Surface water — Clay County

226 of the 654 points in Clay County — 34.6% — take this source.

What this source means

water taken from a river, a stream or a reservoir. Surface rights answer to different rules and, in a dry year, to a different reality: the river can simply not be there.

What the series actually shows — this group

Reported use here peaked in 2021 at 7,881 acre-feet and bottomed in 1993 at 34. That swing is rainfall, not policy: a wet year needs less pumping than a dry one, and any two years picked from this table can be made to say almost anything.

Comparing decades instead: the last ten years average 5,032 acre-feet a year against 1,451 in the first ten — higher. And the number of points reporting any use moved from 16 to 61: the count of straws in the ground barely changes, whatever the year does to the volume.

⚠️ What a zero here does not mean

165 of the 226 points in this group report 0 acre-feet for 2023, and 216 show five or more successive years at 0 in this file.

A 0 in this file is not a finding. There are no blanks in the usage columns — every point carries a number for every year — so a nil return, a point that did not yet exist, and a report never filed all read the same. Kansas fines non-filing (USD 250 per file, USD 1,000 and suspension after 1 June), which is exactly why a missing report looks like a quiet year.

Kansas does terminate a water right after five successive years without beneficial use — K.S.A. 82a-718 — but only without due and sufficient cause, and only after a hearing before the chief engineer with 30 days’ notice. Four causes are recognised in K.A.R. 5-7-1, including adequate rainfall and water being unavailable at the source, and enrolment in the water rights conservation programme counts as one. A run of zeros here is a reason to check, never a conclusion.

Buying or defending irrigated ground in Clay County?

226 points of diversion sit in Clay County, reporting 4,675 acre-feet in 2023. What a right is actually worth turns on how much it has been used and on whether it can be defended — questions this site cannot answer for a particular file. Tell us where and we pass the request to Kansas water lawyers and consultants.

We recommend nobody and we are nobody's agent. We have no arrangement with any firm today — we are collecting these requests in order to go and find them. What we do with this.

The points

Part of a bigger picture: all 654 points in Clay County.

Other groups of a similar size

• groundwater — Pottawatomie 431
• groundwater — Clay 428
• groundwater — Dickinson 278
• surface water — Butler 242
• groundwater — Cowley 242
• groundwater — Butler 230
• surface water — Marshall 222
• surface water — Mcpherson 222
• groundwater — Douglas 211
• surface water — Republic 209
• surface water — Brown 208