Agricultural Water Policy during Drought: A Strategy for Including Groundwater Permits in Future Irrigation Buyout Auctions in the Flint River Basin

Abstract

Georgia's Flint River Basin has water management challenges from extensive groundwater pumping for agriculture and in-stream flow requirements. The state has experimented with buying out irrigation permits through auctions. Past auctions were relegated to surface water permits. Recently, the state has allowed groundwater permit holders to participate in future auctions. The Flow-Impact Offer (FIO) developed in this paper provides a way to reconcile the disparate impacts of groundwater and surface water withdrawals on in-stream flows when comparing offers in a buyout auction. The techniques suggested here to operationalize the FIO are applicable to other regions of the world as well.

Understanding the Food‐Energy‐Water Nexus in Mixed Irrigation Regimes Using a Regional Hydroeconomic Optimization Modeling Framework

“…Agriculture in southern Georgia, where SFRB is located, was revolutionized by the implementation of center pivot irrigation systems throughout the 1970s in an effort to combat the effects of drought on yields. Irrigation changed crop selection decisions, stabilized production and yields, and enabled the use of systems for the application of fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, decreasing the risk to agricultural producers (Mullen, 2019). We focus on the following four major field crops for this study: corn, cotton, sorghum, and soybeans for this study as they account for 65% of cultivated acreage in the SFRB.…”

Cost-Effectiveness of Sustainable Agricultural Water Policies: Source Switching versus Irrigation Buyout Auctions in Georgia’s Lower Flint River Basin

“…As noted above, the costs of emergency source switching are less than or equal to the costs of standard source switching, so we focus on ESS here. We begin by equating the present value of the expected costs of the policies, as shown in Equation (7).…”

“…Alternatively, we can use Equation (7) to identify, for a given PrF, the probability of drought that equates the present value of expected costs for the two policies (PrD*). If the likelihood of drought in any given year is greater than PrD*, then source switching is more cost-effective, and vice versa.…”

“…Under the rules of the Endangered Species Act, the state of Georgia is obligated to ensure minimum flows in streams that support these species. During the prolonged drought of 1998-2002, the state executed irrigation buyout auctions in which farmers with surface water withdrawal permits were paid not to irrigate their fields during the 2001 and 2002 growing seasons [4,7]. These auctions were executed under the auspices of the 2001 Flint River Drought Protection Act (FRDPA).…”

“…The FRDPA was amended in 2006 to allow groundwater permit holders to participate in future auctions. Mullen [7] examined the cost-effectiveness of different auction rules for protecting instream flows when both surface water and groundwater permit holders were allowed to participate. The results of that study emphasized the need to incorporate the hydrologic connectivity between surface and groundwater at the point of the groundwater withdrawal into the auction rules to maximize the cost-effectiveness of the auction.…”