Researchers in a University of Florida-led study found that some water management practices in farming can reduce groundwater pollution and water use while maintaining farm profitability, while others may require financial incentives to be widely adopted. The findings could help guide future policies aimed at protecting Florida’s groundwater while supporting agriculture and forestry.
The study examined how farming and forestry practices in North Florida affect the Floridan Aquifer, a major source of drinking water for millions of people. The research, led by UF professor David Kaplan, focused on balancing groundwater protection with the economic realities of agriculture in regions like the Santa Fe River Basin.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture-funded FACETS project brought together researchers, farmers, foresters and policymakers to better understand how land management decisions impact water quality and availability. Kaplan, the study’s lead author, said the project used stakeholder-informed models to evaluate how different practices influence nitrate pollution, aquifer recharge and overall sustainability.
Kaplan spoke to WUFT about the study.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Sanchez: Can you explain what the FACETS project is and what problem it was designed to address?
Kaplan: Thanks for the opportunity, Matisse. So the FACETS project was a five-year U.S. Department of Agriculture-funded project, and it was actually a number of universities, University of Florida, Albany State, University of Georgia.
And the idea was to investigate ways that agricultural water use could be sustainable in the future, given issues with climate change, development, agricultural expansion and on also the important ecosystem services that our groundwater provided by the Floridan aquifer provides — so things like spring flows and stream and river flows, basically trying to balance all of the different needs that the aquifer has to supply, including the environment, cities, municipal, domestic and then agricultural production as well.
Sanchez: One unique aspect of this project is its collaborations with farmers and foresters and other stakeholders. Why was it important to include those voices in the research process?
Kaplan: Yeah, I think that's a really great question too. I think oftentimes academic research is sort of done in isolation from the system or the question or the people that are feeling the effects of decision-making and policies. And so, we thought it was really important to include and to actually build models and interpret data and information together with stakeholders for a couple of reasons.
One, we hope that by co-developing these models, we would have a little more credibility with the outcomes, so the findings would be co-developed and interpreted with a group of people that sometimes had different perspectives on water use and development and agricultural production, environmental protection.
And so, by working together, and not always by consensus, we didn't all have to agree on every single decision every time when building a model, but by working together, I think we expanded knowledge in two directions.
One really important direction was that by building models, for example, of forestry practices or agricultural practices with producers, it really affected the realism of the model.
So, one example is that the stakeholders we worked with helped define which particular production systems and which management practices were feasible and how to incorporate them into a model, which, of course, is an abstraction of reality.
And so, it was a way to really test hypotheses together, interpret data together, and to make, hopefully, the results more credible and more useful because they were co-developed with folks whose livelihoods or whose work is on the ground in these ecosystems.
Sanchez: So based on that work and what you mentioned, what did your team learn about how different farming and forestry practices affect groundwater quality and quantity in northern Florida?
Kaplan: Yeah, so we worked with farmers and foresters and regulators and environmental groups to build models. And of course, models are like I said. They're a version of reality that lets us test different scenarios, future scenarios that are hard to implement at a whole watershed scale.
But if we have enough data to build models together, then we can sort of do what-if scenarios. And what we found is that in several cases, for some of the major production systems in the region, like forestry practices and row crop production, we found several win-win scenarios that could benefit both the aquifer and the producer's bottom lines.
So that's like a synergy where it may be like, yeah, no brainer to move in that direction. But we also found other cases where there were trade-offs between aquifer health and grower incomes. And there the outcome, the take-home is that that means economic incentives may be needed in order to encourage adoption or a different practice to be used.
Sanchez: How do you see these findings being used and what needs to happen next to better protect the Floridan aquifer while still supporting agriculture and forestry in the region?
Kaplan: Yeah, I think that's like the $10 million question. You know, I think the one thing I want to point out is that this study was really focused at the scale of, sort of at the farm or the forest parcel scale, and so that the outcomes here about water savings or about nitrogen reduction going to the aquifer are really about decisions made at the parcel scale, or maybe the, you know, multiple parcel but individual owner scale.
So, the next question is, when you scale up all these decisions to, let's say, the Santa Fe River Basin or the Suwannee River Basin, did they begin to make a difference to the amount of flow and the water quality in those rivers? And the answer is they do, but that widespread adoption of these practices would be necessary in order to do things like meet minimum flows and level requirements to meet numeric nutrient criteria and other regulatory frameworks that are intended to protect our water resources.
In some cases, the improvement from better practices on a particular land use, while very important for improving aquifer health may not be sufficient to meet some of those regulatory requirements. I'll say it a little more explicitly, which is that improved land management practices has tremendous potential to improve aquifer health, but in some cases, actual transition of land use may be required to meet the criteria that are on the books for water quantity and water quality.
Sanchez: Is there anything else that you would like the viewers, the readers, the listeners, to know and understand about this project?
Kaplan: Yeah, I think this project was quite unique. This FACETS project showed that we do have potential to protect groundwater and support working lands. They don't have to be opposing goals. But there are places where there are obvious win-wins, and there are places where there really likely needed incentives in order to improve aquifer health without negatively affecting growers.
Getting that type of collaboration required, getting people in the same room who maybe had never met each other and weren't used to working together.
But by bringing together these different sectors, we improve the modeling, and hopefully we put forward some policies that reflect a way forward for the Santa Fe River Basin and for the broader region in North Florida.
Sanchez: Will this affect the outcome of any of this or affect drinking water for especially people in these states?
Kaplan: So the Floridan aquifer is one of the largest and most productive aquifers on the planet. Estimates show that 10 million people get their drinking water from the Floridan aquifer.
If you brushed your teeth this morning, it was almost certainly from the Floridan aquifer in our listening area. So yeah, it supports drinking water and close to $10 billion agricultural industry as well. So it's very productive, both in terms of producing a lot of water, but also producing a ton of economic impact.
We wouldn't have the life and quality of life that we have in Florida if we didn't have the Floridan aquifer, and so that's why it's worth protecting and trying to understand better ways to move forward in maintaining this ecosystem.