Farmers in southwest Georgia will be able to apply for new or expanded permits to pump water from the Floridan Aquifer to irrigate their crops starting April 1.
They’ve been cut off from the vast, water-filled cave network that underlies the southeast corner of the U.S. since 2012, when a two-year drought dried up rivers that flowed through Florida, Georgia and Alabama.
The Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River Basin was a key site in the decades-long “Water Wars” during which the three states accused each other of mismanagement of their shared water resources.
While withdrawals in the basin are always contentious, experts from Florida and Georgia say the partial lift of Georgia’s moratorium is scientifically sound and may offer a model way to permit in a “minefield” of a basin.
A growing need for water
Southwest Georgia farmer Murray Campbell remembers the first center pivot irrigation systems popping up in his area in the early 1970s. They drew from the Floridan Aquifer and launched high-pressure jets of water into the air, losing more than half of the water to evaporation under the July sun.
Though woefully inefficient compared to modern models, the early pivots were a boon for farmers and banks alike.
“Banks were more interested in loaning money for you to put in irrigation to stabilize the income than they were, you know, making an operating loan,” said Campbell, who also serves as chairman of the Lower Flint-Ochlockonee Water Planning Council.
Growers pulled water from interconnected surface streams and underground aquifers for their cotton, peanuts, vegetables, soybeans and other crops. The irrigated area grew from fewer than 200,000 acres in 1970 to more than 3.6 million acres statewide in 2022.
Farmers in the Southeast, no strangers to dry spells, faced repeated, severe droughts from the 1990s to the 2010s. Heat records, fueled by climate change, were set and broken growing season after growing season. Mounting withdrawals to protect crops exacerbated dry conditions.
A reporter from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution visited Campbell’s farm in 2000 and asked to turn on the center-pivot irrigation system for a photo. He laughed and said “no, we’re not going to do that.” Water was too precious.
In 2011, farmers throughout the Southeast faced what the Georgia Environmental Protection Division later counted as 310 days of drought. In 2012, a leap year, the drought lasted 365 days.
That year, the EPD put a moratorium on new or expanded agricultural withdrawals from the Floridan Aquifer or from surface waters in the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River Basin.
The move didn’t satisfy Florida, which sued Georgia in 2013, alleging that its upstream pumping decreased flow to the Apalachicola River and Bay. The legal battle made its way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in Georgia’s favor in 2021.
A gradual reopening
Georgia maintained the moratorium but reevaluated it each year.
In 2023, after a series of wet years, the EPD opened some exceptional pumping permits to protect crops from frost. In 2024, the agency authorized surface water withdrawal permits from two portions of the suspension area.
The groundwater permits that will open on April 1 don’t have a quantity or acreage cap, so it’s difficult to estimate how much water they’ll withdraw from the Floridan Aquifer. EPD spokesperson Sara Lips said technical assessments analyzed the potential impacts of adding 100,000 irrigated acres. “The amount of water use associated with this will depend on the irrigation depth,” wrote Lips in an email to WUFT.
The permits are drought-restricted. If water levels fall past a certain threshold in at least five of 15 monitoring wells, farmers have 24 hours to stop pumping. All the wells will be equipped with sensors that track their water use.
“Georgia deserves some credit for designing a permit system with feedback loops,” said Matt Cohen, director of the University of Florida Water Institute. He called the change “sensible, pragmatic and environmentally sound stewardship.”
Georgia’s EPD considered multiple ecologic and economic factors while making its decision, including work on endangered and threatened freshwater mussels by researchers at The Jones Center at Ichauway.
The mussels depend on fish to transport their larvae in the lower Flint River Basin, so low flows jeopardize their reproduction. The permit’s drought restriction ensures that farmers don’t drop groundwater enough to dry up surface streams.
Nick Marzolf, an assistant scientist at the Center, sees the moratorium’s partial lift as a compromise. “The farmers acknowledge the mussels, and we acknowledge that water is the way of life for so many people here.”
As for Florida, Cohen anticipated “modest or even minor” impacts to groundwater in the Sunshine State. By minimizing the impacts to zones of the river basin in Georgia, the permits will likely protect farther reaches of the aquifer, too, he explained.
The parts of Southwest Georgia slated to open for agricultural withdrawals have mostly permeable soils. Jason Bellino, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, said the Floridan Aquifer is considered ‘unconfined’ in this region because rainwater can filter into the groundwater without being blocked by a layer of clay.
The ease of replenishment could “ mitigate some of those pumping effects,” on Floridan groundwater, Bellino said, though he cautioned the number, capacity and geographic spread of the wells would determine impacts to water levels above and below ground.
“There’s not going to be a mad dash” to secure new permits, predicted Campbell, the Georgia farmer. Some soils, he explained, are too quick-draining to justify the cost of a new well.
“We’re wanting to be good stewards, no question about that,” Campbell said.
Farmers in his area use soil moisture sensors to make sure they don’t water more than necessary and use lower-pressure center pivots so less water is lost to evaporation. Some participate in the GA-FIT Drought Swap program, which subsidizes wells into deeper aquifers, below the Upper Floridan, for use in times of drought.
The Florida comparison
Georgia’s loosening of agricultural withdrawals came as bad news to Robert L. Knight, founder of the Florida Springs Institute.
“I’m disappointed,” said Knight. “I think it’s going to make it definitely harder to recover the aquifer to the level where it should be to protect the springs and the rivers.”
Wakulla Springs is one of many water bodies already feeling the effects. Typically, caves in southern Georgia and north Florida swallow dark streams underground and shuttle their waters to the Gulf.
Pumping in southern Georgia, Leon and Wakulla counties decreases flow, which means tannic water doesn’t make it to the Gulf and instead escapes at Wakulla Springs, turning crystal waters murky.
“We’re just adding insult to injury with every one of these permits,” Knight said. “ Georgia’s not the only bad actor. It’s Florida as well.”
Between 1983 and 2023, Florida’s five water management districts each approved over 99% of water use permits, though not all of them draw from the Floridan Aquifer.
The perceived openness of Florida’s permitting compared to Georgia’s moratorium has been a source of frustration for some Georgia farmers.
“You hear a lot of talk about how many new irrigation systems and wells are going in down there,” Campbell said of agriculture in Florida. “We haven’t had that opportunity in a long time.”
Alabama, Florida and Georgia jointly protect their water resources through the 1997 Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River Basin Compact, but aren’t required to confer or notify each other about changes to water policy within their state boundaries.
“Therefore, the state was not consulted prior to Governor Kemp’s announcement,” wrote a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to WUFT, adding that water management districts will continue to monitor flow in the basin “to assess whether these new withdrawals lead to any adverse impacts on downstream waters.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
