Water levels are declining in the Mississippi River Valley Alluvial Aquifer, and environmental scientists and concerned agencies are working together to investigate and mitigate the problem.
Today and Wednesday, the Delta Sustainable Water Resources Task Force will host two regional meetings in the Delta to educate farmers and other concerned citizens about the problem and possible solutions.
The meetings are free and open to area farmers as well as anyone else interested in water conservation.
According to Kay Whittington, director of the Mississippi Department of Environment Quality’s (MDEQ) Office of Land and Water Resources, out of 2.8 million acres of cropland in the Delta, 1.9 million acres are irrigated, drawing water directly from the aquifer.
Whittington and others will be discussing the nature of water use, irrigation efficiency practices and monitoring aquifer water levels during these two meetings, organized by the Delta Sustainable Water Resources Task Force.
The task force was formed in 2011 to promote awareness of the need for water conservation and to come up with methods to manage water effectively.
The task force includes MDEQ, Yazoo Mississippi Delta Water Management District (YMD), Delta Council, the Mississippi Soil and Water Conservation Commission, the Mississippi Farm Bureau Federation and a number of federal agencies, all of which support research, share information and work to come up with viable solutions.
In the Delta, in large part, that means promoting efficient irrigation practices.
“We’ve been working with Mississippi State University researchers in Stoneville, outside of Leland, looking at which irrigation efficiency practices work best in the Delta, helping farmers to pump less water and spend less on energy costs,” Whittington said.
In addition to researching irrigation practices, MDEQ and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) are working together on new data collection efforts planned for the upcoming fiscal year to improve the regional groundwater model.
“We want farmers at the meeting to let them know that the USGS has some innovative data collection methods, especially one involving collecting data from an airplane, which might be starting in October,” Whittington said. “We want them to know that if they see a funny-looking airplane flying around, that’s part of us improving our data collection.”
These meetings also precede the beginning of YMD’s water level survey that begins Monday.
The agency will measure groundwater elevations at 500 locations around the Delta, including in Leflore County, in a process that generally takes about two weeks. Information collected by YMD is used for research and mapping efforts to further understand the Mississippi River Valley Alluvial Aquifer, the underground body of water from which irrigation water is drawn.
Whittington said that in Mississippi there is a deeper aquifer that provides drinking water and a shallow aquifer available for irrigation. In the Delta, farmers draw 80 percent of the water they use for irrigation from that shallow aquifer.
One of the USGS projects being evaluated involves looking into a groundwater transfer project that would move water from a part of the aquifer to a part that’s less full.
For more information about the work of the task force or the informational meetings, please call 601-951-8833.
•Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com.
