by Ted Genoways
IN THE late 1940s, while tenant farming in Colorado, a farmer and tinkerer named Frank Zybach attended the Irrigation Field Day held near Prospect Valley. He watched the demonstration crew set the pipes on an irrigation system, then tromp through the mud to move them. The arrival of abundant water had been a godsend to Colorado and Zybach’s native Nebraska, but the early irrigation systems that delivered that water to the field were little more than a series of bulky metal pipes that had to be lugged into place and then reset two or three times a day. It was a mucky and painstaking job, and not a terribly efficient one.
Zybach later remembered thinking, “There has to be a better way.” He began to develop and eventually patented a self-propelled system, in which the force of water flowing through the irrigation tube would slowly turn the drive train of supporting wheels. By anchoring the pipe to a central wellhead, the system turned in a perfect circle, watering the field evenly without any work by the farmer. Zybach’s system became known as “center-pivot irrigation.” In 1952, he moved back to his hometown of Columbus, Nebraska, and partnered with local equipment manufacturer A. E. Trowbridge on building and marketing the systems.
Despite their ingenious design, early center pivots were plagued by malfunctions and were a nightmare to maintain. The long central irrigation pipe was prone to leakage, which would drop the water pressure enough so that the whole system ground to a halt—often flooding a single spot in the field in the process. Farmers, leery of the expense and hassle of owning an untested piece of equipment, were reluctant to buy. In the first two years of production, Zybach later told the Lincoln Journal Star, he and Trowbridge sold just nineteen center pivots. After several years of struggling, they decided to license the technology to Robert B. Daugherty, the young owner of a small farm equipment company called Valley Manufacturing, not far from the banks of the Platte in Valley, Nebraska. Zybach hoped that Daugherty could improve the design and make the system profitable.
Daugherty spent months and months working on a pipe-making machine that could take a flat piece of steel, roll it into a wide-gauge tube, and then automatically weld it shut. When he had finally perfected the process, he was eager to show it off. In 1953, one of the first buyers of a center pivot from Valley was a young man recently returned from the Korean War named Walt Sehnert. “One day my dad and I stopped in at the Valley plant to see this new pipe-making machine,” Walt told me. They were greeted by Daugherty and given the grand tour, culminating in a demonstration. “Daugherty was a dapper little man, ramrod straight,” Walt said. “He even carried a little swagger stick, favored by some Marine Corps officers. As we walked through the plant, he explained the various phases of manufacture that we were seeing, and slapped the side of his leg with this stick from time to time.” When they finally reached the pipe-making machine, it didn’t seem to be working right. Daugherty approached the two men who were tinkering with the machine and offered a couple of suggestions. “Then he came back to where we were standing. He said nothing, but clenched his teeth, turned red, and glared at the machine, beating a tattoo with that swagger stick against his leg.” A minute later, one of the men gave the thumbs-up, and the machine rolled out a perfect 6-inch pipe.
Sehnert bought and installed the system. Soon other farmers followed suit—and just in the nick of time. In summer of 1953, furnace-like temperatures spread across the Central Plains, pushing hot, dry air across the American breadbasket. The drought that followed held the region relentlessly in its grip. For nearly four years, the middle of the country, from the panhandle of Texas all the way to the Sandhills of Nebraska, experienced low rainfall and stretches where the mercury topped 100 degrees for weeks at a time. The federal government spent $3.3 billion on assistance to farmers, and the beef industry in Texas was nearly destroyed in what became known as the Great Cattle Bust.
But the lucky landowners of eastern Nebraska who had invested in center pivots were able to weather through the drought. Other pivot manufacturers soon popped up around eastern Nebraska—Zimmatic in Lindsay, Reinke in Deshler, and Olson Brothers in Atkinson—and they began setting up dealerships across the Great Plains. In the decades that followed, farmers from North Dakota to Texas turned to center-pivot irrigation to provide extra water during key growing times and help them through dry spells.
