Less than 1% of North Dakota farmland is irrigated, but in a warming world, there could be more demand for the practice.
By midcentury, the benefits of irrigating corn and soybeans will outweigh the costs in North Dakota and other Upper Midwestern states, according to a recent Dartmouth-led study.
Corn and soybeans play a central role in the U.S. food system and economy. The crops are used for livestock feed, processed foods and biofuels. They accounted for over 40% of North Dakota agricultural sales in 2017, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Both plants require a lot of water, though corn is thirstier than soybeans.
As the planet warms, irrigation could be an answer to maintaining a prosperous agriculture industry. But there are roadblocks to expansion in North Dakota, and some researchers think soil conservation and plant breeding might be better solutions.
People are also reading…
Wet and dry
Forecasting rainfall decades into the future is less reliable than predicting temperature. But across the five climate models associated with moderate and high levels of climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions that researchers examined for the study, there was an average of around 10% decrease in overall precipitation during the months of June to September in North Dakota by the middle of the 21st century, according to Trevor Partridge, a postdoctoral fellow at the U.S. Geological Survey, and the study’s lead author.
“It would probably be pretty detrimental to crops in some place like the Dakotas where it’s already fairly arid ... if there’s a little decrease that could have pretty big impacts,” he said.
Extreme weather can cause a lot of loss. An unexpected drought in 2017 led to over $2.6 billion in total agricultural losses in the Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies, according to the National Integrated Drought Information System.
Some evidence points to this already becoming a trend. A recent analysis of data from USDA’s crop insurance program by the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit environmental advocacy organization shows that over the past two decades North Dakota was among the top 10 states in payments for drought, excess moisture, hail and heat.
While weather extremes are not new to the Midwest, the size of the payments has increased, said Anne Schechinger, EWG Midwest director and the study’s author.
“Drought payments grew — up 2,679% so just a huge amount — and excess moisture payments grew as well but only by 285%, so excess moisture really has been affecting farmers in North Dakota for a long time so that’s been a common thing, but the drought, we’ve seen it go from less of an issue to much more of an issue lately,” she told the Tribune.
Andrew Hoell, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research meteorologist who was not part of the Dartmouth study, said that no singular model or study will predict future weather patterns perfectly, but increasing temperatures will make North Dakota’s historically variable weather — dry one year and wet the next — more intense. Droughts are harmful not only because they reduce rainfall, but also because they lower water retention in soil.
“It’s almost a certainty that temperatures will be higher in those future droughts, and that would further desiccate the land surface and then make a drought a little bit more intense than the droughts we saw in the past,” Hoell said.
North Dakota State University Crop Economist Frayne Olson said the largest threat that climate change poses to farmers are fluctuations in weather patterns becoming more exaggerated.
“Especially for agriculture, it’s those swings that can cause us the big problems,” he said.
Partridge said irrigation can be a useful tool for farmers to continue to operate and to shore up food security during these swings.
Olson said that irrigation will play a role in addressing future uncertainties around rainfall, but it will likely only be part of the story of how North Dakota farmers will adjust to more volatile weather patterns.
“Irrigation is not the perfect solution. Even if you go into areas like Nebraska or western Kansas or parts of the panhandle, Oklahoma and Texas, where they already do a lot of irrigation, there are still years where they have losses because they can’t pump water fast enough, just physically can’t do it,” he said.
And some experts caution that even in the face of more intense droughts, North Dakota’s physical environment and water use policies pose limits to the extent to which irrigation can and should expand.
Limits to irrigation
Agriculture is one of the largest consumers of water across the U.S., with more than 40% of freshwater removals going toward irrigation, according to a U.S. Geological Survey report from 2015. The practice has led to water shortages in states where irrigation is commonly employed, such as those in the High Plains and American Southwest that have relied on sources such as the Ogallala Aquifer or the Colorado River for water. There is now fear that these bodies of water will dry up due to more water being pumped out than what can go back in year after year.
