Every Farmer Took the Free Water and Laughed at His Well — 15 Years Later He Was the Only One Left – In the spring of 1972, a man from the federal government drove into Sheridan County, Kansas, in a white Ford sedan with a briefcase full of promises. His name was Richard Tully, and he worked for the Bureau of Reclamation. He had a sunburn, a firm handshake, and a presentation he’d given 47 times in 47 counties across the Great Plains.
The presentation was always the same. The message was always the same. water. Specifically, the Ogalala aquifer, the largest underground reservoir in North America, stretching from South Dakota to Texas, holding enough water to fill Lake Huron. The aquifer sat beneath western Kansas like a hidden ocean. And the federal government had a plan to tap it. Center pivot irrigation. You’ve seen them. Those giant sprinkler systems that roll across a field on wheels, turning a quarter mile circle of dry prairie into a green paradise.
The technology had been around since the 50s. But in 1972, the government was offering something new. Subsidized loans to install them, low interest rates, easy terms, and water rights so cheap they might as well have been free. Richard Tully held his meeting at the Sheridan County Community Center on a Tuesday evening in April. Every farmer in the county came. 43 men in work boots and caps sitting in folding chairs, looking at charts and diagrams of center pivot systems and projected corn yields.
The numbers were staggering. Dryland wheat in western Kansas yielded about 25 bushels an acre in a good year. Irrigated corn yielded 140. The math was simple. Irrigation multiplied your income by four or five times. The cost of a center pivot system about $35,000 for a quarter section could be paid off in three good years. Gentlemen, Richard Tully said, standing behind a folding table with his charts. The water is already there. It’s been sitting under your feet for 10,000 years.
All you have to do is pump it. Every farmer in that room signed up that night. Every farmer except one. Alvin Ducker was 61 years old and had farmed 320 acres of dryland wheat in Sheridan County since 1933, the worst year of the Dust Bowl, the year the sky turned black and the top soil blew to Chicago. He’d been 18 years old, just married, just starting, and the land had tried to kill him before he’d planted his first crop.
He’d survived not by borrowing, not by expanding, not by chasing the latest technology. He’d survived by doing one thing, refusing to depend on anything he couldn’t control. Alvin sat in the back row of that community center meeting and listened to every word Richard Tully said. He looked at the charts. He looked at the loan terms. He looked at the projected yields. And when the signup sheets were passed around and every farmer in the row ahead of him signed his name, Alvin passed the sheet to the man behind him without picking up the pen.
After the meeting, Richard Tully approached him in the parking lot. Mr. Ducker, I noticed you didn’t sign up. Can I answer any questions for you? Alvin was leaning against his truck, a 1965 Ford F250, faded red, held together by rust and stubbornness. He looked at Richard Tully. The way a man looks at someone selling something that sounds too good. How deep is this aquafer? Alvin asked. Varies. Under Sheridan County, between 100 and 200 ft of saturated thickness, and how fast does it recharge?
Richard Tully hesitated. That wasn’t a question farmers usually asked. The recharge rate depends on rainfall and soil permeability. In this part of Kansas, it’s approximately half an inch per year. Half an inch per year, Alvin repeated. And how much water does a center pivot pull out per year? About 18 in of water per acre per growing season. So, you’re pulling out 18 in and putting back half an inch. Richard Tully opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again.
The aquafer has enormous capacity, Mr. Ducker. At current projected usage rates, the water will last how long? Decades? 50 years at minimum? Probably longer. Alvin nodded slowly. 50 years. And what happens in year 51? Richard Tully didn’t answer that question. Nobody ever did. Alvin pushed himself off the truck. I’ve been farming this ground for 39 years. My father farmed it before me. The only thing I’ve learned in 39 years is this. Free water doesn’t exist. Somebody always pays.
If it’s not you, it’s your son. If it’s not your son, it’s the land. He got in his truck. I appreciate the offer, but I’ll find my own water. He drove home. Now, let me tell you what happened next because this is where the story splits into two paths. And the two paths are the whole point. Path one, everybody else. Within two years, 37 of the 43 farmers in Sheridan County had installed center pivot irrigation systems. The transformation was visible from the air where there had been a patchwork of brown dryland fields, wheat, sorghum, there
were now green circles, perfect green circles a/4 mile across, fed by underground water pumped through aluminum pipes by diesel engines running day and night. Corn everywhere. Corn, irrigated corn, yielding 130, 140, 150 bushels an acre. The grain elevator and Hawky had to build a new storage bin. The JD dealership sold more equipment in 1974 than in the previous 10 years combined. Land that had been worth $80 an acre in 1970 was selling for 300 by 1976 was selling for 300 by 1976.
