WaterClaim

LINCOLN - Nowhere in America is there a freshwater sea as large as the aquifer under Nebraska. Nowhere in America is more water pumped from the ground for crops than in Nebraska. And no other Western state has waited until now to slow the drought-driven push by irrigation farmers - a tiny fraction of Nebraskans - to overuse groundwater.

The sentence that says farmers are pushing to overuse groundwater sets the tone for the remainder of the piece. This statement is an editorial comment inserted into a “news” piece.

A good water supply and good soil sustain farming with center-pivot irrigation. As a result, significant declines plague parts of Nebraska, rivers are being sapped, mighty Lake McConaughy is shrinking, and now all the state's taxpayers are being presented with a multimillion-dollar repair bill.

This paragraph contains factual statements; but because it follows the first paragraph, it strongly implies that all problems are caused by the bad farmer who has overused groundwater.

It was the year before Pearl Harbor when the Nebraska Supreme Court pointed out that the Legislature had legal gaps in groundwater regulation - gaps that later allowed this unregulated growth.

You’ll notice that bringing images of Pearl Harbor into a reader’s mind is stronger for the anti-irrigator case than to just specify the year.

The Legislature dallied for more than six decades before taking aggressive action.

Meanwhile, irrigators exploited the commonly owned aquifers under a system that rewarded those with the deepest wells.

Here the farmer is accused of exploiting the aquifer and further states that those with the deepest wells are the most guilty.

Nebraska waited so long that it faces a costly, painful process of rolling back water use where it exceeds natural or legal limits.

The sting and expense once were avoidable. Now they're not.

This strongly implies that groundwater irrigation is the only cause for the streams and reservoirs to have less water in them than they used to. That is not true, and the writer and editors of the story know it is not true. The primary reason for streamflow reduction is not groundwater irrigation, yet this article implies it is the only cause.

Gov. Dave Heineman wants to create a $128 million cash fund to address the state's water challenges. Lawmakers are considering a halt to new irrigation wells statewide and paying landowners to reduce irrigation.

The Governor says he wants to create a $128 million cash fund, but that dollar amount is multiplied by many years to get to that number. The real number is $3 million a year; which, after six years, it would increase to about $6 million a year.

The water exploitation evolved under the watch of influential farmers in the Legislature with a self-interest in promoting the rural economy.

This sentence says the farmers are guilty of exploiting the system, thatthey got themselves on the Legislature and then used the power of the State for their self-interest. That is a pretty slanderous accusation that assumes the worst about people.

Traditions made inaction easy. Nebraska has a history of rural independence. The state constitution gives farmers reasonable use of water under their land. Timely wet years and confidence about the state's groundwater wealth lulled farmers and legislators into complacency.

Now the farmer is accused of the opposite – first, the farmers exploited the Legislature. Now, in this paragraph, farmers and their agents in the Legislature are said to be lulled and complacent.

Indeed, Nebraskans have barely tapped the High Plains Aquifer, an eight-state system of underground water. But what irrigators take off the top often depletes rivers, streams and reservoirs - and that drives the current crisis. If nothing were done, isolated pockets of Nebraska could mirror parts of Kansas and Texas where it's too expensive or impossible to drill deep enough to reach the water.

Here, at least, is an admission that the aquifer decline is isolated to small parts of the State. Yet, the accusation is still made that all farmers using aquifer water are guilty of depleting the rivers, streams and reservoirs. A comparison is made to Kansas and Texas to make an alarmist comparison. If the aquifer is not going down -- which it is not in the vast majority of the State -- then it would appear that the accusations made by the article are overly broad and misleading.

Nebraska's estimated 17,000 irrigated farms represent a third of its total farms. They irrigate roughly 43 percent of the state's harvested cropland, watering corn, soybeans, wheat, sugar beets, potatoes, dry edible beans, alfalfa and other crops.

Irrigators make up only about 1 percent of the state's population but use about 94 percent of its groundwater and two-thirds of all its water each year.

If read quickly enough or only once, the wording structure of this sentence could imply to the layman reader that irrigators are guilty of depleting two-thirds of Nebraska’s water supply.

Irrigators range from mom and pop farms, whose operators pump one well and work in town to pay the bills, to megafarms with dozens of wells, whose owners are among the farming elite. The state's average irrigated farm has 462 irrigated acres.

