Dramatic surge in water demand predicted by 2040 puts Ohio farmers and industry on collision course

Deep inside a report on the future of water in central Ohio is this warning: Industrial demands for water will skyrocket at the same time experts expect farmers will need to regularly irrigate their fields during the critical growing period of July through September.

The competing demands of agriculture and industry – particularly the 130 data centers in central Ohio already consuming millions of gallons of water a day to cool computer equipment – would require billions of gallons of water daily, according to a 15-county Central Ohio Regional Water Study released this year by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.

Industrial demand alone is estimated to increase across the 15-county region by approximately 120% between 2021 to 2050 – to 250 million gallons a day by 2050. Agricultural demands could reach an estimated 110 million gallons a day across the region by 2040 during the growing season.

Some of the additional billions of gallons needed in the coming decades would come from surface sources such as rivers and lakes.

But the study says virtually all of the water needed for agricultural irrigation would be pumped from groundwater sources – an additional 9.15 billion gallons a year across the 15-county region. That’s enough water to fill nearly 14,000 Olympic swimming pools. And all of that groundwater would come from the same aquifers depended upon by municipalities and rural owners of private wells for drinking water.

Of growing concern for some who pay close attention to water demands in Ohio – especially as it continues to invite water-guzzling data centers to the “Silicon Heartland” – is that there are few regulations to manage the extraction of one of the state’s most valuable resources.

“Water regulation is kind of the ‘Wild West’ in Ohio,” said Jim Roberts, executive director of the Licking Regional Water District, which is expanding to meet demands for water and sewer service in fast-growing western Licking County. “Sewage treatment is a lot more regulated.”

And Glenn Marzluf, general manager and CEO of Del-Co Water Company in Delaware County – a nonprofit cooperative currently looking for a water source in northern Licking County – put it this way:

“Ohio water laws are pretty simple: You own the land, you own the water,” Marzluf said after a town hall meeting in Utica, where he bluntly told folks that if his company decides to develop a “utility-scale” well field there that could draw up to 6 million gallons of water a day, area residents “would have little say in the matter.”

Wet springs, dry summers

Most Ohio farmers have never found it necessary to water their crops and pastures.

In fact, across most of Ohio, farmers have done the opposite for more than two centuries since white settlers moved in and started digging ditches and burying field tile to drain wetlands to plow and plant in them.

“We’re one of only three states in the U.S. that has dryland farming, which means we farm without irrigation,” said Bryn Bird, a Licking County resident and president of Ohio Farmers Union, which represents more than 2,500 family farms.

“We can grow with what God gave us,” said Bird, who is also a produce farmer and Granville Township trustee in Licking County, where the growing number of data centers already are driving up demand for water. “It’s a massive benefit to us and to crop yields. Even if you irrigate, you don’t have the same yields.”

But the report released earlier this summer by the Ohio EPA, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and the Ohio Water Development Authority, with assistance from the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission and the Hazen and Sawyer consulting firm of New York, says that the changing climate in Ohio will drive an unprecedented demand by central Ohio farmers for surface and groundwater.

Licking County farmers, for example, will need an estimated equivalent of 5 inches of rainwater a year for irrigation during the growing season, says the Central Ohio Regional Water Study. That’s more than a month’s worth of rain, based on the average monthly rainfall of about 3 inches.

The state’s study was released in June – just before Ohio experienced its third drought in three years – and the last two were severe, including the driest August on record in Ohio in 2025.

At the same time the agricultural needs are expected to spike, the industrial demand for water – especially by data centers, computer-chip makers and other tech companies – is expected to skyrocket from an insignificant amount in 2020 to more than 40 million gallons a day by 2030 – then up to about 70 million gallons a day by 2040 and as much as 90 million gallons a day by 2050.

For context, the City of Columbus delivers more than 140 million gallons of water a day from its three water treatment plants to 1.25 million people and its industrial customers. A fourth treatment plant is under construction now at a cost of $1.6 billion to meet anticipated future demands.

So in a state where there are few regulations to manage water resources, especially extraction from underground sources, those who need water and see what’s coming are rushing to stake their claims.

That includes Del-Co and Licking Regional Water District in Licking County.

Drilling for the future

While Del-Co is looking for water to the north near Utica, the Licking Regional Water District is looking for a well site near Hebron in southern Licking County. Roberts has said that the utility serving western and southern Licking County also has plans for a water treatment facility in St. Albans Township, south of Alexandria and west of Granville.

He said the utility doesn’t plan to drill for water on the nearly 100 acres it owns near Rt. 161/37 and Outville Road, but it would be interested in a partnership with the City of New Albany and the New Albany Company, which owns 106 acres nearby. The City of New Albany and Village of Granville are currently conducting tests on that land to determine how much water could be pumped from wells there – and how any future pumping might affect Granville’s wells, which draw from the same aquifer.