Partridge said increased weather variability is already leading to the expansion of irrigation in parts of the country that have not traditionally irrigated. He warned that similar water depletion issues could arise in those areas if the practice grows, but said these issues are not inevitable.
“The real challenge is going to be to find that balance between expanding irrigation and ensuring (there is) enough water for other uses,” Partridge said.
North Dakota water use policies are set up to work within that balance, according to Danielle Quissell, executive director of the North Dakota Irrigation Association, a nonprofit group that often works with the state to improve and expand the technology.
That balance is not always in favor of more irrigation, however.
The state’s water management policies are built around the concept of a “sustainable yield,” with the intention of not overusing ground and surface water resources, Quissell said.
“The state won’t grant a permit for (more) water than what will be recharged in a given year ... if you do take more water out of the aquifer in a given year than what’s going in, that is called mining and that will slowly deplete the aquifer so there won’t be water available for future generations, so that’s really what the state’s trying to avoid,” she said.
Most aquifers are fully appropriated for irrigation, Quissell said, but interest is expanding in areas where the water has not yet been fully committed. This includes area that can be irrigated with surface water such as the Missouri River and the McClusky Canal in central North Dakota.
Irrigation is also expensive. Installation prices can be upwards of $300,000, and there are typically costs to maintain the systems too, according to Quissell.
There are physical barriers to how much irrigation could increase in North Dakota as well. Olson, the NDSU crop economist, said North Dakota does not have the availability of groundwater needed for irrigation to be cost-effective in many scenarios, even if the practice does grow.
“There are areas right now that can be irrigated that are not, so I don’t want to totally say it’s not going to happen, because I do think it will happen; it’s just not going to be to the size and the scale that they have in Nebraska,” he said. Nebraska has historically been among the top irrigators in the U.S.
Moving forward
Quissell said the Irrigation Association is pursuing strategies to make irrigation more accessible in areas where practicing it makes sense.
One program uses a partnership of the State Water Commission and local irrigation districts to share costs on expanding and improving irrigation infrastructure. Another program tries to make financing irrigation systems easier by having the state-owned Bank of North Dakota buy down interest rates from loans that local banks provide for irrigation systems.
Both institutions have recently increased the level of assistance they are providing, Quissell said.
New technologies are also available which enable farmers to continuously monitor where, when and how much water is needed at different sections of their fields, making for more efficient uses, she added.
Olson said there are technologies and practices outside of irrigation that are likely better suited for North Dakota to address the forecast intensity of future droughts.
One possibility is to plant more drought-tolerant crops such as dry beans, chickpeas or lentils. Soybeans may make more sense to plant than corn in a drier future given the plant’s relatively smaller water needs for a successful yield, Olson added.
“When you think about a flower versus a cactus, some flowers if you don’t water them every other day, they’ll start to wilt and you can tell that they’re getting too dry and they’ll eventually die. But a cactus you can go weeks without watering that and it will still remain fine because it doesn’t have the water use required,” Olson said. “So the same with crops.”
But with the many uses and demands for corn, soybeans and other thirsty plants, it is unlikely that growing less water-intensive crops will be the only answer.
Olson said there are also developments in cultivating varieties of plants which would help make water and fertilizer use more efficient. This is done through making use of knowledge around plants’ past genetic codes to breed better crops. It differs from other more controversial types of genetic engineering that put genetic material from one plant into another, Olson said.
Once a new seed variety is found, it can typically be brought to commercial scale in around three years, he added.
“In natural plant breeding or what we have been doing for centuries where we’re cross-pollinating between Plant A and Plant B to get the kind of things we want, that’s really what we’re doing with (this form of) genetic engineering,” he said. “It’s just in the old days we had to let Mother Nature do the crosses and hope we found a combination that works; well now we can be more precise as we start to understand that genetic code.”
Incentives for farming practices that conserve and strengthen soil will play a role in countering the effects of droughts as well, according to Olson.
“It’s a big issue, the water use thing, and changing water patterns and adjustments, those are big things that we’re going to have to address and will impact North Dakota,” he said. “It’s just I’m not 100% sure what role irrigation will play in that.”