The data analyzed here reflect permits in the Department of Natural Resources Agricultural Water Permit database as of January 31, 2003, that had latitude and longitude information associated with them. At that time, the groundwater permit database contained 10,193 permits, 1,592 of which were missing latitude and longitude information. The surface water database contained 11,536 permits, of which 540 were missing latitude and longitude information. All permits in both databases contained county information. Accordingly, it was possible to compare the distribution across counties of permits with latitude and longitude versus the distribution of the entire data set (permits both with and without latitude and longitude information).
Although the database analyzed here is from 2003, the number of new permits issued is static. The Flint River Basin has been under a moratorium for new agricultural permits since 1999. Therefore, we expect the analyses presented in this web site are unlikely to be affected by permits issued since that time. We intend to update this site periodically with new permit information when it becomes available.
The data were divided into 6 sets: i) the number of surface water permits, distributed by county; ii) the number of groundwater permits, distributed by county; iii) the number of surface water plus ground water permits, distributed by county; iv) the volume of surface water permitted for withdrawal (gpm), distributed by county; v) the volume of groundwater permitted for withdrawal (gpm), distributed by county; and vi) the volume of surface water plus groundwater permitted for withdrawal (gpm), distributed by county. A Wilcoxon two-sample test was performed for each of the six data sets to compare the county distributions with and without the permits lacking latitude and longitude information. All six tests failed to reject the null hypothesis that the distributions were the same at an alpha level of 0.30.