How data and AI help reshape water policy in the agricultural heartland

In a 1964 photograph taken at the train station in Topeka, Kansas, a specially painted Santa Fe express boxcar bears a bold message: “Kansas feeds the world.” The image by photographer Joe McMillan captures the spirit of a time when America’s agricultural surpluses were first mobilized to fight global hunger and to foster international trade. Kansas, with its rich soils and productive farms, was at the forefront of that effort.

More than 60 years later, the message still holds true. Producing nearly a quarter of America’s wheat supply, along with significant quantities of corn, soybeans, sorghum and sunflowers, Kansas remains a critical contributor to feeding the nation and the world. But the state’s agricultural engine isn’t powered by crops alone. Livestock is also a major driver of the economy – and it depends on water for everything from pasture and forage to animal health and processing. In fact, the Kansas Department of Agriculture estimates beef cattle ranching and farming account for about $13.5 billion in the Kansas economy. These realities raise the stakes for water policy decisions about how limited supplies are managed and how water quality is protected. This is the work at the heart of the Kansas Water Institute (KWI) at Kansas State University: turning science and data into trusted insights that help sustain the state’s water resources for current and future generations.

“KWI was formally launched as a university-wide initiative in 2023, but it’s actually been housed at K-State since 1963,” says Susan Metzger, Director of KWI and the Strategic Interdisciplinary Program Development at Kansas State University. “Every land grant university throughout the nation has a water resources institute that helps advance the type of research necessary to tackle their state’s water challenges.”

Getting lost in complex, scattered data

Like many agriculturally driven states, Kansas faces increasing water challenges, including groundwater depletion, water quality impairments, reservoir sedimentation and increasing occurrences of droughts and floods. While Kansas has accumulated decades of water-related data, the ongoing challenge is turning that information into effective action.

“I would say from a data analytics standpoint, we have the advantage of having a wealth of water-related data, whether it’s data we’ve collected for many years on groundwater conditions in western Kansas or water quality conditions in eastern Kansas,” Metzger says. “So, it wasn’t a data concern. It’s what we were doing with that data. We really underutilized the power of the decisions that were available in that data.”

For years, terabytes of data had been scattered across agencies, research labs, spreadsheets and systems. “When I first jumped into this project, I had no idea how much data we were going to be dealing with,” says Robert Sholl, graduate student in the Department of Statistics at Kansas State University. “And it’s not even the quantity of the data. It’s where it’s all organized. It really was like a spider web.” 

That fragmentation made it difficult to answer key questions relating to conservation and nutrient reduction investments, allocation of limited resources and building trust in the data that drives policy decisions. KWI needed to find a solution that would bring together vast amounts of data, make it accessible and provide insight at scale.

Finding clarity with analytics and AI

That need for focus and integration led Kansas State University to partner with SAS. Together, SAS and KWI built a unified data analytics and AI platform powered by SAS Viya 4, designed to enhance water quality and quantity insights across the state.

The platform brought together what had long been separated: water well data, land use records, nutrient management practices and water quality measurements – all integrated into a single, cloud-based platform. Streamlined workflows allow users to gather, clean, visualize and model data in one place, while built-in machine learning and geospatial capabilities reveal patterns that had previously gone unnoticed.

“For the first time, we’re combining Kansas’s water quality monitoring data with the data behind state conservation investments,” Metzger says. “That allows us to see whether those dollars are truly improving water quality – and, if not, what policy or implementation decisions need to change.”

The impact was immediate

As Sholl began exploring datasets in SAS Visual Analytics, problems surfaced. “I found errors everywhere … missing data, misentries,” he says. “I would’ve never found that just loading it into Excel. SAS made me immediately aware: you need to look at this, you need to ask better questions, and you need to dig deeper.”

That clarity accelerated productivity across the team. “The workflow in Viya easily takes you from loading data, to cleaning it, to visualizing it, to modeling it – and then checking your models. Sholl says. “That’s a workflow you usually need one or two semesters of statistics classes to learn.”

The tool is easy to use, too. “SAS Viya is tailor-made for non-technical people,” Sholl adds. “It’s point-and-click. I can train somebody in an hour.”

For Metzger, the ability to put data into geographic context was especially powerful. “Being able to map where we’re seeing challenges – and how that is connected at a landscape scale or to the climate – that sort of advancement in technology has been key,” she says.

Building trust with partners, farmers and the community

As KWI’s analytics capabilities matured, so did trust among agency partners and the community. Much of Kansas’s water data is publicly collected but closely held by agencies tasked with maintaining it. Opening access required confidence that the data would be used responsibly and effectively.

“Through this project, we’ve really been able to develop trust with our longstanding state partners, the Kansas Department of Agriculture and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment,” Metzger says. “We’ve demonstrated that SAS allows us to discover important insights, and now we’re making that data more accessible to students, universities and other entities so we can learn how to make better decisions.”

That trust extends to the people most affected by those decisions: farmers and communities. Early in the project, KWI researchers went into the field, visiting farms and talking directly with producers.

“Even though it’s a bunch of data in a spreadsheet, it represents real occurrences and real people,” Sholl says. “If we don’t understand that context, we can’t build anything that’s useful.”

Communicating insights clearly remains one of the toughest and most important challenges. “Nobody asks more difficult questions than a farmer,” Sholl says. “You don’t get to be wrong. You have to tell them why we need to implement these policies and why certain practices aren’t efficient.”

Beyond software: A transformational collaboration

Both Metzger and Sholl emphasize that the value of SAS goes beyond technology. “It’s the people,” Sholl says. “The SAS consultants are absolute innovators. The training – compacting two years of expertise into a month – is insane. This project would not be where it is without them.”

For Kansas State University, the partnership also aligns with a broader strategy to build deep, values-driven industry collaborations. “We didn’t want one-off relationships,” Metzger explains. “We want partners who share our values and can really advance our work. SAS rose to the top of the list.”

Metzger also points out that the SAS collaboration can encourage an interest in water science and potential careers in analytics among the university’s students. “That’s what I’m most proud of,” she says. “Giving them hands-on opportunity to work with data, go out in the field … and introduce them to internship or future career opportunities at SAS.”

Today, KWI is using SAS Viya to move faster, work smarter and communicate more clearly. This collaboration is enabling more informed water investments, stronger policies and improved access to clean water for communities across the state.

It’s a model that can be replicated in other regions facing water scarcity and water quality issues.  As Sholl puts it: “Our mission is to preserve this natural resource, water. Because if there’s no water, we can’t farm. If we can’t farm, we can’t feed America. And that’s what Kansas does – we feed America.”