Giving Compass' Take:

• Kansas' vital natural resource of water is becoming depleted, as The New Food Economy reports. Now, the state has to decide whether to cut back and face an agricultural decline or ignore the problem and confront dire consequences.

• How is water depletion affecting other states across our country? In what ways can funders help mitigate droughts?

• Here's more on the mismanagement of our local water supplies and why robust monitoring is needed. 

For the past year, I’ve traveled across Kansas, a journey that’s entailed half a dozen visits and thousands of miles on the odometer of my mother’s worn-out sedan. A fourth-generation daughter of the plains, I was sobered by the state’s profound and seemingly irreversible depopulation, a depressing downward trend driven by its dependence on heavily mechanized commodity agriculture. It’s a phenomenon I wrote about for The New Food Economy in April of this year.

Kansas agriculture faces an existential choice.

It was a difficult piece to write. I was disturbed by what I encountered in my home state—towns I knew from childhood emptying out, struggling farmers leaving their land to work elsewhere. And while I received many sorrowful letters from Kansans past and present, writing to say they recognized my depiction, others sent responses of a more hopeful variety. It’s not all bad news in Kansas, these letters insisted. I wanted to see if there was truth to that, if one day Kansans might reverse the state’s linked downward spirals of depopulation and agricultural overproduction.

Read the full article on Kansas' struggle against limited water resources by Corie Brown at The New Food Economy.