True, and if the water was not used, it would end up in the Gulf of Mexico as salt water. , Apparently, if you farm a lot of acres, that makes you part of farming’s elite. I don’t know for sure what the writer is trying to insinuate with the use of “elite,” but its use is possibly an attempt to get the reader to image greedy, selfish people who get rich while stomping on all the hard-working, family farms most prevalent in nostalgic thoughts of Nebraska’s homesteading past.

But others also want water: growing cities, the ethanol industry, recreation and wildlife.

Now you have the cause of the controversy. Someone wants what someone else has.

Lawmakers put off action for decades, despite court urgings, conflicts among water users, significant shortages plaguing other High Plains Aquifer states and mounting scientific evidence that groundwater use often affects surface water levels.

Until the most recent drought, which began in 1999, the Legislature rarely displayed urgency to regulate groundwater.

In 1940, the Nebraska Supreme Court noted that 500 irrigation pumps in Dawson County created huge losses of flowing water in the Platte River.

The Supreme Court did not say that irrigation wells caused huge losses. That was the accusation of surface irrigators that wanted groundwater wells turned off so they could have more water. This citation comes not from the Supreme Court but rather from Central Nebraska Public Power and Irrigation District, and Central is making a similar argument 65 years later. The Supreme Court didn’t buy that argument in 1940 or in 2005.

In 1994, the court explicitly said in a Platte River case: "It is to the Legislature that Wyoming must direct its argument regarding future groundwater depletion."

But it wasn't until 2004 that Nebraska passed a significant law, Legislative Bill 962, creating a proactive approach involving both local and state agencies to resolve long-standing water issues.

Even in 2005, the court, in a case involving the Spear T Ranch near Bridgeport, noted legal confusion for dealing with groundwater and surface water.

"Ideally, the Legislature would develop a comprehensive administrative appropriation system . . . to adjudicate direct conflicts between groundwater and surface water users in Nebraska. This would be consistent with how most legislatures in Western states have addressed conflicts between water users," the court said.

Legal confusion? There isn’t any legal confusion. The Courts have said, “This is how it works. If you want it to work differently, then talk to the Legislature.” Here, the author is putting words in the mouth of the Supreme Court to imply that the Court doesn’t know what to do. It isn’t the Court that has a problem. The Court has said what the procedure is for resolving conflict between ground and surface water users. The Court has said that it might be better to set up an administrative system to do that.

The reason for inaction is clear, said Michael Klein, a Holdrege attorney who represents the state's largest irrigation district and its surface water users.

"The Legislature has only in small ways come to grips with the unsustainable use of the resource," Klein said. "You can speculate all day, but it's pretty clear that the reason they didn't is pure politics."

Michael Klein is a colorful and intelligent speaker. He is an agent for surface water irrigation and does not hide his desire to see less groundwater irrigation. This article by Hendee obviously uses many of the ideas that opponents of groundwater irrigation advocate. Just remember as you read that Mr. Klein has a desire to reduce the amount of groundwater irrigation and is on record saying that he wants the irrigation wells west of Lake McConaughy turned off.

Irrigation has made thousands of square miles of this semi-arid state landscape more productive, bringing prosperity to irrigators and their communities and making Nebraska the world's center-pivot equipment capital.

Nearly 8 million acres of groundwater-irrigated cropland create a big political hurdle, Klein said, when lawmakers ponder bills perceived to regulate or restrict groundwater use.

Paul Hutchison, who has three pivots on his farm west of Sidney, said farsighted laws a few decades ago would have prevented obvious damage that groundwater irrigators did to aquifers.

"But . . . they weren't breaking the law," he said. "If LB 962 had been in effect 30 years ago, then there could have been something done."

Self-interest kept the Legislature from taking bolder steps during the boom years, said former State Sen. Loran Schmit of Bellwood, an irrigator.

"Who lobbied? Those of us who had (irrigation) interests - we understood the interests," he said.

Loran Schmit is the individual who accuses himself and his fellow farmers of exploiting the system for themselves. The problem is that the writer has decided to treat the Schmit opinion as fact for all.

David Aiken, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln water law expert, pointed to the belief among the state's movers and shakers in the supremacy of irrigation.

"When push came to shove, irrigation was No. 1, and we couldn't do anything to get in the way of groundwater irrigation because that was Nebraska's future," Aiken said.

David Aiken is a long time advocate of less groundwater irrigation.

Former State Sen. Ed Schrock of Elm Creek, a farmer who helped push through LB 962, said he understood his predecessors' hesitancy to act.

Nebraska has the continent's largest and deepest pool of accessible groundwater.

"It was a resource that we thought was inexhaustible," he said. "And Nebraskans are pretty independent-minded people. We don't like regulations."

