Groundwater Use in Agriculture: Approaches to Sustainable Management in U.S. Case Studies

This paper links together three major themes: groundwater, agriculture, and sustainable management. Irrigated agriculture is the primary consumptive use of freshwater in the United States, using 40 percent of all freshwater withdrawals from surface water and groundwater and 68 percent of all groundwater withdrawals alone. Past and current uses of groundwater for agriculture are widely considered unsustainable. The purpose of this paper is to answer three key questions. First, how do we define “sustainable” groundwater use? Second, what strategies represent “more sustainable” approaches to groundwater use – both institutional and technical? Third, what are the conditions that support sustainable groundwater management? To answer these questions, this paper analyzed the institutional and technological approaches to groundwater management in Arizona, California, Florida, and Texas.