NESPAL > Water Use & Quality > Research Projects > People and Water

People and Water
by Jim Hook

Water runs under and over us, through our communities, and through our bodies. Water's serene and majestic places recharge our souls. Its pools and baths cleanse and refresh. Its lakes, rivers, and oceans employ, relax, and feed. Its pure springs and taps sustain our bodies. Our very nature as humans creates a deeply personal stake in the water that surrounds us.

It shouldn't be surprising, then, when water is discussed, each of us wants to understand threats to water availability and water purity. Most of us want involvement in decisions and actions that affect our own water resources, even as we clamor for protection against the vagaries of storms, floods, and drought.

Scientists may explore water's properties, contaminants, and creatures. Engineers may dam, channel, pipe, and convert its power. However, unless scientists and engineers understand this personal stake, seek input from the public, participate in its debates, and use their knowledge and training to educate and inform, their work will be off-target, misunderstood, or fought. Likewise water agencies may permit, regulate, and police, and elected officials may create, fund, and limit the actions of scientists, engineers, and agencies. However, until hired and elected officials enable individuals and groups to participate in setting the agenda and securing their water needs, they can expect suspicion, non-compliance, and little support.

NESPAL's programs, thus, are shaped around the interface of science and engineering with individuals and groups. Building upon strong public involvement that has been the hallmark of agricultural programs in the Land Grant institutions, NESPAL's scientists and engineers are moving from the fields and labs to the classrooms, meeting rooms, public hearings, and boardrooms to reach out and to gather in. They are responding to the requests of water agencies to provide answers or conduct studies to get answers. They are acting upon the concerns of water users They are seeking input to shape their research programs.

No single thrust or project in NESPAL describes the full scope of our program. Instead, a dynamic, evolving series of efforts has been created to respond to the effervescent world of water in Georgia.

Commitment to public process is embodied in watershed-based public groups in which NESPAL scientists and engineers actively participate and for which NESPAL provides web development:

• The Southwest Georgia Water Resources Task Force, Inc. which sponsors educational Water Summits on timely water issues for regional leaders, is based in the Flint River Basin. The Task Force was an outgrowth of several separate water-related efforts in Southwest Georgia begun at a time when negotiations for the Ga-Fl-Al Water Compact allocation was being formulated. Recognizing that changes were coming in availability of water, the Task Force has work to educate rural leaders among many stakeholder groups and begin public dialog and input into the complex facets of our region's water. Their Water Summits also provide non-confrontational forums of education by federal and state agency personnel who more commonly face aggrieved citizens in required public hearings.

• The Upper Suwannee River Watershed Initiative brought community involvement, economic development, scientific study, and rural government together in quarterly meetings and annual Summits on water issues affecting the Suwannee River and its subbasins. Water quality concerns, TMDL's, best management practices, community education, and creation of parks and preserves are some of the issues demanding their attention. As Florida continues its water studies from the mouth of the Suwannee upstream, they will inevitably face Georgians and question their work in protecting the upper half of this shared river basin. The Upper Suwannee River Watershed Initiative will have educated citizens, involved Georgia agencies, and active scientists engaged in productive dialog with their downstream neighbors as that day approaches.

• The Southwest Georgia Agribusiness Association in lower Chattahoochee, Flint, and Ochlocknee river basins is an association of farmers and farm related bankers, suppliers, brokers and others interested in expanding the opportunities for agriculture based businesses in Southwest Georgia. Recognizing the strength of the regions agriculture and general economy depends upon access to water for irrigation and recreation, they have asked for the University's scientific and engineering expertise. Their active involvement has provided leadership to the entire farm community of the region and brought farmers and the Environmental Protection Division face-to-face for productive dialog.

Engineering and scientific expertise of NESPAL scientists provides research in service to State Agencies. As a publically funded institution with substantial understanding in the farm and rural communities, NESPAL accepts its responsibility to provide unbiased information on water for Georgia agencies and decision makers. Most of these studies require close cooperation with private land owners and farmers who manage irrigation. By building trust, soliciting input, and providing feedback to cooperators NESPAL has been able to work with both farm community and the environmental agency that oversees their water use:

• ACT/ACF Ag Water Use Studies - Early in the research and information gathering phases of the Tri-State Water Comprehensive Study, NESPAL scientists teamed with economists in Alabama to use comprehensive crop growth and water use models and data on soils, crops, and weather from the 19 subbasins of the three states to project current and future demands for water by agriculture. These studies were later continued to examine impacts of water restrictions on the farm economy. When Georgia sought to refine its negotiating positions, NESPAL teamed with irrigators in SW Georgia to gather actual farm water use records kept some farmers to provide a measure of real water use information to confirm model studies. NESPAL continues limited activity in this ACT/ACF process through its extensive links pages for ACT/ACF. These pages gather, without comment, federal and state agency, university, NGO, and private citizen interpreted data, negotiation documents, new studies, and op/ed pieces regarding the ACT and ACF basins and the Compact.

