.

“After no rain this winter, it might take everything I have just to get the crop above the ground,” Booher said. “Then I’ll have to give some more just to keep it alive.”

Cotton farmer Kirby said he looks at his water supply as supplemental water.

“I’m going to put as much water as I can,” said Kirby, “but I just don’t have that much! So whatever comes from the ground is only supplemental to what comes from the sky.”

Kirby said he’s had to put a land into no-till practice and reduce the amount of land he irrigates. If another drought happens, he said he might be put out of business.

McFerrin tells a similar tale. He’s had to go to more dryland this year than in the past with a near four percent decrease of irrigated land over the last 5-10 years. McFerrin and other farmers are decreasing their irrigated land despite the pressure from their landlords.

 

“My landlords would like to see more acres irrigated,” McFerrin says. “Well, I would too! I’m already making the trip to and from the fields.”

He says they just don’t understand the reality that water is incredibly short – especially since their grandfathers watered corners. McFerrin says he remembers those days, but he can’t do that today.

“We want to get a profit too,” McFerrin said. “But if you plant every acre, you can’t water every acre and the yield doesn’t come out the way you want, but that’s just reality.”

One landlord recently thought Kirby would be able to grow grain rather than cotton, he said. He had to explain to his landlord that it takes a lot more water to grow grain, and they just don’t have it.

“They have no clue what our water situation is,” Kirby said. “Others, I think, understand – but it takes a bit of a learning curve unless they were there themselves.”

Shelley Berry, manager of Gill C Farms says all these factors add a lot of stress to the guys and farm families.

“It’s our livelihood,” she said.

A Collective Effort

In the city, one common complaint is “the farmers are wasting all the water!” Although they do use 80 percent of all water consumption in this area, they are by no means wasting it says Texas Tech Agricultural Economics Professor Ryan Williams.

“Many people complain, but I ask them if they’re willing to pay the farmer for not using water,” Williams said. “Silence usually falls after that.”

Williams studies the economic pressures surrounding water in this area. He says that in order to conserve water, people need to start paying up.

“No one knows their price of water,” Williams said. “If I knew the price of the water I used, I’d stop letting the faucet run while I brushed my teeth.”

He says that if you want a commodity to be treated as a scarcity, then you charge it as a scarcity. The city needs to make the citizens pay for their water so they become conscious of exactly how much they’re using instead of blaming the farmers. He also believes that’s a problem mainstream media ignores.

“When we talk about the worry of water in this area, nobody worries about whether the farmer is going to make the crop or not,” Williams said. “The news, instead of worrying about the farmer, worries about me and my lawn.”

If, however, we continue to have years of drought, Williams said, and the local economy falters with the farmer, it could possibly lead to a pricing mechanism that was more appropriate.

“Maybe we quit worrying about having green lawns and install more appropriate landscaping,” Williams said. “What people don’t understand is that Lubbock popped up because of agriculture. Without the water we have to irrigate crops, the city probably wouldn’t have existed in the first place.”

Again, he says that if people are truly worried about the farmer’s water usage, they can always pay them to not pump their water anymore.

“Their answer is going to be no,” Williams said, “and if that’s the case, then they don’t really care about the problem.”

Even so, producers in this region are doing their part by being among the highest adopters of low-pressure centers, pivot irrigation, and subsurface drip irrigation says Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Agent Dana Porter.

“Those are very efficient systems,” Porter said. “It doesn’t necessarily mean we are saving water, but it means we’re getting more crop per drop; a higher yield in return for the water input – so we’re doing a better job there in terms of water use efficiency.”

Even if crop prices were decent and conservation practices economically feasible, changing farming methods takes serious time. Booher doesn’t have any family to take up his work after him, or else he’d consider changing the way he farms.

“I might consider going completely dryland if I had someone following in my footsteps,” Booher said. “But I’ve got no one and I’m too close to retirement to make that big of a move.”

Kirby continues farming because of his son, Kyle.

“I want him to have a future in it, so I do what I can now to ensure that future for him,” Kirby said.

Asked if he’ll continue farming if the drought persists, Joe McFerrin gave a long pause before saying “that’s a hard question.”

“Do we keep putting money in knowing we’ll get nothing back? It’s one of those questions I hope I don’t have to make,” he said.

A Region of Faith

“You can’t be a pessimist as a farmer; you have to be a realist,” said cotton farmer McFerrin.

A consistent narrative among producers and the people of West Texas is the hope that rain will come. It is shared across social media, on the prayer lists of bulletins in local churches, and agreed upon at cotton gin offices across the South Plains.

“Farmers are innovative,” Shelley Berry said. “They take the good, the bad, and the ugly and they make something work.”

All-in-all, Berry adds that farmers are fairly optimistic. It’s always ‘it’s gonna be a better year’ with them.

In March, Lubbock churches and their members gathered at Texas Tech’s Jones AT&T Stadium for a PrayJones event. The goal of the meeting was to bridge across identities and denominations and pray for a revival across the land. One section, however, was completely devoted to praying for rain.

Later that evening, the PrayJones2018 Facebook page posted this image. Although it didn’t rain more than an inch that evening, it gave the people of Lubbock a resurgence of hope that rain will come eventually.

That’s the same hope for Cape Town. Their hydrological year is just beginning, and the future of Day 0’s reality depends on the rain.

And although Day 0 is a very real possibility, it was presented as more of a scare tactic than anything says Winter.

“Both the local and provincial authorities have spent an inordinate amount of time dealing with the specifics of the distribution of water should Day 0 arrive, and that takes up an enormous amount of resources,” Winter said. “It was very effective in bringing the water demand down very rapidly amongst residences, and clearly you don’t want to persist with that psychologically damaging narrative.”

Whether that tactic would work in the South Plains is unknown. What is known is the water consumption for this area is unsustainable. There is no feasible way to recharge the aquifer and producers are at the mercy of the weather. There is no ocean to draw water from, and so many factors go into the current water’s use.

“I just think we need to be as conservative as we possibly can if we’re going to make it last,” Aaron Kirby said. “Someone’s gotta grow it. We’re feeding the world.”