Texas Farmers Fight Groundwater Restrictions

Texas Tribune, via Big Picture Agriculture:

As sleet pounded his West Texas farmhouse one recent afternoon, Dawdy and three other farmers said that new regulations — which limit the amount of water they can withdraw from the Ogallala Aquifer and require that new wells have meters to measure use — could have crippling effects on their livelihoods.
“We view it as a real property-rights violation,” said Dawdy, who grows cotton. If the restrictions had been in place last year during the drought, he said, his land would not have produced a crop.
Water is a contentious issue across Texas, but tensions have been especially high in a 16-county groundwater conservation district stretching from south of Lubbock into the Panhandle, an area considered part of America’s “breadbasket.” There, farmers reliant on the slowly diminishing Ogallala are fighting to maintain their right to pump unrestricted amounts of water. The issue gained urgency last month when a landmark Texas Supreme Court opinion confirmed that landowners own the water beneath their property, in the same way they own the oil and gas.

This won't end well for the Panhandle region.  The region is only viable agriculturally as long as the aquifer is there to exploit.  The farmers are really water miners, and when the water is gone, so is the agriculture.  The future of the region is the future of the aquifer, and in the southern part of the Great Plains, that future looks pretty bleak.