The Agalala seemed bottomless. Alvin kept farming his 320 acres of dryland wheat. His yields were the same as they’d always been, 20 to 30 bushels an acre, depending on the rain. His income was modest. His costs were almost nothing. He had no irrigation payments, no equipment loans, no operating debt. He drove the same farm, all H he’d driven since 1951. He saved money every year. His neighbors felt sorry for him. Poor old Alvin, they said, sitting on 320 acres of gold and too stubborn to mine it.
1979 through 1982, the first cracks. Two things happened that nobody expected, or rather nobody wanted to expect. First, the farm crisis hit. Vulkar raised interest rates. Corn prices dropped. The farmers who’d borrowed 35,000 for center pivots and a h 100,000 for new tractors suddenly owed money they couldn’t pay. The boom turned to bust. Three farms in Sheridan County went to foreclosure in 1982, but the irrigated farmers survived the price crash barely because they still had water. Their yields were still high even if prices were low.
The irrigation kept them alive. They told themselves the crisis was temporary. It was the second thing that wasn’t temporary. In 1980, the Kansas Geological Survey published a report on the Ogalala aquifer in western Kansas. The numbers were bad. Since the irrigation boom began in the early 70s, the water table in Sheridan County had dropped an average of 3 ft per year. In some areas near the heaviest pumping, it had dropped 5 ft per year. 3 feet per year.
In a county where the saturated thickness averaged 150 ft, that meant the aquifer had lost roughly 30 feet in 10 years, 20% of its water gone. And the recharge rate still half an inch per year, just like Alvin Ducker had asked about at that community center meeting in 1972. A few farmers noticed, most didn’t. The water was still coming, the pumps were still running, the pivots were still turning. Alvin noticed. He drove to the county extension office, picked up a copy of the geological survey report, and read it at his kitchen table.
Then he drove to the co-op, the place where everyone gathered, the place where opinions were shared and reputations were made. And he left the report on the counter. Nobody read it. 1983 through 1985. The acceleration. The aquifer kept dropping 3 ft a year. Some wells that had been drilled to 120 ft were starting to suck sand. The pumps had to work harder. Diesel costs went up. The water came slower. In the summer of 84, the first center pivot in Sheridan County ran dry.
It belonged to a farmer named Jean Willard, 6 mi west of Hawky. Gan had been one of the first to install irrigation. His well had been drilled to 130 ft in 1972. By 84, the water table had dropped to $140. His pump was pulling air. Gene drilled deeper, another 60 ft at a cost of $8,000. He hit water again, but the flow was half what it had been. His center pivot, designed for 800 g a minute, was getting 400.
His corn started to stress in July. His yields dropped from 140 bushels to 90. He wasn’t the only one. By 1985, 11 wells in Sheridan County had either gone dry or lost significant capacity. The Geological Survey published an updated report. The aquifer had dropped another 15 ft in 5 years. Total decline since 1972, 45 ft. 30% of the original saturated thickness was gone. An Elvin Ducker’s handdug well 42 feet deep tapping a shallow perched water table that had nothing to do with the Ogalala was still pumping 8 gallons a minute same as the day he’d finished it.
The difference was simple. Alvin’s water came from local rainfall filtering through the soil into a shallow gravel layer. It recharged every year. It was small but sustainable. The Ogalala water came from 10,000 years of accumulated rainfall. ancient water, fossil water, water that would take centuries to replace once it was pumped out. Alvin had known this. He’d known it in 1972, standing in that parking lot, doing the math in his head. 18 in out, half an inch back.
You didn’t need a geology degree to see where that equation ended. 1986 through 1988. The reckoning. By 1987, 23 center pivots in Sheridan County had either shut down or were operating at reduced capacity. The aquifer had dropped 60 ft since 72. Wells drilled to 120 ft were useless. Some farmers drilled deeper, 200, 250 ft, spending 15 20,000 each time chasing water that kept retreating. The corn yields that had once been 140 bushels were now down to 80 or 90 on the remaining irrigated acres.
Some farmers gave up on corn entirely and went back to dryland wheat, the crop they’d abandoned 15 years earlier. But here’s the cruel part. The land had changed. 15 years of irrigated corn had depleted the soil differently than dryland wheat. The organic matter was lower. The soil structure had shifted. The transition back to dry land wasn’t smooth. Yields were worse than they’d been before irrigation, 20 bushels instead of 25. Meanwhile, Alvin Ducker’s dryland wheat, which had never been irrigated, which had been farmed the same way for 55 years, was yielding 28 to 32 bushels an acre, better than it had in the 70s.
