by Ted Genoways
But even reduced drafts from wells, applying just a few acre inches in a whole growing season, are drawing a lot more water than you might think. Rick led me over to the meter, attached to a pipe coming up from the well. He ripped up handfuls of tall grass that had overgrown the gauge. “Look at that,” he said, pointing to the small lettering under the spinning numbers. “ ‘Gallons times one hundred.’ We’re talking millions of gallons of water that get pumped from the Ogallala Aquifer.” Sixty years after the advent of center-pivot technology and the movement toward water-intensive crops like corn, those millions of gallons were starting to add up, catching the eye of environmentalists and farmers alike.
A 2015 study of U.S. Geological Survey data compared the depths of more than 32,000 wells nationwide over the previous two decades. The results were alarming. Across the country, water levels had fallen in 64 percent of all wells, with an average decline of more than 10 feet. In the Ogallala Aquifer system, which supplies groundwater for crop irrigation not only in Nebraska but to eight states from Texas to South Dakota, the declines were especially pronounced. In much of southwestern Kansas, wells were down to 25 percent of the water that existed when the aquifer was first tapped less than seventy years before. In the southern High Plains of Texas, near the edge of the Ogallala, water levels had fallen more than 100 feet in places, leaving many farmers without any water at all. In 2011, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that the government would be investing over $70 million in the Ogallala Aquifer region, “to help farmers and ranchers conserve billions of gallons of water.” But the Great Plains was soon plunged into a multi-year drought, and, instead of declining, water usage shot up dramatically.
After he was done checking over the pump and had twisted the yellow dial of the control panel back to its off position, silencing the humming system, Rick seemed caught for a moment in the calm. He confided that he worried sometimes about how much water industrial ag used on the Great Plains. “You know, if I’ve got one issue that I really care about,” he said, “the environment would be it.” He was proud that Nebraska’s unique system of Natural Resource Districts, governing responsible water use at the local level, had become a model of management and stringent enforcement of consumption, but even in eastern Nebraska where the aquifer recharges faster than any other part of the system, the levels had still dropped noticeably in Rick’s lifetime. “I have seen nature repair itself, but it takes time,” he said. “If humans don’t give it a chance, we’ll end up stressing the resource, and I think it could be bad.”
I was struck by the turn of phrase. “Stress the resource,” I said. “You mean we could use up all of the water?”
Rick hesitated, then waved me back toward the truck. We climbed back into the quiet of the cab, out of the wind. “Look,” he said finally. “If rainfall patterns keep shifting, we keep getting hotter summers and less rain, and people don’t conserve the groundwater, I’m not saying there will be no more water. But there won’t be enough to raise crops, not like we’ve been doing. There will just be grass in Nebraska.”
Rick promised to take me out west to where he grew up in Curtis, maybe at the end of the summer when it was time to bring the cow-calf pairs back from pasture. Not far from there, he said, at a place called Dancing Leaf Earth Lodge, archeological excavations had uncovered the remains of a once-thriving village, part of the Upper Republican Culture, an ancient precursor to the Pawnee. Digs suggested that those people, after centuries of farming corn, were forced to abandon their homes in the late fifteenth century, displaced by a catastrophic drought that lasted generations. “We brag about toughing it through years of hard times,” he said. “Sure, we’ve made it through droughts. Three-, five-, seven-year droughts. Terrible, but we got through. But what about the fifty- or hundred-year droughts?” The sites of many of those abandoned villages had been found buried under a thick shroud of dust—proof of dry times and roiling winds that rendered the area uninhabitable for multiple lifetimes.
“They left and never came back. They don’t know for sure what happened to them. Could it happen across the Great Plains today?” Rick asked. “Absolutely.”
FINDING WATER to grow food has been the central challenge of life on the Great Plains since the earliest days of white settlement. When the United States, in its zeal to displace Native Americans and settle the Free Soil debate with the Confederacy, passed the first Homestead Act in 1862, government surveyors fanned out to plat a patchwork of one-mile squares, which were then subdivided into quarters of 160 acres each. A “quarter-section” was awarded any free citizen of the United States, man or woman, native-born or immigrant, with just one major catch: you had to live on the land and farm it for at least five years. This not only meant concocting some way of building a home on the treeless prairie, but also finding enough fresh water to sustain crops.
