June 7, 2025

Our Country’s Water Crisis

Why Aquifers are a bigger problem than the Colorado River

Revised 03/20/2025

If you think the increasing demands on the water supply from the Colorado River is a major concern, the “groundwater depletion” of the Ogallala Aquifer and more than 20 other aquifers in the Southwest is at a crisis level.

  • The Colorado River provides 12.5 to 15 million acre-feet of water per year.
  • The Ogallala Aquifer provides 19 to 21 million acre-feet of water per year.
  • California’s aquifers provide 17 to 18 million acre-feet of water per year.

The annual pumping of groundwater in the southwest from aquifers is more than double the total amount of water that flows down the Colorado River in a year.

Unlike reservoirs, which can refill relatively quickly during wet years, aquifers could take hundreds to thousands of years to naturally recharge. At the current rate of groundwater pumping, these vast underground reservoirs of water are being irreversibly depleted to dangerous levels.

This is a water crisis that is getting little attention covering the portion of the country which produces nearly 90% of the country’s food.

This article takes a different look at the current and worsening water problem but also provides an alternative path forward.

From researching articles about water this past year for the new company I have founded, I now realize the water problem is far more significant than I could have imagined. Every summer, you hear about droughts and every winter, you hear about floods, so my thoughts were we have multi-year cycles of drought and heavy rainfall, so it can’t be that bad. The reservoirs will refill with the next cycle.

The truth is that even if there were not cycles of drought and rainfall in the country was consistent, we would still be in serious trouble.

Did you know that for about a 2,800-mile stretch of our California coastline and along the southern border of Mexico, we have relatively no river water existing to the ocean or Mexico, not even the once mighty Colorado River? All the multiple rivers for these 2,800 miles of coast and border are diverted to cities and agriculture. (See the river flow map below where the river’s width is gaged by cubic feet of water per second and the red line is where no water exists from the country.)

The Ogallala Aquifer

Major rivers of the 48 contiguous United States, scaled by average flow where river symbols are proportional to the volume.The Ogallala Aquifer, which is one of the biggest aquifers in the world, is part of the same southwest section. It spans under eight states and covers 111 million acres. It has an estimated 170,000 wells, mostly very high-volume agriculture wells drawing water from it. For most of it, the water table has been dropping for several decades.The Central Valley Aquifer in the California farm belt covers 15 million acres, and which is agricultural land with over 100,000 wells in it. Between 1961 and 2021, the aquifer lost an estimated 93 million acre-feet of groundwater storage. There are about 20 other aquifers in the southwest states that are in significant depletion.Now, think of these aquifers as vast lakes far bigger than all the Great Lakes combined. Imagine that these enormous multistate-sized lakes were filled with silt up to just above the waterline, and then a fertile layer of topsoil was laid on top. These aquifers have very little water storage in the space between the sand and gravel so they can be drained quickly and refill slowly.A couple of generations back, you could dig a well almost anywhere in this 1/3 of the country and find water not that far down, and this led to an agriculture boom of what was once thought of as a nearly limitless supply of water.
ground waterwater table

Wells are running dry at an alarming rate, drastically reducing the number of high-volume wells needed for pivot irrigation. When flying over farmland, the thousands of perfectly round, green circles visible below are pivot irrigation systems, which rely on high-volume wells drawing from aquifers.The larger circles are about one mile in diameter, while the smaller one’s measure ¼ mile in diameter. In contrast, areas with square green patches are more likely irrigated by canal systems or piped-in river water.farming
This image gives you a better idea of the scale of a pivot irrigation system. The typical length of the pivot arm is 1,320’ or 2,640’ and it is estimated that there are 125,000 self-propelled center pivot irrigation systems in the United States.The mass production of submersible electric well pumps began in the 1940s, enabling large-scale groundwater extraction. In 1954, the first commercial pivot irrigation system was installed. As the power grid expanded across the Great Plains, well drilling surged, leading to the rapid proliferation of millions of irrigation wells, fueling an unprecedented agricultural boom.It has been only about 75 years since we first began extracting water from the 20 major aquifers of the Southwest. Water pumping peaked in just 30 years, and today, tens of thousands of pivot irrigation systems sit idle due to severe groundwater depletion.This boom contributed to the peak in U.S. cattle inventory in the 1960s and 1970s, a level that has been declining ever since.
There are approximately 50,116 center pivot irrigation systems in just the central and southern regions of the Ogallala Aquifer,
(Characterizing center pivots to help improve crop production - Irrigation Today).Digitized center pivotsMost of the pivot irrigation systems above are not irrigated due to lack of water. You will also see two different cattle feedyards in this photo used in the article about pivot irrigation systems of the Ogallala Aquifer.

