Surface water — Cowley County

152 of the 394 points in Cowley County — 38.6% — 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 1990 at 4,823 acre-feet and bottomed in 1997 at 2,392. 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 3,133 acre-feet a year against 3,284 in the first ten — lower. And the number of points reporting any use moved from 12 to 11: the count of straws in the ground barely changes, whatever the year does to the volume.

⚠️ What a zero here does not mean

141 of the 152 points in this group report 0 acre-feet for 2023, and 145 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 Cowley County?

152 points of diversion sit in Cowley County, reporting 3,367 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 394 points in Cowley County.

Other groups of a similar size

• surface water — Republic 209
• surface water — Brown 208
• surface water — Washington 207
• surface water — Pottawatomie 205
• groundwater — Brown 196
• surface water — Mitchell 191
• surface water — Dickinson 190
• groundwater — Osborne 183
• groundwater — Wabaunsee 173
• groundwater — Geary 171
• surface water — Sedgwick 167