By Dan Chapman
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“This,” says Cox, a fifth-generation farmer, slowing to a crawl and pointing at the churning, brown river, “is what we live on.”

The Flint is part of a web of streams, reservoirs and underground lakes that city dwellers, industries, endangered species and oystermen downstream in Florida claim as their birthright, too. Florida’s latest “water wars” lawsuit against Georgia currently before the U.S. Supreme Court takes direct legal aim — for the first time — at the region’s farmers who collectively use more water than metro Atlanta.

Georgia agriculture is undergoing great change with specialty crops and organic offerings reflecting America’s more discerning palate. But the state’s bread-and-butter row crops — cotton, corn and peanuts — aren’t likely to relinquish their perch atop the state’s $9 billion-a-year food pyramid anytime soon.

Under attack from Florida and Alabama, as well as Mother Nature, though, Georgia’s row-crop farmers are embracing technology to better shepherd the most precious of commodities — water. Cox and fellow farmers are burying moisture sensors under fields and rejiggering industrial-size sprinklers to shoot water only where needed.

Scientists are attempting to quantify how much water is available above and below southwest Georgia’s red clay fields. The state is investing $5 million in a controversial engineering experiment — which, so far, has failed — to capture water during times of plenty to store for times of drought. Researchers are even drilling wells into deep, underground aquifers in hopes of securing an infinite supply of water.

The stakes have never been higher — for southwest Georgia as well as metro Atlanta, whose right to water also rests upon some legally squishy ground. The lawsuit prompted the Supreme Court to appoint a “special master” to resolve the 25-year-old water war. Meanwhile, Gov. Nathan Deal is holding secret negotiations with his Florida and Alabama counterparts to do just that.

He’s got a tough row to hoe. Southwest Georgia’s water consumption continues to rise. And nobody can say with certainty how much water is used by farmers and how much remains underground.

“Everybody is fighting over the same water,” says Cox, back on land, watching a crew of Haitians harvest his sweet corn. “But we’re all about conservation. If we do our part, it will help everyone.”

The headwaters of the Flint River lie somewhere beneath the concrete maw of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport before meandering south and southwest through Albany and some of the most fertile land in the Eastern United States. The river eventually reaches Lake Seminole, where it joins the Chattahoochee River before flowing into Florida as the Apalachicola River.

Streams, reservoirs, ponds and aquifers surround the Flint and Chattahoochee rivers and hold the lion’s share of water that supports southwest Georgia’s corn, cotton, peanut, pecan and soybean industries.

A generation ago, Georgia and the Army Corps of Engineers decided to divert more than a half-billion gallons of water from the Chattahoochee to slake metro Atlanta’s insatiable growth. Alabama sued the corps. Florida sided with Alabama. And the never-ending water war between the three states was on.

The dispute boils down to an equitable sharing of the water that starts in North Georgia. Everybody and everything, it seems, has a stake: cities; industries; endangered mollusks and sturgeon; oystermen; power plants; golf courses; kayakers; and farmers. The achingly complex quarrel further deteriorates during times of drought when the streams run low and are drawn down by water-hungry farmers.

In the 1960s, for example, the Flint typically flowed at 2,000-4,000 cubic feet per second during the hot summer months. In the drought summer of 2011, the river dropped to a record low of 656 cfs, according to the Nature Conservancy.

A year later, Georgia imposed a moratorium on new well permits for the Floridan aquifer, the main groundwater source for the Flint River Basin. Judson Turner, head of the state’s Environmental Protection Division, wrote that “a continued increase in withdrawals from these resources may ultimately lead to unacceptable impacts to existing users or compromise the sustainable capacities of these resources.”

At the time, farmers held 6,500 permits to draw water from the Floridan, the Flint and other streams. Their wells irrigated 900,000 acres of cropland — larger than the entire state of Rhode Island.

Turner’s edict didn’t keep farmers from finding new water sources; they just dug deeper. The EPD has issued an additional 237 permits since the moratorium, allowing farmers to send pipes into the Claiborne and Cretaceous aquifers. An additional 40,000 acres is now irrigated. And overall water usage throughout the Flint basin is inching back up to pre-moratorium levels.

“Florida cannot and should not suffer injury in order to satiate Georgia’s unrelenting thirst,” the lawsuit reads.

Southwest Georgia, from the sky, appears as some alien patchwork of perfectly coiffed circles demarcated by the occasional pine grove, dirt road or lazy stream. Zoom in and you’ll find gigantic, 300-foot-long sprinklers attached to wellheads turning slowly while spraying water on corn, cotton and peanuts.

Center-pivot sprinklers weren’t used in Georgia before 1975. Today, dry-land farming is increasingly rare as commodity prices ensure that wealthier farmers get the water they need.

About 80 percent of southwest Georgia farms employ pivots. Agriculture — not metro Atlanta or evaporation — uses most of the water between North Georgia and Florida, on an average annual basis, according to a new report by the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint Stakeholders, a private research group dedicated to a fair sharing of the water.

The Flint’s flow has declined by more than 30 percent since the advent of the sprinklers, the group reports, with most of the reduction due to agriculture’s growing demand for groundwater.

“Climate changes and intense water use have adversely impacted natural stream flow throughout much of the Flint Basin particularly during periods of below normal rainfall,” the report released in May states. “Yet, overall agricultural water use has increased over that time period.”

Stakeholders question tapping the lower aquifers for irrigation. And, as they point out, the aquifers and streams are all interconnected, so when the Floridan runs low, for example, less water is likely to rise up to the Flint River.

“Poor management strategies coupled with a false paradigm that an endless supply of water existed resulted in a significantly over permitted river basin,” the stakeholders’ report says.

It would help to know how much water is actually in the Flint, the streams and the aquifers of southwest Georgia. It would also help, particularly during a drought, to know how much is being used. While stakeholders and University of Georgia scientists have made strides toward answering the first question, they’re less certain about the second.

“There are areas in this region that do not allow the density of the withdrawals that are occurring,” said Woody Hicks, a retired federal hydrologist and ACFS board member. “Permitting is tied purely to acreage and not to a daily average or a monthly maximum. That’s both imprecise and not manageable.”

Florida agrees. Its lawsuit states that “irrigation diversions … cause streams and ground-water levels, which are naturally approaching their seasonally lowest levels, to decline even further.”

Georgia, in response, blames Florida for its own water woes. Georgia claims one Panhandle county doubled the number of irrigated acres between 2002 and 2007. And the 16 counties in the Northwest Florida water district have added 320 well permits over the past decade.

“Florida’s usage is certainly not as large as ours, but we need to make sure their permitting system and technology programs are as up to par as ours,” said Gordon Rogers, the Flint Riverkeeper. “There’s enough water in the system, even during major droughts, to satisfy everybody’s needs.”