Future water demands of the Colorado River include:

Utah’s Lake Powell Pipeline project to construct a 140-mile-long pipeline, costing $2.4 billion, to secure the water it was allotted back when Hoover Dam was built, is planned. They plan to pump 86,000-acre feet annually over the hills into Utah. They have the right to it, but the other seven states that rely on the Colorado River are in an uproar about it.

Lithium deposit needs Colorado River:

New discovery of a deposit of lithium in brine form deep under the Salton Sea. The deposit size is estimated to be worth $540 billion dollars. The planned project is titled “Lithium Valley.” The water needed to mine out the lithium is expected to be 7.2 billion gallons annually. Below is a photo of the Salton Sea and the Imperial Valley farmland below it.

Currently, there is news of how the Salton Sea is drying up, and the toxic dust blowing off the dry lakebeds has lithium in it, creating respiratory health problems for the area’s population. One reason for the recent drop in the water level of the sea is that farmers of the Imperial Valley are being paid not to farm their land to preserve enough water for the big city. The valley’s farmland runoff is what has been supplying and preventing the sea from drying up. In a university research study to resolve the dust problem, the first choice of refilling the sea with Colorado River water was not an acceptable option due to the amount of water it would take, so there is a $206 million dollar project now funded to do dust suppression for 30,000 acres of dry lakebed.

The 30+ cattle feedyards in this valley that are dependent on the farmland that is now going fallow for water conservation have been forced to reduce their herd size. All the blue drops you see on the map below are some very big cattle feedyards I tagged for this project.

If you go to Google Earth and zoom in on the east and south sides of the valley’s farmland, you will find canals that you can follow back to the 15th and very last dam on the Colorado River. After that, the river is nearly dry.

The Imperial Valleyv

The Imperial Valley above only receives 2” to 3” of rain annually and supports hundreds of thousands of head of cattle fed primarily alfalfa grown from Colorado River canal water.Other countries are stealing our water: It is now estimated that 40 million acres of American land are now foreign-owned. Much of it is farmland purchased that has unlimited ground or river water rights, and they only want to grow alfalfa, the biggest water-hogging crop of all. As seen on 60 Minutes, they pack the alfalfa into cargo containers and ship it home to feed their cattle.60 Minutes video link:

https://youtu.be/tLkV6n1KEJ0?si=L3SYs96uwDSUXNwn
In Wenden, Arizona, a town that the United Arab Emirates purchased land where they are growing alfalfa. They have caused the town’s water supply wells to go dry. It is estimated that the farm uses 15,000 to 16,000 acre-feet of water annually.A Saudi-owned company purchased Arizona desert land and in 2023 alone pumped out an estimated 31,196-acre feet of basin aquifer water.Now that you have this new information, which you were likely unaware of, take a pause and think about the magnitude of the problem. What is the answer? We cannot fix it by building more dams if we cannot keep the ones we have filled. There is no possible way to refill the vast aquifers, and you can only drill a well so deep before you hit the bottom of the aquifer.So, you go the other way, “We need to conserve water.” Well ask the tens of millions of people in the cities on the California coast how they like the restrictions to try and save water. That has not gone well. New California water conservation projects are estimated to cost $13.5 billion between 2025 and 2040.

Now, let me give you a couple more facts before I share with you the plan that I have been working on for the past two years.