On the semi-arid plains of Nebraska and neighboring states, where surface streams often ran dry during the summer months—right when water for irrigation was most needed—farmers had little choice but to dig wells. In some places, large communal wells were undertaken to serve whole communities. In 1887, for example, a group of determined Kansas farmers, using nothing more than shovels and picks, dug a stone-braced well to a depth of over 100 feet to supply freshwater to the town of Greensburg. But more often, the wells were shallow and hand-dug. Farmers erected windmills to pump small amounts of groundwater and divert it to the wide furrows of their fields or into catchment ponds. Life on the hardscrabble plains was arduous, and often hand-to-mouth. Nevertheless, by 1890, the Homestead Act had settled some 2 million people on nearly 375,000 farms.
But in the drought years that followed, just as cities like St. Louis, Omaha, and Denver were turning into bustling metropolises built on income from livestock and grain exchanges, the entire Great Plains region was devastated by blistering heat. It wasn’t just an unlucky few who were pushed to the brink of bankruptcy. By the harvest of 1894, one newspaper reported, nearly 38 percent of acres planted with corn in the middle states were either destroyed or abandoned. In Nebraska, where high temperatures were accompanied by scorching winds, the smell of parched corn filled the air. Meghan’s great-grandfather, Harry Harrington, may have struggled through those years and eventually lost his grip on the family land, but many more simply packed up and left, making their escape, according to another paper, “while they had something to do it with.” The drought revealed that raising enough grain for a farm family to thrive would require greater land allocations than the Homestead Act had originally provided—and a lot more water.
In western Nebraska, where the drought was worst, a group of locals formed the Farmers Irrigation Project, expanding an existing small-scale canal that had started diverting water out of the North Platte River right along the Wyoming border, near Henry, Nebraska, in 1887. My grandfather eventually worked on the channel that resulted from that project, the Tri-State Irrigation Canal—a network of open waterways that stretched from the foothills of the Wyoming Rockies, across the northeast corner of Colorado, and into western Nebraska. He was a ditch rider in the Wildcat Hills, doling out water allotments, for more than thirty years, so on one trip out to that part of the state, I’d stopped in to see Kevin Adams, who had worked his way up from ditch rider to construction engineer to supervisor of the Minatare division to assistant manager to his current position as general manager of the whole district. Though still in his fifties, Kevin had worked for Farmers Irrigation for more than a quarter of the lifetime of the canal. So when I asked what changes he had seen in his years on the job, he broke out in a crooked smile.
“Nobody rides ditch with a horse anymore,” he said.
We were sitting in his sprawling, wood-paneled office just off the main drag in Scottsbluff. “No,” he said, “I never saw that. But this system is old enough that everything was built with horses and slips. They didn’t have dredging machines or anything. I’ve got an old ditch rider’s manual in my desk that says you have to supply your o
wn horse, your own feed . . .”
He paused a moment and smiled again. “Do you want to hear all that history?”
I nodded for him to continue.
“So, this system has a water right of 1887—when the first irrigation supplies were diverted out of the North Platte River,” he began. “By 1891, they had ten miles of small canals built that irrigated about thirty-five hundred acres with the natural flow of water. But they soon found out that, since this part of Nebraska isn’t on an aquifer, they couldn’t sustain crops through the summer without storage water.” The project was suspended—but, in 1902, with passage of the Reclamation Act, the federal government agreed to bankroll a dam in Wyoming that promised to deliver enough water for 150,000 acres, by a new canal dubbed the Pathfinder. At the same time, Heyward G. Leavitt, an entrepreneur who believed that with proper irrigation sugar beets could thrive in the Platte Valley’s rich soil, bought out the remaining interests in the Farmers Irrigation Project—in return for delivering free water in perpetuity to the land of the original owners. Leavitt got a supplemental storage contract with the Pathfinder Reservoir and purchased 36,000 acres, where he extended the old canal and taught tenant farmers to raise sugar beets.
