The world has a groundwater problem. Can we solve it?

53.339 - 73.862 Burleigh McCoy

It's not. It's more like water between rocks that gets to the surface through wells and springs. And that groundwater is responsible for about half of the water people use globally. Wow. Thank you, aquifers, for keeping us all alive. Seriously. And for this episode, I called up someone who has a very close relationship with his local aquifer.

74.213 - 85.126 Hayes Kelman

Earliest memory of farming probably would be sleeping on the floor of a combine while my dad drove the combine through the field and harvested corn or wheat.

85.787 - 100.825 Burleigh McCoy

This is Hayes Kelman. He's a fifth-generation farmer in western Kansas, and he loves it, getting his hands in the soil, watching a crop grow from seed to harvest. But around the time he was in high school, he noticed something about the water they used to irrigate the family farm.

101.345 - 111.909 Hayes Kelman

I started watching how... Certain wells were just dropping off significantly, how we were removing a sprinkler from a certain area of land because we didn't have enough water.

111.949 - 127.972 Burleigh McCoy

So his farm sits above the Ogallala or High Plains Aquifer, which is a huge aquifer. It spans eight states and it's losing water like a lot of other aquifers around the world. Sometimes it's because of cities, but a lot of the time it's because of farms using a lot of water.

290.945 - 310.954 Burleigh McCoy

So on average, more than about four inches per year, which imagine if you have a well, that can eventually be catastrophic. And so a third of those aquifers are losing more than about 20 inches per year. Deborah Perrone is a water resource engineer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who worked on the study.

311.275 - 323.693 Burleigh McCoy

And she says the places with the most rapid declines tended to be in dry regions around the world with lots of cultivated land. So in India, the U.S., China, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and lots of places.

324.134 - 349.502 Deborah Perrone

When you have declines in precipitation, you're getting hit twice. You're getting hit with supply because you no longer have that recharge. You no longer have the ability to replenish your aquifer. And then you're also getting hit with demand because now people don't have other sources of water. They can't do rain fed irrigation. Their rivers probably have lower flows.

349.582 - 353.487 Deborah Perrone

Their reservoirs have less water in them. So now they're turning to groundwater.

354.007 - 363.758 Emily Kwong

So there really is a domino effect here. In places where the aquifer is depleting the most, are people just they're going to run out of water entirely? That is one possibility.

570.862 - 581.974 Hayes Kelman

The hydrologists and geologists, they've figured out what amount of water we can pull from the aquifer to become stable. Because it does have a recharge rate.

582.214 - 592.705 Burleigh McCoy

And so those experts will tell him how much he needs to reduce his water use over time so that the aquifer can recharge enough to be a renewable resource. And he says he's ready to make those changes.

593.225 - 595.247 Hayes Kelman

Everything we do is for our kids and for the future.

595.488 - 612.63 Burleigh McCoy

But he admits it's going to be hard. His farm used to sell a lot of something called Milo. That's a grain that uses less water, but now no one is buying it and it's just sitting there. So he still needs to grow the more water intensive wheat and corn to make a living. Those are the products people want more. Exactly.

612.671 - 624.882 Burleigh McCoy

And he points out that if people stop growing as much corn, for example, cattle farmers are going to feel it because they feed that to their cows and the meat packing plants are affected because cattle numbers then drop. So he wonders.