70% to 80% of all the country's water goes to agriculture,
and 80% of agriculture goes to feeding livestock,
so that is 60% of all the country's water goes to livestock.

global food production

Below is a list of the top 10 water-hogging crops in the USA

Rank Crop Total Water Use
(Billion Gallons)		 Water Use Per Acre
(Acre-Feet)		 Primary Regions
1 Alfalfa 🌾 ~5.2 trillion 4–6 acre-feet CA, AZ, NV, UT, ID, MT, CO
2 Grass Hay 🌿 ~3.5 trillion 3–5 acre-feet CA, OR, WA, ID, TX, WI, PA
3 Cattle Feed Corn 🌽 ~3.2 trillion 2–3 acre-feet IA, NE, IL, KS, MN, SD
4 Almonds 🥜 ~1.1 trillion 3–4 acre-feet CA
5 Rice 🍚 ~1 trillion 5 acre-feet AR, CA, LA, TX, MS
6 Soybeans 🌱 ~800 billion 1–2 acre-feet IA, IL, MN, IN, NE
7 Cotton 🧺 ~750 billion 3–4 acre-feet TX, CA, GA, MS, AR
8 Pistachios 🥜 ~600 billion 4 acre-feet CA, AZ, NM
9 Grapes 🍇 ~550 billion 2–3 acre-feet CA, WA, OR, NY
10 Walnuts 🌿 ~400 billion 4–4.5 acre-feet CA, OR, WA

Use of rainfall and Ogallala Aquifer water

Nebraska and Kansas receive 20” to 45” rainfall and support over 13 million head of cattle primarily fed Alfalfa, grass hay, and feed corn.
“Use of rainfall and Ogallala Aquifer water”.
Despite the heavy rainfall much of this area has had a drop of the Ogallala Aquifer of 100’ to 200’ due to the tens of thousands of pivot irrigation systems.Now you will see on the list of “Top 10 Agricultural Water-Using Crops in the U.S” above, the top three water-hogging crops are for livestock, and these three crops cover the bulk of the feed for most all livestock. The acre-feet is the amount of water they irrigate on one acre of land. So, an alfalfa crop would need a six-foot-tall rain gauge to measure the water applied in one year.Please take note that feed corn is different from what we eat; it is chopped up stalk, ear, and all, and is fermented in big piles under white plastic tarps; it is fed as what is called silage (it looks like the mulch you would put in your garden).Now for the business plan I am proposing, it is addressing how we feed livestock, we will first focus on beef and dairy feedyards for logistical benefits of feed transportation costs, and how with scale, we drastically lower feed cost and get to massive water reduction. Other livestock we will address later.
Now we know that more than half our water goes to just three crops: alfalfa, grass hay, and feed corn; surprisingly, you will learn that there is an existing way to replace these three crops with another “drought tolerant crop” that is grown with a fraction of the water and is a fast-growing crop taking just 90 to 120 days to harvest so you can harvest two or three crops a year, but the best part is that it can be “dry farmed”—that term means the crop can be farmed with just rainfall and no irrigation water at all.This crop is in the grass family, and grass is the most important of all types of vegetation on the planet, and there are between 12,000 to 13,000 varieties of grass. You know its name well; archaeological findings suggest that its cultivation dates back at least 10,000 years. It is barley.Now, the answer is no, we are not going to start raising livestock on barley grain or hay that is not cost effective. My plan is to build huge warehouses directly adjacent to each feedyard. Inside the building we will use a large-scale vertical farming method specially designed with hydroponic systems to grow “barley fodder”. Barley seed is hydroponically grown with this racking equipment for just nine days in trays using a fertilized water solution without dirt, creating a thick mat of roots and grass, referred to as a biscuit of fodder. The living root and grass fodder biscuits are 100% consumable by cattle.Barley fodder is rich in protein, calories, vitamins, and minerals, comparable to alfalfa. However, unlike dried alfalfa, fresh living barley fodder contains beneficial live enzymes and probiotics. At nine days of growth, it reaches the "true leaf" or "microgreen stage", which is the peak of nutritional value and digestibility. This stage is highly valued, similar to vegetable microgreens found in high-end markets and restaurants.Barley fodder is a healthier, more natural diet, and livestock love it and prefer it every day of the week over traditional feed.Fodder can replace a significant portion—or even the entirety—of a farmer’s traditional feed mix. Many farmers are currently using fodder systems successfully, and raise animals on a diet consisting almost entirely of fodder.The point of this plan is that we can now start replacing the three biggest crops that take half our water, replacing them with a “dry-farmed crop” in the same surrounding area of the feedyard to reduce transportation costs. Then, we grow the seed into 100% edible biscuits of roots and grass, fed directly to the cattle. With my most advanced proprietary system we are now averaging about ten pounds of fodder from a pound of seed in 9 days.
Crop Water Needed (inches per season) Relative Water Demand
Barley 12–18 inches (300–450 mm) Low
Feed Corn 20–30 inches (500–760 mm) Moderate
Alfalfa 30–60 inches (760–1520 mm) High

