After victory over Florida in water war, Georgia will let farmers drill new irrigation wells

ATLANTA — Jason Cox, who grows peanuts and cotton in southwest Georgia, says farming would be economically impossible without water to irrigate his crops.

“I’d be out of business,” said Cox, who farms 3,000 acres (1,200 hectares) acres around Pelham.

For more than a decade, farmers in parts of southwest Georgia haven’t been able to drill new irrigation wells to the Floridian aquifer, the groundwater nearest the surface. That’s because Georgia put a halt to farmers drilling wells or taking additional water from streams and lakes in 2012.

Farmers like Cox, though, will get a chance to drill new wells beginning in April. Gov. Brian Kemp announced Wednesday that Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division will begin accepting applications for new agricultural wells in areas along the lower Flint River starting April 1.

Jeff Cown, the division’s director, said in a statement that things have changed since 2012. The moratorium was imposed amid a parching drought and the collapse of the once-prolific oyster fishery in Florida’s Apalachicola Bay.

The state of Florida sued in 2013, arguing that Georgia’s overuse of water from the Flint was causing negative impacts downstream where the Flint and Chattahoochee River join to become the Apalachicola River. But a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court in 2021 rejected the lawsuit, saying Florida hadn’t proved its case that water use by Flint River farmers was at fault.

That was one lawsuit in decades of sprawling litigation that mostly focused on fear that Atlanta’s ever-growing population would suck up all the upstream water and leave little for uses downstream. The suits include the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint system and the Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa system, which flows out of Georgia to drain much of Alabama. Georgia also won victories guaranteeing that metro Atlanta had rights to water from the Chattahoochee River’s Lake Lanier to quench its thirst.

Georgia officials say new water withdrawals won’t disregard conservation. No new withdrawals from streams or lakes will be allowed. And new wells will have to stop sucking up water from the Floridian aquifer when a drought gets too bad, in part to protect water levels in the Flint, where endangered freshwater mussels live. New wells will also be required to be connected to irrigation systems that waste less water and can be monitored electronically, according to a November presentation posted by the environmental agency.

In a statement, Cown said the plans “support existing water users, including farmers, and set the stage to make room for new ones. We look forward to working with all water users as they obtain these newly, developed permits.”

Georgia had already been taking baby steps in this direction by telling farmers they could withdraw water to spray vulnerable crops like blueberries during freezing temperatures.

Flint Riverkeeper Gordon Rogers, who heads the environmental organization of the same name, said Georgia’s action is “good news.” He has long contended that the ban on new withdrawals was “an admission of failure,” showing how Georgia had mismanaged water use along the river. But he said investments in conservation are paying off: Many farmers are installing less wasteful irrigators and some agreed to stop using existing shallow wells during drought in exchange for subsidies to drill wells to deeper aquifers that don’t directly influence river flow.

“What we’re going to do is make it more efficient, make it more equitable and make it more fair,” Rogers said. “And we’re in the middle of doing that.”

A lawyer for Florida environmental groups that contend the Apalachicola River and Bay are being harmed declined comment in an email. Representatives for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and state Attorney General Ashley Moody did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Cox, who lives about 165 miles (265 kilometers) south of Atlanta, said he’s interested in drilling a new well on some land that he owns. Right now, that land relies on water from a neighboring farmer’s well.

He knows the drought restrictions would mean there would be times he couldn’t water his crops, but said data he’s seen show there wouldn’t have been many days over the last 10 years when he would have been barred from irrigating, and that most of those days wouldn’t have been during peak watering times for his crops.

Three years ago, Cox drilled a well for some land into a deeper aquifer, but he said even spending $30,000 or more on a shallower well would boost the productivity and value of his land.

“It would enhance my property if I had a well myself,” Cox said.