When You Find Yourself in a Hole, Dig Faster

That seems to be the idea out in Kansas.  From Mother Jones:

 But I think it's also worth asking what, exactly, they'd be sustaining. The following chart, pulled from the study, shows the amount of corn grown in the region since 1980—both irrigated and un-irrigated (i.e., grown without added irrigation water), as well as the amount of corn that has been consumed by cattle in the region's feedlots. The latter metric, denoted by the red dots below, is a pretty good proxy for just how teeming those feedlots have gotten over the decades.

So the area has dramatically ramped up both beef and corn production since 1980—and the great bulk of that corn comes from irrigated land. And while beef production in the region has at least leveled off, the region's farmers just keep churning out more corn—including irrigated corn. New York Times reporter Michael Wines summed up the situation in an article last May:

This is in many ways a slow-motion crisis — decades in the making, imminent for some, years or decades away for others, hitting one farm but leaving an adjacent one untouched. But across the rolling plains and tarmac-flat farmland near the Kansas-Colorado border, the effects of depletion are evident everywhere. Highway bridges span arid stream beds. Most of the creeks and rivers that once veined the land have dried up as 60 years of pumping have pulled groundwater levels down by scores and even hundreds of feet.

One major culprit has been a shift in what farms grow—from a rotation featuring corn, wheat, and sorghum to a narrow focus on a single crop that flourishes under heavy irrigation and has been in high demand lately: corn.

 A shift to growing corn, a much thirstier crop than most, has only worsened matters. Driven by demand, speculation and a government mandate to produce biofuels, the price of corn has tripled since 2002, and Kansas farmers have responded by increasing the acreage of irrigated cornfields by nearly a fifth. At an average 14 inches per acre in a growing season, a corn crop soaks up groundwater like a sponge—in 2010, the State Agriculture Department said, enough to fill a space a mile square and nearly 2,100 feet high.

Indeed, US industrial-scale beef production is largely concentrated over the High Plains Aquifer, which stretches from Nebraska clear down to Texas.

What this reminds me of in some ways is the Grand Lake St. Mary's watershed.  Although there the issue is that large families wanted to stay close together on some heavy clay soils back when crops weren't profitable enough to do that, and there were too many people for the number of acres.  So they got into livestock production, and just kept building barns closer and closer together.  Eventually, they had way more shit than they had ground to absorb it (especially in that heavy clay).  Those nutrients ran off into the less than 12 foot deep, but 13,500 acre lake, which was perfect for growing algae.  When the state DNR came in to put together a report on the problem, their graph of livestock production was very similar to the one above (see the graphs on pages 13 and 14 here).  They just put too many animals in too small of an area.

Farmers are often a perfect example of self-interest trampling the interest of the community as a whole.  Nobody is better at overproducing, overinvesting, and generally screwing themselves in an effort to outdo their neighbors.  I understand that nobody wants to walk away from their home, especially while water is still available.  But growing corn, as opposed to wheat, just doesn't make sense.  I would look at what would help my children and grandchildren (if I could find a woman soft enough in the head to let me bring them into the world), and mining water just doesn't seem to be it.

However, the folks in Kansas aren't as bad as folks in the American west.  Flood irrigating alfalfa in Arizona is even stupider than mining groundwater in Kansas.  Reality will eventually teach folks in these areas that you can't just do more and more of the same stupid shit.  In a slightly lesser way, people here in the rain-fed part of the world will find out that even though a duoculture of crops is the easiest and most profitable way of going about things, it definitely isn't the best way to do it.  We humans will put off pain as long as we can, but eventually, we reap the whirlwind.