The fodder is grown in the system more than 20 levels vertically for the first 5 days without lighting and then on wider-spaced racks with grow lighting for the final 4 days. The fodder greening stage is very fast before harvesting, so it uses only a small fraction of electricity compared to most other vertical farming operations. This most advanced system was designed specifically for large-scale high tonnage per square foot warehouse operations.

The new system design in the climate-controlled environment will produce an average of 430 pounds per day, 365 days per year, using about 220 square feet of the warehouse floor space per system. We would line the systems up in rows in the warehouse with a conveyor belt system to move the fodder to the feedyard dispensing and mixing truck commonly used by ranches.A brief history of vertical farming AKA “CEA” farming, the boom and bust: Billions of dollars have been lost in attempts to vertically produce food for humans, and similar attempts failed for livestock feed. My co-owned business founded in 2015 called “Fodder Nation” was one of the many failed livestock fodder feed businesses. The mathematical failures come down to the length of days to harvest the crop, the number of days of grow lighting needed, the lack of ability to get the produce to the consumer for a reasonable price, and the ratio of the calories/tons per square foot of the building.The feasibility of the above depends on what the food is, and in my opinion, the foods people eat mathematically can’t be done, but with this new business model for barley fodder and the right design, it can done.

barley fodder hydroponic system

Side view of barley fodder grown for just 9 days with an incredibly
high ratio of calories and tons produced per square foot of the
building compared to the best ratio ever producing food for humans.

floor plan

In a grow lab

Projected Production Capacity

Facility Size Number of systems Daily Output Monthly Output Annual Output
40,000 sq. ft. 160 35 tons 1,038 tons 12,458 tons
100,000 sq. ft. 400 86 tons 2,595 tons 32,147 tons
250,000 sq. ft. 1,000 216 tons 6,489 tons 77,868 tons
500,000 sq. ft. 2,000 432 tons 12,978 tons 155,736 tons

Brief history: In 2015, I was hatching and raising hundreds of emu each year, and I was battling a nutrition-related problem when I learned about companies selling fodder systems. I found the method of growing your own feed on the ranch interesting. I enjoyed learning about the nutritional values of fodder and the problem-solving aspect of how to build a better system. Each of the four systems I designed improved upon the previous one. However, the main challenge faced by my company and the many other fodder-producing businesses were that even after the initial investment, it comes down to the seed, labor, and electrical costs to produce the fodder were higher than the market price of mass-produced feed.

fodder system

control panel

 

The Economy of scale: In the years after ending my fodder business, I kept thinking we needed to produce the fodder so efficiently and get the cost down so low that it would be a better alternative for a large feedyard than picking up the phone and having another 50 or 500 tons of hay delivered.Over the past three years, I have implemented significant improvements to the design and formed a new C-Corp called Sprouting Gear Inc. Sprouting Gear's hydroponic system utilizes a fertilized water approach, has more vertical layers, and is specifically tailored for use in very large warehouses capable of housing hundreds of systems. The yield per square foot of floor space has now increased several times compared to my previous designs or other designs, while also reducing both labor and electrical demands.Producing larger buildings alone is not enough to reduce the cost per ton significantly. We still have not addressed labor, electricity, transportation—along with the high expense of barley seed—each is addressed below to make the system viable.

Labor for fodder compared to traditional plow farming: My revised system is far more efficient for labor. When scaled up with this warehouse business model, I calculated under production it would be between 1.5 to 2.5 tons of fodder per man hour delivered to the feed mixing truck. My AI search for alfalfa and feed corn labor showed about the same for traditional feed labor with large scale operations using the biggest, most advanced tractors and harvesters.

