Garden City ? Irrigation made southwest Kansas an agricultural powerhouse. But it has also depleted the region’s groundwater.

Balancing the interests of the economy and the needs of the future remains a challenge, members of the Kansas Water Congress said.

“Our economy is based on water,” Robin Jennison, the organization’s president, said last week as the group met for a two-day conference in Garden City. “If we could not mine it, it would not be worth anything. But we need to use it and manage it in a reasonable manner.”

The group, formed in 2003, meets annually to discuss ways to manage the state’s water resources – resources that, because of overdrilling in the 1950s and 1960s, have raised concerns over preservation of the Ogallala Aquifer.

“Water is everything to the economic future of the High Plains,” said Rep. Ward Loyd, R-Garden City. “If at some point you run out of water, if there is no reason for people to make a life on the High Plains, then there is no future for agriculture. The decisions you make today, what we do with those issues, are going to determine who is here in 50 or 100 years.”

David Pope, the state’s chief water engineer, said some water rights holders were complaining that those with less seniority were taking too much water.

“We’ve had a significant number of formal complaints where people have said enough is enough,” Pope said.

Increased regulations could provide a solution, Pope said, and the Water Congress is also considering incentive programs to reduce water use.

Either will cost money, which is in increasingly short supply in Kansas. Since 2004, a proposal to fund an irrigation transition program for farmers and another to buy the Circle K Ranch in Edwards County as a wildlife refuge – and shut down some of its irrigation wells – have failed to gain approval.

Kansas Agriculture Secretary Adrian Polansky said the state cannot afford to consider only short-term economic concerns.

“Preserving the life of the Ogallala extends the lifeblood of this part of Kansas,” said Polansky, whose son and grandson still work the family farm near Belleville in northern Kansas. “Certainly we know what will happen if we do nothing at all, the economic consequences that may happen in the future.”