NRCS in Nebraska is providing approximately two-point-five million dollars to fund the Ogallala Aquifer Initiative.
The initiative is a voluntary program to provide technical and financial assistance to farmers and ranchers to improve water conservation on their ag land.
NRCS spokeswoman Joanna Pope says the money will be distributed through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP).
“It will fund programs that conserve water through converting systems from gravity irrigation to pivot irrigation or to subsurface drip irrigation—or to retiring irrigation land altogether,” Pope says.
Pope says NRCS will not be taking new applications for the initiative dollars—funding will go towards applications NRCS currently has on hand. “You can apply for EQIP at any time and we get a lot more applications than we receive funding to actually do practices for—so we have plenty on hand.”
We asked Pope how many projects might be funded with 2½ million dollars.
“That is a hard question. It just depends—some practices are more expensive than others,” she says. “The retirement of acres can be kind of expensive, as is the conversion to center pivot irrigation. But there are other practices—like conservation tillage—that can also conserve irrigation water—which isn’t very expensive.”
The Ogallala Aquifer, also known as the High Plains Aquifer, is a vast underground water table aquifer located beneath the Great Plains. It is one of the world’s largest aquifers and covers about 174-thousand square miles in portions of eight states, which include Nebraska, South Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas.
The aquifer covers a majority of the state of Nebraska.
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