Bird grew up in arid Colorado singing songs as a child about turning off the water while washing her hands. With that perspective, Ohio’s willingness to turn over fertile farmland to industry – combined with its lack of both regulation of water resources and delineation of water rights to protect those resources – is shocking.

“We are literally taking the nation’s breadbasket, where it’s most productive, most advantageous to farm, and turning it over for industrial use,” she said, adding that the protection of water should be a priority issue for the state legislature and the candidates for governor in next year’s election.

Bird said the state’s water report does nothing to manage or protect a life-giving resource as important to human existence as oxygen. Bird fears that the water study serves mainly as a divining rod for those who are looking for water.

Intentional or not, Bird said, “that report was written to tell all of the companies where to go. The report reads like, ‘This is where the water is, so go get it,’ rather than these are the areas that need to be protected.”

She said she has talked about the need to protect Ohio’s water supply with campaign staffers for Democrat Amy Acton and Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, two of the declared candidates for governor in the 2026 election.

And Bird said she has told anyone who will listen that Ohio is “just letting our water get sold.”

‘You have no idea what you have’

The Central Ohio Regional Water Study came after state officials promised Intel that if it built its proposed $28 billion computer-chip manufacturing campus in the New Albany International Business Park – in Licking County – state and local agencies would find the 6 million gallons or more a day it would need for its industrial process.

So far, the City of Columbus has committed to meeting Intel’s anticipated water needs when the company begins producing computer chips in 2030 or after.

The introduction to the study says that its “goal was to assess current and future water resource availability and demands in a 15-county area. This assessment allows the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) and Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (Ohio EPA) to understand the need for water supply and infrastructure investments to support public and environmental health under changing conditions.”

Bird said she works with farm groups in arid states such as California, the Dakotas and Oklahoma, and they look at Ohioans “like you’re insane – like you have no idea what you have there.”

Managing the use of groundwater, she said, is all about the rate at which the underground aquifer recharges. These underground water reservoirs are replenished in part with surface water that percolates a few hundred feet or more down through topsoil, sand and gravel.

Pumping water out faster than the aquifer can recharge can draw down the aquifer and dry up neighboring wells.

“Oklahoma had one of the largest aquifers in the country at one time, and now they don’t,” Bird said, referring to the Ogallala Aquifer that stretches across several Plains states. “Because they overused it.”

Some Ohioans believe we’ll never run out of water, said Kristy Hawthorne, executive director of the Licking County Soil & Water Conservation District.

“We have to be able to have a conversation about this,” she said. “We need to bring people to the middle to ask: What if it does happen?”

Licking County has been notably water rich, she said, but Ohioans need to talk about “the what-ifs” regarding the rapidly increasing demand for water, and the positive impact of water re-use and environmental restoration.

“This discussion about water re-use is helping,” Hawthorne said. “It will help manage that water for potable use and industrial water, re-using that industrial water as much as possible.”

And she said the wide-ranging H2Ohio program initiated by Gov. Mike DeWine in 2019 has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into projects across the state to help improve water quality and access to clean water by promoting best practices by farmers, building wetlands, replacing aging water lines and installing water treatment systems where there were none.

Initially funded at $172 million in the 2020-21 state budget, the program grew to $270 million in the 2024-25 budget and was cut by nearly 40% to $165 million in the 2026-27 budget.

“It has opened up conversations in the ag community and in working with local governments and soil & water conservation offices,” Hawthorne said. “It has broadened the conversation across all water users.”

It will take a sustained conversation – and action – to protect Ohio’s water resources, she said.

“Water is not an infinite resource,” Hawthorne said. “There is a finite amount of water, and we need to protect what we have because we can’t make any more.”

Changes in weather

Ohio has plenty of water, says State Climatologist of Ohio Aaron Wilson, but changing weather patterns mean that more of it is coming in the spring and less in the summer.

“This year was a great example – a snapshot of the trend,” he said. “We had our eighth wettest April on record and our driest August on record.”

For example, he said that Pickaway County, south of Columbus, saw 32 inches of rain in April, May and June – an average of more than 10 inches per month – and then had the driest August ever. “That’s incredible oscillation,” Wilson said.

Historically, rain fell more evenly on Ohio throughout the year, with some months drier than others but without the wild swings from heavy rains just as planting season begins – making it challenging for farmers to get into the fields to plow and plant crops – to extremely dry periods when growing crops need rain most.

“With these rapid oscillations,” Wilson said, “if you have irrigation, you can ensure that rain-fed crops will do well in those dry periods.”