The two biggest differences for labor will be the skillset needed for the labor and the added trucking cost.
Running the fodder systems is simple, with a very short learning curve that anyone can do compared to the new advanced tractors, and harvesters require a high skill set to maintain and run them. The fodder building is to be built directly next to the feedyard, so there would be no transportation costs, and the traditionally farmed hay or corn would travel long distances, adding trucking labor and fuel costs. The labor for the fodder building will be a daily 8-hour shift year-round in a comfortable climate-controlled building about 68 to 70 degrees, but plow farmed feed is very irregular due to extreme weather changes and it is seasonal.

Energy of the fodder warehouse: From the studying I have done about vertical farming food for people that require massive amounts of electricity for the grow lighting, the fodder takes just a small fraction by comparison.

The fodder system uses no lighting for the first five days of growth, and just four days of lighting in the greening racks. The LED grow lighting for the greening rack of each system is 432 watts in total. We can run the lighting from dawn to dusk, not needing 24-hour lighting. Calculations show we can offset the grow lighting with 1/3rd of the roof in solar. Another 1/3rd of the roof in solar would cover climate control.
We would be near net zero for energy.

Feedyard

For the final step that will have the fodder production at 2 to 4 times lower than the traditional feed is that the ranch or the farmer would change less than 1/10th of their crops from alfalfa or corn to barley to grow the seed needed for the fodder production. Eliminating the seed and grain brokers by growing the seed within a few miles of the feedlot eliminating the long transportation cost. This step could have the seed cost as low as 3 to 4 cents per pound. With my calculations, after the one-time costs of the building, it comes down to just the seed and labor, and the fodder should be in the $20 to $30 per ton range.Now, there are massive water savings from switching the bulk of cattle and livestock feed to barley fodder. Calculations show that a 40,000sf fodder building...

...produces 35 tons of fodder every day, 365 days a year, regardless of extreme weather conditions, which is over 12,000 tons a year from less than one acre of land. The national average for alfalfa is just 3 to 6 tons per year, per acre. If the farmer just farms 1/10th of their land, dry farming barley to get the seed for growing in the fodder systems, he could let the rest of the land go fallow and feed the same number of cows. Also, when harvesting the barley, you create barley straw hay that adds feed for the cattle.In addition to the water savings of growing dry-farmed barley instead of a water-hogging crop, I designed the fodder production building to have zero wastewater. No water leaves the building, not even evaporation humidity. Dehumidification systems will return the moisture to the fodder systems. Also, the moist living fodder delivered within hours of harvest has the proper moisture content, so the cow is not thirsty like they are eating dry hay, so they drink far less water.

On another note, studies show cattle eating grass and alfalfa hay have a 40% to 50% digestible rate of the feed compared to the study that shows the highly digestible fodder has a 90% digestible rate, so the cattle produce less manure, which has always been a feedyard problem. One of the fodder studies suggests that cattle on a fodder diet produce less methane due to the fast digestion rate and less manure.

We also have a strategy to generate additional income for both Sprouting Gear and the farmers by securing grants, credits, and offsets from state and federal programs, as well as private companies. These incentives reward reductions in land use, water consumption, fuel usage, and methane emissions, aligning with sustainability goals.

To start, to achieve the most effective launch, SGI plans to work with cattle feedyards. The building must be located directly adjacent to the feedyard to maximize cost savings. The ranch will own the building and infrastructure. For a lower cost of entry, SGI will license the systems to the ranch with a lease. The monthly lease fee covers training, ongoing education on increasing yield rates, provide research that may include utilizing “CRISPR and Boosted Seed Technology” to create a hybrid seed that produced a higher yield rate in nine days.

Funding: The upfront cost of building each warehouse system is in the millions of dollars, and many of the ranchers we’ve approached can’t afford or justify this investment without large-scale proof of concept first. If you can assist with a grant, loan, sponsorship or shared ownership of a building, please visit the Investor tab on our website and fill out the questionnaire. You can also learn more about the Sprouting Gear project by visiting our website at www.SproutingGear.com.

Founder Paul Pluss

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