Groundwater depletion in US High Plains leads to bleak outlook for grain production

The depletion of groundwater sources in parts of the United States High Plains is so severe that peak grain production in some states has already been passed, according to new research. An international team of scientists, including experts from the University of Birmingham, has extended and improved methods used to calculate peak oil production to assess grain production in three US states, Nebraska, Texas and Kansas. They related the levels of water extraction from the Ogallala aquifer, one of the largest underwater reservoirs in the High Plains, over the past five decades, to the amounts of grain harvested in each state and used this model to predict future trends. Their results are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "We were inspired by insightful analyses of US crude oil production. They predicted a peak in crude oil production a decade in advance,' says Assaad Mrad, a Ph.D. candidate at Duke University and lead author of the study.