• Economic Impact of Agricultural Water Use - Georgia policy makers and agricultural groups sought information on the role of irrigation in providing income in the region. NESPAL scientists used reported crop acreage data, irrigation surveys, and known crop response to water to calculate estimates of farm gate income due to use of the region's water for irrigation. EPD Ag Permit Database and Cleanup - Since the 1988 law requiring permitting of essentially all agricultural water users and their irrigation, EPD has been inundated with permit requests, maps, and agency response documents. Limited records were kept in spreadsheet format. The agency had difficulty performing analyses needed to understand its commitments and effectively followup with change requests. NESPAL scientists created a relational database, incorporated existing records, scanned for significant errors, and assisted EPD in correcting erroneous records. The database is currently used by EPD in its continued permitting and record keeping.

• Ag Water Pumping - By 1998, EPD began to realize that lack of accurate irrigation water use data, estimated to be the state's largest consumptive water use, was hampering its ability to protect watersheds and ground water or to negotiate with its downstream partners. As they placed new permit moratoria on selected aquifers and basins they asked NESPAL and Cooperative Extension to develop methods for scientifically sampling farm irrigation systems. They wanted to know when and where farmers were using water and how much they were using. NESPAL and UGA's Biological and Agricultural Engineering Department designed a random sample, volunteer-based, practical irrigation monitoring scheme for the state. They created a team of technicians to implement this, and they continue to provide oversight into data collection, representativeness, validation, and reporting of this information.

• Automated Ag Water Pumping - Although Georgia, Florida and Alabama long understood that groundwater discharges into the Flint River, one of the ACF Compact rivers, they used simple methods to estimate the impact of groundwater withdrawals for irrigation on river flow. Because of the magnitude of withdrawals, this impact was large, and serious questions arose about errors in that estimate and the impact that decisions based on errors could have. EPD asked the US Geological Survey to construct more accurate water models of the region of impact. These models, however, require more detailed input than was possible with the monthly monitoring of Ag Water Pumping. NESPAL scientists and engineers designed sampling and monitoring system to provide daily and real time water use information and found a commercial partner to implement and manage that system. Over 175 irrigation systems withdrawing groundwater in the Dougherty Plain have real-time monitoring recording status of center pivots and drip systems as they turn on and off in response to farmers use patterns. The data will soon become input into recently completed models for ground and surface water interaction in the Flint basin.

• Irrigation Permit Mapping - In 1999, EPD froze permitting for farmers in the Floridan aquifer region of the Dougherty Plain and from the Flint River and its tributary. That preemptive action by the permitting agency was based upon their own records of the amount of land that farmers were permitted to use. As previous work with Ag Permit records had suggested, these permitted acreage amounts were often overestimated. In an effort to provide accurate information on which to base permitting decisions, to protect farmer interests in water, and provide a modern framework upon which EPD could tie its permitting decisions, NESPAL scientists teamed with the J. W. Jones Ecological Research Center to develop a GIS-based permit management system and map 17 counties in the freeze-affected area. The Mapping was based upon a GIS aerial photo mapping of agricultural irrigation systems for hydrological studies in a subbasin of the Flint River. However, discussions with farmers pointed out that aerial images could only provide part of the information needed for accurate positioning of irrigation systems as well as their associated wells, pumps, and permit numbers. We worked with the farm community to come up with a reasonable interview process with farmers directly assisting the drawing of irrigation and sources onto the computer maps.

In addition to participation and leadership in water resource groups and conducting studies with Agencies and Farmers, NESPAL directly assists in regional statewide planning on government appointed committees and boards:

• Governor's Advisory Committee for ACT/ACF Compacts asks participants to provide independent assessments of negotiated allocation ideas and formulas at significant steps in the Compact formulation process.

• Georgia Drought Planning and Response Committee brought together water users, scientists, engineers, elected officials, economists and others for development of a Comprehensive Drought Management Plan.

• Joint Comprehensive Water Plan Study Committee and its Advisory Committee were begun as a result of a Joint Georgia Assembly Resolution to create a comprehensive water plan for the state. Among the tasks NESPAL has undertaken is the leadership of the Data and Information Subcommittee to determine appropriate means for the State to gather and make information available for decision makers.

• TMDL formulation