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Aquifer depletion exacerbates agricultural drought losses in the US High Plains

Nature Water volume 2, pages 41–51 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Aquifer depletion poses a major threat to the ability of farmers, food supply chains and rural economies globally to use groundwater as a means of adapting to climate variability and change. Empirical research has demonstrated the large differences in drought risk exposure that exist between rainfed and irrigated croplands, but previous work commonly assumes water supply for the latter is unconstrained. Here we evaluate how aquifer depletion affects the resilience of irrigated crop production to drought risk using over 30 years of data on historical corn and soybean yields, production areas and aquifer conditions for the High Plains region in the United States. We show that aquifer depletion reduces the ability of farmers to sustain irrigated crop yields and production areas in years and locations with large growing-season water deficits. Our findings demonstrate that drought-related production losses on irrigated croplands increase non-linearly with aquifer depletion, highlighting the need for proactive aquifer conservation interventions to support adaptation and resilience to future increases in rainfall variability under climate change.

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Fig. 1: The impact of water deficit and aquifer thickness on rainfed and irrigated per-area yields in the US High Plains.
Fig. 2: The difference in estimated county-level irrigated corn and soybean yields.
Fig. 3: The estimated impact of aquifer thickness on the share of agricultural production under irrigation for corn and soybean producing counties in the US High Plains.
Fig. 4: Average productivity of corn and soybean in the US High Plains.
Fig. 5: Difference in average yield of corn and soybean for aquifer thickness levels.

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Data availability

All the raw datasets used in this study are publicly accessible. The boundary shape file of the High Plains Aquifer was obtained from the US Geological Survey at https://water.usgs.gov/GIS/metadata/usgswrd/XML/ds543.xml#stdorder. County and state boundaries were obtained using the R tigris package88. These datasets were used for Fig. 7. Corn and soybean yield data were obtained from the US Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, available at https://www.nass.usda.gov/Quick_Stats/. The R tidyUSDA package89 was used to automatically download the relevant data. These data were used for Fig. 6 and the regression analysis. Weather data were obtained from the gridMET dataset81, which is available at https://www.climatologylab.org/gridmet.html. Elevation data were obtained from the gridMET website at https://www.climatologylab.org/gridmet.html. These datasets were used to calculate water deficit, which was used for Fig. 6 and the regression analysis. The aquifer thickness data were obtained from Hydroshare87 available at https://www.hydroshare.org/resource/7d925c7944244032af98c9ed20c22db6/. These data were used for Fig. 7 and the regression analysis. Soil characteristics data were obtained from the Soil Survey Geographic Dataset, which was used for regression analysis. The R soilDB package90 was used to download the data. Regression analyses were implemented using the R fixest package91. Other key R packages included ggplot2 (ref. 92) for creating plots, data.table93 for data wrangling, and sf94 for spatial data operations. A minimum set of data files required to reproduce the results and figures presented in this article can be found on the figshare website (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.6025748). Due to file size constraints on figshare, not every data file is hosted there. However, a complete set of data files can be accessed via the following Dropbox link: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/bghhwlidmi7wx1ok0az5n/h?rlkey=tgbix1hp7g9np9etlo1z3biyr&dl=0.

Code availability

All data processing and analyses were carried out using R95. The codes used for this study are available at the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/tmieno2/Drought-Production-Risk-Aquifer. Additionally, instructions for reproducing all the results and figures presented in this article can be found at the bottom of the repository page in the README section.

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Acknowledgements

Funding for the research in this article was provided by the US Department of Agriculture under contract numbers OCE 58-0111-20-007 (T.M. and S.K.) and OCE 58-0111-21-007 (T.M. and S.K.) and the Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute at the University of Nebraska (S.K.). This research was also supported by Innovate UK award no. 10044695 (T.F.), as part of the UK Research and Innovation and European Commission funded project ‘TRANSCEND: Transformational and robust adaptation to water scarcity and climate change under deep uncertainty’. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Agricultural Economics, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA

    Taro Mieno & Nicholas Brozović

  2. School of Engineering, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Timothy Foster

  3. Department of Applied Economics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

    Shunkei Kakimoto

  4. Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE, USA

    Nicholas Brozović

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  1. Taro Mieno
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Contributions

T.M. conceived the paper, developed the computer programs for data collection, processing, analysis and summarization, and wrote the paper. T.F. conceived and wrote the paper. S.K. wrote the computer programs for data collection and processing. N.B. conceived and helped improve the framing of the paper.

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Correspondence to Taro Mieno.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Historical rainfed yield, irrigated yield and water deficit.

a,b, The blue solid, red solid and black dotted lines represent irrigated yield, rainfed yield and water deficit for corn (a) and soybean (b), respectively.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Aquifer thickness in 2016.

a,b, The map shows county-average aquifer thickness in 2016 for each county included in our corn (a) and soybean (b) regression analyses. Counties highlighted in gray are rainfed only, and the red polygon denotes the boundary of the HPA system.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. S.1–S.8 and Discussion.

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Mieno, T., Foster, T., Kakimoto, S. et al. Aquifer depletion exacerbates agricultural drought losses in the US High Plains. Nat Water 2, 41–51 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-023-00173-7

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