Back to the Anaheim Ducks Newsfeed

Cities' food supplies are eating into groundwater reserves, study finds

Groundwater in America's major aquifers is being used up way faster than it's being replenished. But where does all that water go?

A lot of it is used in producing food for the nation’s city dwellers, a new study calculates.

Rather than try to figure out how much water farmers use in comparison with how much cities demand, the study's authors looked at the foods that groundwater is used to grow — and who gets to eat them.

“Cities and farms are linked,” said Megan Konar, a hydrologist in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and one of the authors of the study.