Irrigation was a moral crusade for senators who lived through the Dust Bowl.

Ed Schrock has said that it has been the policy of the State to irrigate and use irrigation for the good of the State. But, by putting his comments in an anti-irrigation piece, it makes it look like he opposes irrigation, which he does not.

The late State Sen. Maurice Kremer, an Aurora farmer, once told Schmit the 1930s drought motivated his work to develop water for irrigation.

"He'd come in from the field and lift his baby son from the crib and find that so much fine dust had filtered into the house that he could see the outline of the baby on the sheet where it was lying," Schmit said.

"Maury Kremer's interest in irrigation was created by that gut experience."

Irrigation was seen as a tool to deal with droughts by the farmers who were irrigators and the State itself. “Bad people. Didn’t they know droughts are natural and should be expected; that irrigation is a morally wrong way of altering nature?”

As early as 1940, shortly after the Dust Bowl ended and when irrigation was in its infancy, Nebraskans were warned about future water conflicts and shortages and heard calls for state control of the resource.

John C. Page, a native of Nebraska who directed the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, warned Nebraskans that unregulated groundwater use could cause declining water tables and weaken rural communities.

It is easy to find people that warned against everything. If we, as a people, would just learn to listen to every person who ever warns about anything we could bring life to a halt. Wouldn’t that be better?

The state has managed surface water since 1895. But across most of Nebraska, throughout the 20th century, groundwater pumping was guided only by individual decisions.

Not until 1957 did the Legislature pass its first law regulating groundwater - and that simply required registering and spacing wells and set preferences for using groundwater.

The use of the word “simply” implies that nothing much was done with this law, but the legislation made it possible for controls to be set on groundwater use.

As irrigation boomed in the 1960s and 1970s, awareness and research grew about how groundwater pumping can sap streams and rivers. Nebraska water law wasn't ready for the resulting number of conflicts among water users.

Kremer and other irrigators were creating what he called "a new Nebraska" of prosperity. But he also acknowledged during that period that "maybe we've gone too far."

Kremer joined the Legislature in 1963, the year water-law experts warned of the danger of shrinking aquifers contributing less water to the stream flows. The experts predicted an inevitable collision between groundwater and surface water irrigators.

Kremer was a father of the state's natural resources districts. They were formed in 1972 to consolidate 154 tiny resource and conservation districts into about two dozen larger agencies to manage soil and groundwater.

Over the next three decades, the Legislature limited the districts' authority to manage groundwater, doling it out piecemeal.

This implies the opposite of what happened. The State didn’t constrict the authority of the NRDs. It broadened it over the years. For many years, the NRDs were prohibited from restricting groundwater use. That was a policy decision by the State of Nebraska made by those “conspiring, evil farmers who controlled the Legislature.” Strange how those farmers have been able to outwit the urban guys for decades.

For example, the Legislature, led by Kremer, passed its first groundwater law in 1975. The law authorized the NRDs to propose restrictions on irrigators who were mining water - drawing more from the ground than annual precipitation could restore.

But such restrictions required approval by state water managers and were rarely imposed.

Meanwhile, the pressure to irrigate was great. Soviet Union grain purchases, which began in 1971, depleted U.S. reserves.

Grain prices soared. Farmers with center-pivot irrigation watched their land values leap from a few hundred dollars an acre to $2,000 to $3,000 an acre.

Irrigated agriculture ensured the ranking of lightly populated Nebraska as a leading agribusiness state. Cash receipts from farm marketing contribute about $12 billion a year to Nebraska's economy. Farmers pay hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes.

So, money is the cause of the problem. If farmers weren’t so greedy, there wouldn’t be problem. Maybe if we ban the ability to make money, there will be more water in the rivers.

By the mid-1980s, science-based information about the connection between groundwater and surface water was widespread, water tables were falling and rivers were vanishing.

We were warned about it in the 1940s, yet it took 40 years before the information became widespread? This sentence also implies that the water tables are falling across the State. That isn’t true; in fact, there was more water in the aquifer in the 1980s than there was in the 1940s.

But groundwater was the heavyweight champion in state water politics, UNL's Aiken said.

That's where the money was, he said. "Any farmer worth his salt had an irrigation well."

Among farmers, he said, "irrigators were the leadership. You didn't want to mess with them."