Within a decade, Leavitt’s Tri-State Canal was completed—and the sugar beet had transformed the valley. The beets themselves were reliable and profitable. The Great Western Sugar Company provided seasonal factory jobs, first in Scottsbluff and then at a second plant in nearby Bayard. The byproducts of sugar refining (both beet tops and leftover beet pulp) could be processed into feed for cattle, stabilizing the beef industry and creating jobs on ranches and bringing packinghouses into towns along the railroad. And the manure from the ranches could be used to enrich irrigated soil to grow a greater diversity of crops—most notably soybeans, alfalfa, and eventually corn.
“At that time,” Adams said, “everything was open channel—seventy-five miles of a main canal, which we still have today; probably 288 miles of open laterals. And, of course, we maintained most of the creeks and drains in this area—about ninety miles of that, too.” All told, the Tri-State’s storage supply in Wyoming’s Pathfinder reservoir is capable of delivering 1.1 million acre-feet of water, but even in the early years, the river couldn’t deliver enough to meet all of the agricultural demands of the growing diversion projects. By midsummer of each year, the Platte River in the central part of the state and points farther east always ran dry.
So at the same time that the Farmer’s Irrigation District was digging canals, the U.S. Geological Survey had commissioned a study of groundwater resources on the Great Plains. In 1897, working at a spot west of Ogallala, Nebraska, government geologist N. H. Darton surmised that the abundant wells in the southwest corner of the state were drawing from a great storehouse of ancient water held in place by an enormous underlying layer of limestone. “Extending from Kansas and Colorado far into Nebraska,” Darton wrote, “there is a calcareous formation of late Tertiary age to which I wish to apply the distinctive name Ogalalla formation.”
Darton described the Ogallala as a kind of enormous, untapped reservoir, like a lost freshwater lake waiting through the millennia to one day emerge and regreen the plains. Over time, however, geologists have come to understand the aquifer as something much more complex—and difficult to manage. Ann Bleed, a former state hydrologist and director of the Nebraska Department of Natural Resources, explained to me that the Ogallala isn’t even a single aquifer but many aquifers, studied and managed as independent parts of the High Plains Aquifer System.
When the system began to form over 100 million years ago with the uplifting of the Rocky Mountains, the shallow inland sea that had covered much of North America slowly receded, and rain and snow from the rising craggy peaks ran off, forming rivers that raced east from the mountains to the flatlands. In time, the braided channels filled with silt and gravel, creating spaces that trapped a vast basin of freshwater commingled with the alluvial soil. Contrary to popular views, however, an aquifer is not a giant underground lake, with all that implies. It is not a round-bottomed bowl filled with water, but rather the flooded and filled in remains of valleys and canyon walls, more akin to the Badlands than the flat prairie we see today.
So in places where rivers once ran, the Ogallala can be quite deep, but in areas where the bedrock is the high top of an ancient butte, it may be shallow and cut off from other parts of the system. Some parts of the aquifer, like those in eastern and central Nebraska, can replenish, or “recharge,” rather quickly, because, by the good fortune of geology, the aquifer there is connected with the substrate from the Rocky Mountains. The underlying bedrock still tilts to the east, carrying underground water resources in that direction. And the area around York and Hamilton counties also benefits from water slowly percolating out of the Sandhills to the north and west. In Nebraska, the aquifer can seem like an inexhaustible resource, but, in many other places, wells can be inadvertently tapped out—and take hundreds of years to replenish. Still other spots, like the aquifers underlying western Kansas and wide swaths of the Texas Panhandle, refill so slowly it’s as if they don’t recharge at all; geologists call their water “fossil water,” because it is more akin to oil, a finite and nonrenewable resource. But no one knew that at the time they were discovered.
