Irrigation projects on tap again in water-saving efforts in state

A farmer harvests rice near Stuttgart in September. A University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service program that reduced water use by 25 percent last year in about two dozen farm fields is being expanded by about 30 fields this year.
A farmer harvests rice near Stuttgart in September. A University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service program that reduced water use by 25 percent last year in about two dozen farm fields is being expanded by about 30 fields this year.

After reducing water use by 25 percent last year at about two dozen fields in Arkansas, the University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service is going back this summer to show more farmers how they can use less water while maintaining the same crop yield.

The irrigation management demonstrations are not part of the Arkansas Water Plan, which details the state's water usage and proposes ways to make it more sustainable in the agriculture-heavy Delta. But the program is one way the state can address water use, said Chris Henry, assistant professor and water-management engineer at the UA Rice Research and Extension Center.

"This project is kind of answering those questions," Henry said.

"You've got to start somewhere," he added. "It gets you thinking about how to start irrigating correctly."

Henry will add about 30 more fields this year, using funds from the Rice, Corn and Grain, and Soybean Promotion boards.

The irrigation projects are one of the latest efforts in Arkansas to use water more efficiently -- and use less -- on farms. That saves money for the farmer and helps alleviate concerns about sustainability.

The 2010 U.S. Geological Survey data used to compile the Arkansas Water Plan, approved by the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission last year, indicated that Arkansas is among the top users of water in the country, despite its small size and population. The state was the second-largest user of groundwater -- and fourth-largest total water user. The water plan, along with the state's 2015 groundwater report, projected that current water-use trends were not sustainable in the long run.

The groundwater projections have been disputed by agricultural groups, and the commission is working with them to install meters to get better measurements. But according to projections, about 80 percent of eastern Arkansas won't be able to irrigate in 40 years. The gaps between projected water use and supply in other parts of the state are not as wide.

Although the water plan has been approved by the Natural Resources Commission's board of commissioners and given the approval of Gov. Asa Hutchinson, it can't be officially adopted by the commission until the Arkansas Legislature approves it.

Water plan developer Edward Swaim said he doesn't think Arkansas' position near the top of the nation's water users will change once the 2015 Geological Survey data are released. That's because the state produces crops, such as corn, grains and rice, that need a lot of water.

Last year Arkansas farmers planted about 1.39 million acres of rice -- about half of the nation's rice acreage for 2015, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture figures. All that rice requires flooding of fields.

Irrigation and thermoelectric power are the biggest users of water in the United States, according to the Geological Survey. A thermoelectric power plant, for example, would be a nuclear power plant that uses water to cool down. The only Arkansas county that draws similar amounts of water as the eastern side is Pope County, which is home to agriculture and the state's only nuclear power plant, Entergy's Nuclear One.

Even with the water projections in east Arkansas, the state was still in a better position than some states with more immediate needs, according to Drew Westerman, a hydrologist and geographic information system specialist for the Geological Survey in Arkansas. He said California, Nebraska and Texas -- all near the top of the list of water users -- face more serious situations that will require them to act more quickly.

"We have been very fortunate to be a water-rich state," Westerman said. "We don't have dire problems."

What will reduce water use to sustainable levels in the state's east are water-saving projects like the one UA's Henry is working on and two irrigation projects slowly being constructed to deliver water in the next few years, Swaim said. Conservation projects ideally could achieve 25 percent of the reduction needed, he said. The major irrigation projects -- Bayou Meto and Grand Prairie -- would make up the rest.

"Once they're completed, and once they're serving their entire acreage, that will reduce our area that is overdrawing water by another 15 percent statewide," Swaim said, referring to the percentage decrease in total water use.

The Grand Prairie project will build new reservoirs between the White and Arkansas rivers, doubling the amount of usable, aboveground water storage. The Bayou Meto project will divert Arkansas River water as a part of a process that converts groundwater to surface water for irrigation.

The projects have been funded using 65 percent federal funds and 35 percent local funds in the past decade or so, Swaim said, and federal funds have been slow to come in because of the demand of the federal government for infrastructure. At the current pace of funding, Swaim expects the projects to start delivering water in two to three years.

Universities and state and federal agencies have been working on water-saving projects for years.

In recent months, Swaim and the Natural Resources Commission have worked with the Geological Survey to install flow meters on wells in the Mississippi River Valley alluvial aquifer. Because of manufacturer delays, they have installed only 11 of 65 meters to measure water use in the area where many farmers claimed water use was being overreported, throwing off projections of unsustainable use.

Farmers might overreport water use to give themselves breathing room if a conflict arose that could place them on water restrictions at a level based on what they were reporting, Swaim said. But, he added, large overreporting would be flagged in the Geological Survey's water-use database, so he doesn't agree that overreporting would drastically change the water plan's projections.

The state Natural Resources Commission also is working with USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service to hire four new people in east Arkansas to work on irrigation-management with farmers. Three would work at conservation districts in eastern counties, and a fourth would work for the commission in another office in the east, Swaim said.

The irrigation project that Henry is working on combines many of the programs that extension service faculty members have pushed for some time: computer software programs that dispatch water more efficiently, irrigation scheduling based on evaporation and transpiration, and different irrigation methods based on the type of farmland.

Also within the past year, the state has taken on a Regional Conservation Partnership Program with Ducks Unlimited and the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service.

The "Rice Stewardship Partnership -- Sustaining the Future of Rice" is a 39-member, $10 million program in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, California and Texas, all major rice-producing states.

Arkansas has received $4.5 million of those funds for the project, which assesses water quantity and quality in rice-producing areas by estimating the bird population an area can sustain. The idea is that the number of birds corresponds with surface-water levels.

The project started late last summer, said Merle Anders, a retired University of Arkansas professor who is working on the project. The project's 75 contracts with farmers should yield results for the first time this year, he said.

Using less water on rice, Anders said, would have additional benefits of reducing methane emissions caused when fields are flooded, and should reduce arsenic levels in the rice.

Some of the longer-standing initiatives in the state include promoting tail-water recovery and products like Pipe Planner and Phaucet, two computer programs that dispatch water to fields more efficiently.

Tail-water recovery involves collecting, storing and transporting excess water on a field for reuse in irrigation.

Tail-water recovery can take years to pay off, said Walt Delp, state conservation engineer for the Natural Resources Conservation Service, but some programs and the amount of water saved can offset the cost of doing it.

Technically called "computerized hole selection," the Pipe Planner and Phaucet programs can reduce water use by an average of 25 percent, said Mike Hamilton, an instructor and irrigation educator with the Extension Service and the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

The programs use information on "pipe friction loss, pipe elevations and flow rate, and pressure" to change the size of holes in pipes that release water into a field with rows of crops, according to the extension service. A pipe connected to this technology will ultimately supply the same amount of water to each spot on a field, even if the field has some longer rows and some shorter rows.

Ordinarily, without the program, a pipe would send excess water to shorter rows after filling them while it continued to fill the longer rows.

Hamilton and others regularly pitch the products to farmers, many of whom have taken advantage of them, with some now promoting the products to other farmers. Hamilton said many farmers are attracted by the economics of the program and the promise of saving on water costs, especially as crop prices are falling.

"They're getting drawn in themselves," he said.

No one project will bring water levels to where they need to be, Delp said. Efficiency projects, tail-water recovery and the larger Grand Prarie and Bayou Meto irrigation projects are the three prongs of bringing water use in the Delta to more sustainable levels long-term, he said.

"The whole goal is to reduce groundwater use or make it more sustainable," Hamilton said. "If we're not sustainable, then we're not going to have a business."

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