After victory over Florida in water war, Georgia will let farmers drill new irrigation wells
ATLANTA– Jason Cox, who grows peanuts and cotton in southwest Georgia, says farming would be economically impossible without water to irrigate his crops.
“I’d go bankrupt,” said Cox, who farms 1,200 acres of farmland around Pelham.
For more than a decade, farmers in parts of southwest Georgia have been unable to drill new irrigation wells into the Florida aquifer, the groundwater closest to the surface. That’s because in 2012, Georgia put an end to farmers drilling wells or withdrawing extra water from streams and lakes.
However, farmers like Cox will have the opportunity to drill new wells from April. Governor Brian Kemp announced Wednesday that the Georgia Environmental Protection Division will begin accepting applications for new agricultural wells in areas along the lower Flint River beginning April 1.
Jeff Cown, director of the division, said in a statement that things have changed since 2012. The moratorium was imposed amid a scorching drought and the collapse of the economy. once productive oyster fishery in Florida’s Apalachicola Bay.
The state of Florida filed a lawsuit in 2013, arguing that Georgia’s overuse of water from the Flint had negative impacts downstream, where the Flint and Chattahoochee Rivers join to become the Apalachicola River. But a unanimous US Supreme Court in 2021 dismissed the lawsuitsaying Florida had not proven that farmers’ water use in the Flint River was to blame.
That was one in decades of extensive litigation focused largely on fears that Atlanta’s ever-growing population would suck up all the upstream water and leave little for downstream use. The suits include the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint system and the Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa system, which flows from Georgia and drains much of Alabama. Georgia also had victories guarantee that metro Atlanta had rights water from the Chattahoochee River Lake Lanier to quench his thirst.
Officials in Georgia say new water withdrawals won’t ignore conservation efforts. No new withdrawals from streams or lakes are permitted. And new wells will have to stop sucking water from the Florida aquifer if the drought gets too bad, in part to protect water levels in the Flint, where endangered freshwater mussels live. New wells will also need to be connected to irrigation systems that waste less water and can be monitored electronically, according to an Environment Agency presentation in November.
In a statement, Cown said the plans “support existing water users, including farmers, and pave the way to make room for new ones. We look forward to working with all water users in obtaining these newly developed permits.”
Georgia had already taken small steps in this direction, telling farmers they could withdraw water in freezing temperatures to water vulnerable crops such as blueberries.
Flint Riverkeeper Gordon Rogers, head of the environmental organization of the same name, said Georgia’s action is “good news.” He has long maintained that the ban on new withdrawals was “an admission of failure,” showing how Georgia has mismanaged water use along the river. But he said investments in conservation are paying off, with many farmers installing less wasteful irrigation systems and some agreeing to stop using existing shallow wells during droughts in exchange for subsidies to drill wells into deeper aquifers that don’t directly control the river’s flow. to influence.
“What we’re going to do is make it more efficient, more equitable and fairer,” Rogers said. “And we are in the middle of that.”
An attorney for Florida environmental groups that claim damage to the Apalachicola River and Bay declined comment in an email. Representatives from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and Attorney General Ashley Moody did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Cox, who lives about 165 miles south of Atlanta, said he is interested in drilling a new well on a piece of land he owns. Currently, that land is dependent on water from a neighboring farmer’s well.
He knows the drought restrictions would mean there would be times when he wouldn’t be able to water his crops, but said the data he’s seen shows there haven’t been many days in the past decade when he hasn’t been allowed to irrigate. of those days would not have been during the peak times of watering his crops.
Three years ago, Cox drilled a well for a piece of land in a deeper aquifer, but he said even spending $30,000 or more on a shallower well would increase the productivity and value of his land.
“It would improve my property if I had a well of my own,” Cox said.