In the 1870s, interstate railroads brought ranchers to West Texas, where they could run cattle on flat expanses of public rangeland. At the turn of the twentieth century, when cattle baron Christopher Columbus Slaughter, the godfather of the Texas Longhorn, began setting wells for his growing herd of 20,000 breed stock, most of his digging crews didn’t even have to drill for water. They simply used a horse-drawn trench digger to deepen a natural arroyo or a buffalo wallow, which would fill with water whenever rains fell on the already saturated soil. In other places, Slaughter hired men to install windmills to pump water into stock tanks spaced five miles apart, but the water was so close to the surface that they could set a well with nothing more than shovels.
Thanks to readily abundant groundwater, the economy of West Texas, especially in cattle towns like Plainview, boomed. The downtown there saw the construction of the Granada and Fair vaudeville halls. The city erected the 3,000-seat Plainview Municipal Auditorium. In 1929, Hilton built a seven-story hotel with 125 rooms, all with private baths. Seeing the success of irrigated cotton fields, other farmers were encouraged to start planting wheat and feed crops. B. F. Yearwood, a local entrepreneur, erected a 50,000-bushel corn mill at the edge of town. The Harvest Queen flour mill, which opened its doors in 1907, was completely rebuilt with soaring concrete grain elevators. The city was so convinced of its limitless water supply that it planted more than 50,000 shade trees as part of a beautification project. In 1937, at the height of the Dust Bowl, the McCormick company issued a postcard, intended to attract drought-stricken farmers from Oklahoma. A young farm girl is shown holding the lead of a beef cow and standing next to an open irrigation well, its windmill spilling water into a verdant-ringed stock pond. The legend reads: “This modern farmerette has no rainfall worries.”
Farmers in eastern Nebraska weren’t so lucky. Though groundwater was abundant there, it was not as near to the surface as in West Texas. Irrigation wells were reliable and sustainable if they were dug along the banks of the Platte River where the water was closer to the surface, but farmers there already had the region’s most abundant water supply and were often reluctant to shoulder the cost of drilling and putting in a wellhead, or the price of buying and maintaining oil-powered pumps. Some employed wind power, but a single windmill could only siphon enough water to irrigate five acres or provide for thirty cattle—hardly enough to get farmers through the dry times. In 1928, the Nebraska Agricultural Extension Service lamented that “the underground water supply is abundant,” but there were insufficient means of “lifting it to the surface and applying it to the land.” Toward the end of the 1920s, as prices of corn and wheat sagged due to oversupply worldwide, there was even less incentiv
e to invest in irrigation equipment. Nebraska farmers were content to keep their input costs low and get by on the twenty-five-bushel-per-acre yields they had steadily produced since recovering from the crisis of the 1890s.
Before long, however, the middle of the country was hit with the drought against which all other droughts would come to be measured. In 1934, the start of the Dust Bowl years, Nebraska’s statewide average per-acre yield of corn was barely two bushels—and didn’t rise above ten bushels per acre again for another five years when Henry Wallace’s drought-resistant corn hybrids brought the country back from the brink of starvation. But then, even before the country could stand on its feet, we were drawn into World War II and five years of food rationing.
During those early years of the war, when the fighting in Europe was still a pitched struggle between heavily mechanized armies, tractor manufacturers like John Deere and International Harvester boomed. Government contracts meant the assembly lines ran day and night, building engines for heavy trucks and tanks. My grandfather, driven out of Nebraska by the drought, moved his wife and infant son, my father, to East Peoria, Illinois. There he worked at the Caterpillar plant, making tracks for tanks as well as industrial scrapers used to build makeshift landing strips for supply planes and bulldozers to clear roadways for trucks to carry those supplies to the front.
After the war, all of those companies shifted resources to developing peacetime applications for their heavy equipment, including diesel-powered pumps that could finally convey all of that groundwater underlying much of the American breadbasket to the surface where it could be used for crop production. After a long decade of going hungry, it’s little wonder that Americans were collectively determined to find a way to ensure that no water shortage would ever again mean going without.