If the reader takes both the quoted sections and the unquoted sections into account, Aiken seems to be accusing groundwater irrigators of being bullies -- people who will go out and hurt you if you don’t agree with them. The fact that there is no record of this type of thing happening in the 65 years the irrigation has been happening apparently doesn’t matter to the Omaha World Herald. The tactic seems to be to accuse your political enemy of the worst motives possible, then let them defend themselves. I guess accusing past irrigators of being bullies means that they aren’t slandering anyone today. Or are today’s irrigators slandered by association?

When Schmit joined the Legislature in 1969, rural senators needed little help from urban colleagues to ensure a majority of votes on water issues. Of the 49 members, 24 were farmers, ranchers, or irrigation and grain company managers.

When Schmit left in 1993, the number of ag senators had dwindled to 15, and new voices were heard.

So is the Omaha World Herald saying ranchers are also guilty? The OWH is also saying the problem is caused by people who are elected by the voters of the State; that all farmers must have agreed with each other and been able to dupe non-farmers for many years. They say that farmers make up only one percent of the residents of the State. Somehow, they manage to control the other 99 percent?

Key among them was Chris Beutler of Lincoln, who became chairman of the Natural Resources Committee in 1993. Beutler questioned the wisdom of unfettered groundwater development.

Rural Nebraskans branded him Public Enemy No. 1.

For a news reporter writing an article outside the Editorial section, a statement like, “Rural Nebraskans branded him Public Enemy No. 1” sounds very opinionated. Would this be all rural Nebraskans that thought this? Would it be a majority? Would anyone presuming to speak for all rural Nebraskans have credibility?

He worked to address the predictable deterioration of water quantity and quality that followed drilling booms in some areas.

One of his biggest water policy successes was LB 108, approved in 1996 over well-organized irrigator opposition. LB 108 turned Nebraska water law on its head by recognizing the connection between surface water and groundwater.

So the well-organized irrigators failed to stop LB 108. First question, what ground water irrigation organizations existed? In 1996, only Nebraskans First existed. While they are an active organization, they have one director, a newsletter, and several hundred members. I am not trying to diminish what the organization does, but farmers never have been organized in some big, powerful force. To say irrigators are well organized is a big stretch of the imagination. But, I suppose in the eyes of the writer, it would make irrigators look bad if they were organized. I wonder if organized irrigators would be any more evil than organized seniors or teachers or bank tellers or cancer survivors or dentists or....

But the law was cumbersome and poorly funded.

Most of his attempts at legislative changes failed. Beutler left the resources committee in 1999, frustrated with the apathy of most urban senators over water issues. And few rural senators, he said, understood the big picture of water policy.

"They are tenacious," he said. "Their key belief is that water needs to be protected for agriculture at all costs."

So would those same rural senators that Beutler says don’t understand the big picture be the same rural senators who conspired to outsmart and outwit all of those urban senators?

Klein, the Holdrege attorney, said it remains difficult for lawmakers to tackle water issues because their actions would affect more than just irrigators.

Each irrigation well plugs into an economic infrastructure of Main Street businesses that sell seed, pesticide, fertilizer, fuel and machinery to grow, harvest and market the crop.

"The greater the economic productivity based on irrigation, the more difficult it is for politicians to come to grips with the reality that we have unsustainable (water) use. The demand exceeds the supply," he said.

"It's easy for the Legislature to sit and do nothing. It's a tough political problem."

So it isn’t just irrigators who have conspired to exploit the water resources of the State. Now it is every person on rural Main Street as well. The conspiracy widens.

Beutler said legislators should have reined in unregulated irrigation development in the 1970s, before it put aquifers at risk.

Now some farmers with irrigation wells are paid tax dollars not to irrigate, as part of a solution to prevent falling water tables and dwindling rivers.

"It makes me sick," he said. "The Legislature let it happen."

Beutler got sick. The greedy irrigator is the cause of all of the problems. The problem has been going on for decades. It is all the Legislature’s fault. It’s just a bad, bad situation. Do you get the idea that this piece was written to try and shame the Legislature into doing something the Omaha World Herald wants the Legislature to do? This piece is an attack editorial masquerading as a news story. It interviews only those who are on one side of the argument. It adopts their opinions and states them as facts. There will be several more issues that will come out. They will look at other elements in the story. As you read those, take note to see if the opinions of the other side are ever presented as facts or just self-interested defenders of a special interest? Ask yourself, “Why is this series of water stories coming out now? Who are they trying to influence? What do they want?” The Omaha World Herald has long been advocating their opinion. Usually, those opinions stay on the editorial page. But, now, they have jumped and violated several of the principles of responsible journalism.