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The Impact Of Saturated Thickness To Protect Farmers From Severe Drought In High Plains Aquifer, Olivier Tuyizere, Taro Mieno Phd

UCARE Research Products

The High Plains Aquifer comprises eight states of Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Wyoming, Colorado, South Dakota with an area of 175,000 square miles. High Plains Aquifer (HPA) has been the primary source of water supply for irrigation in this region. Groundwater depletion varies across the region of the aquifer due to differences in surface water interaction with groundwater, water recharge, precipitation temperature and hydrological characteristics of the aquifer. With the uncertainty in the future of climate, we expect extreme climatic events such as drought. The drought is associated with dry and hot weather in which irrigation plays a vital …

Impact Of Saturated Thickness To Protect Farmers From Drought In High Plains Aquifer, Olivier Tuyizere, Taro Mieno

UCARE Research Products

●The High Plains aquifer is the primary source of water supply for irrigating major crops in the region including corn and soybeans ●Climate change is expected to reduce groundwater availability in High Plains Aquifer and increase extreme climatic events such as droughts. ●Aquifer depletion leads to lower well yields, which in turn diminish the effectiveness of irrigation against drought.

●Estimate the effect of saturated thickness to protect irrigated corn and soybeans production against severe drought in the High Plains Aquifer. ●Calculate the impact of aquifer depletion on farmers’ ability to protect against severe droughts based on the regression results.

A Half Century Of Yield Growth Along The Forty-First Parallel Of The Great Plains: Factor Intensification, Irrigation, Weather, And Technical Change., Federico J. Trindade, Lilyan E. Fulginiti, Richard Perrin

Department of Agricultural Economics: Faculty Publications

In this study, we explain a half-century of crop yield growth along an 800-mile transect of the forty-first parallel North in the U.S. Great Plains. Using 101 county-level observations from 1960-2008 we jointly estimate a biomass production function with cost shares for fertilizer and chemicals while controlling for environmental factors. The main contributors to yield increases in this region were non-specific technical change +62%, irrigation +17%, fertilizer +13% and chemicals +11%. Environmental changes had a minor impact on regional yield changes. The wide range of agroclimatic conditions present along this transect produced significant sub-regional deviations from the aggregate estimates. While …

Estimating Adaptation To Climate Change In Groundwater Irrigation, James Keeler

Department of Agricultural Economics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Understanding the adaptive capacity of irrigated agriculture, including to what extent producers adjust irrigation choices along the intensive and extensive margins, is vital to the development of accurate and holistic estimates of the impacts of climate change on agricultural production and the sustainability of water-related ecosystem services. This thesis proposes and implements a natural experiment using statistical matching methods to estimate how producers adjust groundwater extraction, irrigated crop acreage, and irrigation technology in response to long-term changes in precipitation and evapotranspiration. Results from groundwater irrigated fields in Kansas suggest that intensive and extensive margin water use adaptations are generally limited …

Econometric Estimation Of Groundwater Depth Change For The High Plains Aquifer, Jonathan R. Sims

Department of Agricultural Economics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This article presents a new method for estimating changes in depth to groundwater at a yearly, county level and incorporates these estimates as the dependent variable of econometric models for the High Plains aquifer. The High Plains (Ogallala) aquifer underlies eight states in the central United States and is the primary source of irrigation water for this large food producing region. The stock of groundwater is a finite, non-renewable resource with minimal recharge in most areas. Many fields of study, including hydrology and agricultural economics, are interested in depth to groundwater changes because they serve as a proxy for estimating …