Water Crisis Engulfs U.S. Farmers

The Central Valley of California supplies a quarter of the food on the nation’s dinner tables.

But beneath this image of plenty and abundance, a crisis is brewing — an invisible one, under our feet — and it is not limited to California.

Coast to coast, our food producing regions, especially those stretching from the southern Great Plains across the sunny, dry Southwest, rely heavily and sometimes exclusively on groundwater for irrigation. And it’s disappearing — fast.

What happens to the nation’s food production if the groundwater runs out altogether? Unless we act now, we could soon reach a point where water must be piped from the wetter parts of the country, such as the Great Lakes, to drier, sunnier regions where the bulk of the nation’s food is produced.

The United States has kicked the can down the road for decades, but that road has finally reached a dead end.

It is time for this nation to act to sustain both its food and water security for centuries to come.

Otherwise, we will be faced with the unpleasant prospect of the Great Lakes partially drained of their freshwater, which will be piped across country in a wasteful, expensive and unpopular project that could have been prevented, had we only acted quickly when we still could.