By the end of the 1970s, there were more than 18,000 center pivots operating in Nebraska alone and some 30,000 in other parts of the Great Plains, altogether irrigating more than 20 million acres. The rapid expansion of center-pivot technology allowed farmers to plant on more and more marginal land and to venture into water-intensive crops, leading to dense planting of corn. In just a few short decades, the arid plains were transformed. The changes were so profound that astronauts aboard Skylab reported seeing a patchwork of green circles stretching for miles across north-central Nebraska.
“Passengers on commercial jet airliners increasingly notice the same sight,” wrote William E. Splinter, chair of the Department of Agricultural Engineering at the University of Nebraska, in an article for Scientific American. “What is being observed is perhaps the most significant mechanical innovation in agriculture since the replacement of draft animals by the tractor.”
Today, a tower from one of the original center-pivot systems manufactured by that revolutionary pipe-making machine is still on display in the lobby at Valley Irrigation’s manufacturing headquarters. Matt Ondrejko, vice president for global marketing, told me that the exhibit honors Valley’s central role in averting agricultural disaster in the 1950s and building the large-scale ag economy that followed. Touring the sprawling complex of factories and machine shops bounded by test fields, it’s clear that the folks at Valley recognize how much the future of the company depends on continuing to innovate, particularly in the area of water conservation.
“We can’t run a business selling irrigation systems if there’s no groundwater for irrigation,” Ondrejko said. The company is able to tackle the challenge by closely monitoring every step of the construction of its center-pivot units—from the hand assembly of the plastic sprinkler nozzles to a massive crane system that lowers spans of pipe into a gargantuan zinc-and-nickel bath.
In recent years, Valley has focused its research and design improvements on two main areas: the sprinkler heads and the control mechanisms. By collecting field-moisture data and contrasting yield returns in comparable fields irrigated with different sprinkler heads, engineers are able to refine the spray patterns and the drop patterns, to reduce loss through evaporation. The latest design innovations have focused less on fine droplet dispersal and more on getting water all the way to ground level. After all, the goal is watering root systems, not leaving droplets on leaf surfaces where they will be lost. “There’s really precise science in how big the drop is,” Ondrejko said, and “how close we get it to the ground.”
Valley has also invested in developing variable-rate irrigation, which allows individual sprinkler heads to be turned on and off in particular parts of the span as it passes over different sections of the field. The objective, Ondrejko said, is being able “to precisely spoon-feed the crop—when it needs it, where it needs it, no more, no less.” Perhaps most important is the development of exact application monitoring, so that farmers can collect precise information on how many acre-inches they are using and where. That’s where technology meets water management efforts in the field.
After decades of pumping their groundwater to keep up with farmers in other parts of the Great Plains, the wells in West Texas are running dry. In Plainview, the wide, brick-lined avenues are sun-scorched and shuttered now. The plywood bolted over the front windows of the Hilton is painted with a mural of the former lobby, but the locals now speak only of ghosts lurking in the abandoned upper rooms. As the community limped through the droughts of the fifties and seventies, and the earth-parching heat wave of the early eighties, the cotton industry struggled to stay profitable, and gradually the area returned more and more to cattle feeding and beef processin
g. With the arrival of the Great Recession and the onset of the drought in 2011, Plainview seemed to lose what was left of its other industries: the White Energy ethanol plant closed temporarily, the Peanut Corporation of America plant shuttered due to a salmonella outbreak, and the Harvest Queen Mill & Elevator (by then owned by Archer Daniels Midland), also closed—collectively taking with them more than 1,000 jobs in a town of just 22,000 people.
To avoid a similar fate in Nebraska, David Eigenberg, who heads the Upper Big Blue Natural Resource District, the same NRD that monitors Rick’s wells, told me that the key is more than just better equipment. Technology has led the way to “improved irrigation efficiency,” but in many cases, that has only encouraged farmers to apply water to their fields more often. “You might have the Cadillac out there,” he said, a center pivot with variable-rate application and zone sensing to automatically apply only in places where water is most needed, but all that advanced technology is useless “if you don’t understand the management tool.”