Irrigating farm fields, in many cases, would mean drilling wells, installing big pumps and investing in giant sprinklers, which roll across fields or slowly pivot around a point to water a big circle of land. Anyone who has flown over or driven by farms in arid states – as close to Ohio as Indiana – has seen the crop circles and the big sprinkler pipes that move on big wheels.

But all of that would bring an added expense for Ohio farmers, most of whom have never needed such equipment in the past, said Dean Kreager, educator for agriculture and natural resources at the Ohio State University Agricultural Extension Service Licking County office in Newark.

“It’s going to create some changes, for sure,” he said. “Crop prices would have to go up to offset the increase in costs.”

And those increased costs might prompt some farmers to rethink what they grow and how they grow it.

Jordan Hoewischer, director of water quality and research for the Ohio Farm Bureau, said there has been some farm irrigation in Ohio, “but the quantity of water is becoming more and more a factor.”’

With the convergence of increased demand by industry and agriculture, he said, “there has to be some discussion about water re-use: How do we get nonpotable, gray water into the industrial process?”

Hoewischer also said that the agriculture community could look at how farmers might use the drainage tiles that remove water from their fields during the wet springs to pump water back into the fields when needed.

“We have a system underground already with drainage that potentially could be used to irrigate crops,” he said.

Sounding the alarm

Based on current trends, agriculture could become one of the largest users of water in Ohio by mid-century, “because we have millions of acres in agriculture,” said Vinayak Shedekar, an assistant professor of agricultural water management in Ohio State University’s Department of Food, Agricultural and Biological Engineering.

Despite the growth of technology companies and other industries on former Ohio farmland, agriculture and food production combined remain the state’s biggest industry.

“If every year starts looking like the last two in Ohio, where does that put us?” Shedekar asked. “It’s going to rain too much when we don’t need water – more intense and more of it – and then when the farmer turns his attention to summer and fall, we’re going to be drier and warmer.”

He is the Ohio State professor who provided the prediction for the state’s water study that farmers would need to start irrigating fields by mid-century.

His calculations indicate that rain in the growing season “is not going to go down to zero, but it’s going to look more like what we saw in 2024 and 2025 – and warmer. And if we have a 4-to-5-degree higher temperature, we’ll have more evaporation.

“And that is why I am worried about the sustainability of grain crops in Ohio,” said Shedekar, who serves as the director of Ohio State’s International Program for Water Management in Agriculture and the Overholt Drainage Education and Research Program. “We have been on the borderline for sustainability.”

Go to Nebraska or North Carolina, he said, and it would be hard to find corn or soybeans without irrigation.

“They have soils that cannot hold a lot of moisture for a long time, and they tend to get really hot,” he said. “Or go to Washington and other western states. You cannot grow crops without irrigation. Well, you can grow crops, but it won’t be profitable.”

In Ohio, the majority of crops have been rain-fed, he said, and that’s with a water deficit of 3-4 inches, compared to 9 or so inches in the West.

But the predicted rising temperatures and reduced rainfall during the growing season is a bad combination for farmers, he said.

“If you have a million acres you want to irrigate to about an inch, it’s a large amount of water because it’s such a large area, and that is the challenge,” Shedekar said. “We’re not saying we’re going to run out of water like the western states, but between June and October, central Ohio might be experiencing seasonal drought and seeing wells go dry because of irrigation demands.

“That’s what I’m worried about – that by 2040, in the next two to three decades – that agriculture is going to rise up as a sector that needs water to survive,” he said about the dry growing season. “Because if we want to maintain yields, we will have to rely on irrigation.”

The good news, he said, is that more people are starting to talk about the issue. “As a result, we could see more people pushing for more concrete steps toward water management,” he said.

At the moment, he said, very little is being done to manage the use of Ohio’s water resources.

“What is the state doing to regulate this? Very minimal in terms of surface and groundwater management,” he said.

But it could, he said.

“We have enough water in our community retention ponds to water our lawns in Delaware County, but instead, we use Del-Co’s beautiful water – purified for drinking – on our lawns. Why? We should be using water from those ponds.

“There are solutions like that, and some of them will have to be voluntary, because the government isn’t going to ask you to do it,” he said.

And some companies moving to Ohio are coming from water-scarce states, “and they are thinking about their water footprint,” he said. “They are strategically investing in projects that retain water in the watershed where they are using water.”

That includes projects such as investing in building or restoring wetlands, he said. Building a wetland of 200 to 300 acres, he said, is enough to have an impact.

“We are optimistic when it comes to water conservation,” he said. “Any conservation is good conservation. I like that there is some initiative being taken by these companies. Could it be more strategic? Absolutely.”

And maybe, he said, state and local government officials could do more to negotiate such things with the companies they recruit to Ohio. “As a state, we could be more strategic,” he said.

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This story was originally published by The Reporting Project and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.