Drought's effects last long after rains return

JETMORE, Kan. -- Just three years ago, the Jetmore City Lake covered 100 acres, a welcomed oasis in the midst of the Kansas prairie.

No runoff has replenished this lake in recent years, and its waters have receded now to cover just 15 acres.

Like it, other lakes and streams in western Kansas are showing the lingering effects from the drought that has gripped this area. Less apparent are the dropping groundwater levels, under heavy demand this summer from irrigators trying to salvage their withering crops.

Windbreaks, some established decades ago by early settlers, are losing their oldest and youngest trees. Hundreds of thousands of tree seedlings planted through conservation programs in the past five years are dying.

The drought is causing wind erosion, reducing soil fertility and further depleting native grasslands, state conservationists say.

"You don't ever recover from something like that, you just manage," said Bud Davis, conservation agronomist with the USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service in Salina. "Most of the cropland is already in an eroded state. ... After being tilled, it lost most of the good stuff. What we see now is a continuation of the degradation."

That is why Davis and other conservationists are pushing no-till cropping systems so heavily. They contend it is the only way to get soil losses down to zero. It takes a long time to improve the humus in the soil, and sometimes that never comes back to the way it was before tillage, he said.

Farming practices have improved since the Dust Bowl days. No longer is all the land tilled and tilled heavily. But many soil conservationists fear that may not be enough to stop big dust storms this spring; the rain is needed to get enough winter wheat growth to hold the soil.

Conservationists are advising farmers not to cut all their crops for silage, even corn or milo. Even summer weeds are preferable to leaving the ground bare this winter, they say.

"Whatever they have is going to be more beneficial as a snow trap," he said. "If they feel they have to tear it up, they should leave strips so it traps snow on areas they have tilled."

Dust storms possible

If you can see dust in the air, you are losing soil at more than 10 tons per acre per year, said Larry Kuder, USDA's resource inventory specialist for Kansas. In the dust storms of the 1930s, soil loss exceeded five tons per acre. Today it averages less than two tons per acre.

"Some places have gone two years without producing any crops, and this year is really devastating," he said. "If we don't get fall moisture -- something to hold this land in place with the freezing, thawing and winds we normally get in spring -- we can see some big dust storms again."

Already, plows are clearing drifting soil from roads around Liberal.

Some of the enhancements planted in Conservation Reserve Program land to attract wildlife, such as clover, will be lost with this drought, Davis said.

"You will see a lot of grasslands blow, and it is pretty tough," Davis said. "A lot of grasses designed to stand severe drought will go dormant. Some CRP grasses may not be able to deal with it as severely -- one year, but not two or three."

Concern is also growing for the 1.5 million acres of trees in Kansas, comprising about 3 percent of the state's land area.

Most of the native forest is in the wetter, eastern third of the state -- where a $50 million to $100 million forest industry thrives, said Ray Aslin, state forester for the Kansas Forest Service.

But most of the concern is for the planted forests of western Kansas -- the windbreaks and shelterbelts painstakingly put in decades ago to control erosion and provide respite from relentless prairie winds.

"If this drought continues, we are going to be losing a large portion of some windbreaks," Aslin said.

Trees planted back in the 1930s and 1940s are beginning to get old, their root systems are not as aggressive and they are most likely to be affected by drought, he said. District foresters are reporting the drought is even affecting cedars, the backbone of many of these windbreaks. Younger trees with less developed root systems are also at risk.

Groundwater resources are yet another problems spot, especially on the dwindling Ogallala Aquifer.

Hank Hansen, executive director of the Southwest Kansas Groundwater Management District in Garden City, said there is definitely an increase in usage, but because of the drought many farmers aren't able to keep up. Crops are burning up in spite of irrigation.

Even before the drought, irrigated lands were not profitable because of the high price of gas used to run the wells, low crop prices and decreased capacity of water wells.

The drought's overall effect on groundwater resources probably won't be known until January, when the Kansas Geological Survey measures 1,500 wells in the western third of the state to see how far groundwater levels have dropped.

By that time the water table would have stabilized from this summer's heavy pumping, and will give researchers a more accurate reading of levels.

"I don't think we know what we are going to see when we go out there -- you expect declines when pumping has been as heavy," said Rex Buchanan, associate director of the Kansas Geological Survey.

More apparent now are declines in stream flows, and concern over the interaction between streams and aquifers, he said.

The Arkansas River near Coolidge is at its lowest level since 1977, when it last went dry there, Buchanan said. And the Kansas Department of Agriculture has restricted groundwater pumping along the Republican River because low flows.

Throughout western Kansas, stream flows are so low that U.S. Geological Survey figures show one-third of the state's rivers don't have enough water to meet minimum state-established river-flow levels.