And that’s Nebraska’s real advantage. The state is broken into twenty-three Natural Resources Districts, which were created in 1972 to manage water at the individual watershed level. The NRDs apply a doctrine of “reasonable use” of groundwater, as determined and overseen by locals elected to the NRD boards. By contrast, Texas adheres to a doctrine called “rule of capture,” which essentially allows farmers to use whatever groundwater they can tap from their property. As farmers come to see the resource as finite, many may actually increase their usage, in order to keep up with perceived competition from their neighbors—a phenomenon known as “the tragedy of the commons.” To really reduce water usage, you have to change a culture that views irrigation as an individual right, rather than a method of accessing a shared resource. In the end, Eigenberg said, the change has to come from “the guy in the tractor seat.”
To encourage that change, the NRDs have engaged in a range of tactics. Some have started requiring metering on new wells, which has helped farmers to track field-by-field usage and encouraged them to reduce their draft. Some have offered education courses or water-use counseling to help farmers see how overdrafting is costly in terms of the power used on the pivot pump and often in top-soil loss due to runoff. And some, like the Upper Big Blue NRD have undertaken even more ambitious initiatives.
The Upper Big Blue, which contains significant acreage classified as “high risk groundwater areas,” launched a study in 2012 comparing crop yields in neighboring fields with identical center-pivot irrigation systems—but with one managed by the farmer and the other managed by the NRD. The farmer applied water according to his own judgment, while the NRD used soil-moisture data collected from a network of monitors inserted into the edges of the field. The NRD achieved a nearly identical yield—98 percent of what the farmer harvested—while drawing only a third of the water. The latest advancement is a wireless soil-moisture monitoring system that sends data to the farmer electronically. Future improvements will send that data directly to the center pivot, automatically turning the system on when irrigation is needed and applying water only in the necessary areas. It’s hoped that these new technologies will be able to universally drop usage in these high-risk areas to the point that the aquifer might actually begin to recharge.
But even bigger, more sweeping changes may be needed. To address the problem adequately, we may need to rethink what kind of food we grow where, and how much agriculture is feasible in certain landscapes. The center pivot allowed the repopulation of many areas that had been vacated during the Dust Bowl—areas that simply couldn’t sustain crops without a new source of water. That new technology, coupled with other advances in agriculture, put more than 100 million acres of marginal land into farm production, much of it for growing water-intensive crops, like corn and soybeans, which today are raised primarily for livestock feed and biofuel, not for human consumption. Farmers have also been encouraged to turn away from more drought-resistant cash crops—such as sugar beets in western Nebraska and sorghum in Oklahoma—in favor of commodity grains that are supported by higher farm subsidies and crop insurance.
The Ogallala water boom made it possible for the United States to become the world’s granary, but now, as wells run dry in western Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, it may be time to start rethinking our usage. If we don’t do something, Don Wilhite, founding director of both the National Drought Mitigation Center and the International Drought Information Center at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, believes that the effects of this rapid drawdown could be catastrophic. In a 2013 report, written for the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the university, Wilhite warned that greenhouse gas emissions, if unchecked, will cause temperatures in Nebraska to increase by as much as 9 degrees Fahrenheit in less than a few years. That projected increase in temperatures means that summertime highs will regularly surpass 100 degrees by 2060.
Those extremes falling, as they would, during the peak of the growing season would create untenable demands on groundwater. Even if rainfall were to increase, it would not be enough to offset the loss of soil moisture caused by extreme heat. In a hotter climate, it will take more water to generate the same crop yield, even with genetically modified grain hybrids. Unless we change farming and water management, he explained, there simply won’t be enough groundwater to combat such dry conditions.
Most important, Wilhite said that the loss of groundwater resources would set off a feedback loop with much broader effects. He explained that pumping all of that deep, cold water from the Ogallala and spreading it across many acres has artificially lowered air temperatures and increased humidity. That human-induced microclimate has masked the effects of climate change by forestalling climbing temperatures on a regional level. If we run out of that water, temperatures will rise sharply. Crippling drought will become the new norm, turning the Central Plains states into a permanent dust bowl.
Wilhite told me that his greatest worry is that farmers tend to brush off such dire predictions, insisting that they have lived through many hard times. They say that their grandfathers got through the Dirty Thirties and innovated their way out of the Great Cattle Bust in the 1950s. “Farmers say they’re used to variability,” Wilhite said, “but these projections are way outside the range of anything we’ve ever encountered.”
ON A sun-bright morning in Loup City, Nebraska, Rick walked around a maze-like complex of holding pens, inspecting thick-necked and hulking black Angus bulls. Their coats glistened like oil slicks in the daylight, and they stepped broodingly around their pens, like boxers before a title fight. The day’s auction was set to begin just after lunch, and Rick was going over the program, checking each breeding male, one by one. All of the bulls for sale that day were from Dutch Detleff’s ranch in Ravenna or Loren Treffer’s place in Broken Bow. Rick knew Dutch from way back. He’d bought from him before, and he trusted the quality of Dutch’s genetics and his instincts on what breeders call the “phenotype” of particular bulls—the visible characteristics that they read as indicators of the size and health of their future offspring. At one pen, he paused to show me the bull’s number in the program along with the entry for his stats.
“EPD is your expected progeny differences,” he said. “That’s the estimate of how that bull’s calves will perform over the average weight for the breed—at birth weight, wean weight, and yearling weight.” The ideal was finding a bull that produced calves that were barely over average birth weight, to keep down the chance of losing cows during calving. “We had fifty heifers calve this spring,” Rick said, “and didn’t have to pull a single one.” But once they’re safely born, you want those calves to put on weight swiftly. Many of Dutch’s bulls were expected to sire calves that were just a pound or two over standard birth weight but then would put on an extra fifty pounds by weaning and could be over a hundred pounds heavier than average by the time they were a year old. “With the price of beef over six dollars per pound,” Rick said, “getting a good bull can add six hundr
ed pounds to the sale price of each calf. Multiply that across a year’s births, and it really adds up.”
But bigger isn’t always better, Rick said, especially when you’re talking about cow calves. He pointed to another category on the grid, marked “Milk.” “That tells you what their offspring cows will produce for milk once they’re pregnant and lactating,” Rick said. You want a cow that will produce enough milk to be sure that her calves are well fed and put on weight, but you also want to avoid genetics that produce udders that get too big. “An extra twenty-five pounds is about the top range,” he said. “If you get too much milk, then you start to get bad bags. The calves can’t nurse or the teats get mastitis, and you can’t keep them in the herd for very long.”
So the trick, as with everything on the farm, was factoring in your input costs and your relative risks. Calves that nurse aggressively will put on valuable pounds but require stouter cows and more feed for the mothers. Once weaned, those calves will need more food, too. Because Rick grazes his cattle almost exclusively on grass, it’s not the cost of food that he’s worried about so much as time and energy—moving the herd from one pasture to another, rotating weaned calves out to Curtis where they can bulk up on open rangeland and then bringing them back for sale. And you have to weigh the prospect of big bull calves against the risk of oversized cow calves. Factoring those costs and risks into the potential for increased profit, Rick settled on a total number he was willing to pay for two bulls that caught his eye. He was doubtful that he could get both for that price, but it was a number he wouldn’t go past.
Inside the sale barn, the bidders were being called to the bleachers for the auction to begin. The auctioneer, who had driven in from Colorado for the day, sat high above the sale ring, leaning close into the microphone. He wore a tall, black Stetson and reading glasses, and he introduced the breeders in the buttery tone of a call-in radio host. From the moment the first bull was finally brought in, it was a brisk sprint through each sale. The hired hands would pull open the gate, ushering in the angry bull. He would spin and stomp around the show pen, twitching his ears and swishing his tail, looking fiercely for an exit. The auctioneer would read the seller’s description: “This stylish stout-made bull will be a real herd improver.” Then he would call for a starting bid and the first hand would shoot up.