Once Sheridan County was booming, the water was flowing. The money was rolling in and everyone, the farmers, the banker, the JD dealer, the county agent, looked at Alvin Ducker’s 320 acres of dryland wheat and shook their heads. Old Alvin’s going to die broke on dry ground, they said at the co-op. Stubborn old man won’t take free money. The JD dealer, a man named Lyall Gunderson, put it more bluntly. He was standing in his showroom full of new four-wheel drive tractors and center pivot parts when someone mentioned Alvin’s name.
Alvin Ducker is farming like it’s 1935. Lyall said dryland wheat, no irrigation, no new equipment. Driving a farm all that’s older than his grandkids. The man’s a museum piece. In 5 years he’ll be bankrupt and I’ll be selling his land to someone who knows what to do with it. That was 1974. Remember that year? Remember what Lyall Gunderson said? Because we’re going to come back to it. Path two. Alvin Ducker. The morning after that community center meeting, Alvin drove his farm all H to the northeast corner of his property, the lowest point on his 320
acres, where a shallow draw collected rainwater in the spring, and the grass stayed green a week longer than anywhere else. He’d been watching that spot for 39 years. He knew what it meant. Somewhere below that draw, the water table was closer to the surface than anywhere else on his land. Not the Ogalala. The Ogalala was 150 ft down. This was something shallower, a perched water table fed by local rainfall, sitting in a layer of gravel and sand maybe 40 or 50 ft below the surface.
It wasn’t the Ogalala. It wasn’t an ocean of water. It was a creek compared to a river, but it was his. Alvin started digging, not with a drilling rig. He couldn’t afford one, and he didn’t trust them anyway. A drilling rig punched through everything. Gravel, sand, clay, rock, without telling you what it was going through. Alvin wanted to know every inch of what was under his ground. He dug by hand, shovel, pickaxe, and a bucket on a rope 4t in diameter straight down.
He lined the walls with field stone as he went. Stones he’d been pulling out of his fields for 39 years and piling along the fence rows. It took him 4 months. He dug in the mornings before the heat, and again in the evenings, when the shadow of the windmill reached the hole. 61 years old, lean as wire, standing at the bottom of a shaft that got deeper every day, filling a bucket with dirt and hauling it up with a hand winch.
His neighbors drove past and stared. Some stopped. “Alvin, what in God’s name are you doing? Digging a well by hand? That’s right. The government will put in a center pivot for $35,000 on a 20-year loan at 4%. ” And you’re digging a hole in the ground with a shovel. That’s right. You’re out of your mind. Maybe. At 37 ft, Alvin hit gravel. Wet gravel. The water seeped in slowly at first. A puddle at the bottom of the shaft, then an inch, then 2 in.
By the time he dug to 42 ft, the water was rising faster than he could bail. He’d found it. He lined the bottom with more field stone, installed a hand pump, and later added a small windmill pump that he built from salvaged parts. An old air motor frame, new sucker rod, leather cups he cut himself. Total cost of Alvin Ducker’s well, about $300 in materials, plus 4 months of his own labor. The well produced 8 gall per minute.
Not much. A center pivot used 800. But Alvin didn’t need 800 gall minute. He wasn’t growing irrigated corn. He was growing dryland wheat, a crop that needed rain, not pipes. The well was for his house, his livestock, and his garden, and for one other thing that nobody understood at the time, insurance. “What do you mean insurance?” His wife Mabel asked him. “Someday,” Alvin said. “The big water is going to run out. When it does, this little water is going to be the most valuable thing in the county.” Mabel looked at the well, looked at the windmill, and looked at her husband.
You’re either the smartest man in Kansas or the craziest, she said. Might be both. Alvin said. Now, let me tell you about the next 15 years. Because this is where the two paths start to diverge slowly at first, then all at once. 1972 through 1978, the boom years. Irrigated farmers in Sheridan County were making more money than they’d ever seen. Corn prices were high. Yields were high. Everyone expanded. More pivots, more acres, more loans. Land prices climbed from $80 to $300 to $500 an acre.
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.
Because Alvin had been rotating wheat with building organic matter, keeping the soil healthy, his ground hadn’t been stressed by irrigation and then abandoned. It had been steady all along, and his well, that 42-t hole he dug by hand while everyone laughed, was still pumping. Let me tell you about the morning. Everything changed. August of 1987, the hottest summer in 15 years. No rain since June. The dry land crops were hurting. Alvin’s included. But at least they were alive.
The irrigated crops that still had water were surviving. The ones that didn’t were dead. At 6:00 in the morning, Alvin was at his well filling a stock tank for his cattle when he saw a pickup truck coming up his drive, then another one behind it, then a third. The first truck was Gene Willard, the man whose pivot had gone dry 3 years earlier. He drilled deeper twice, and the second hole had come up empty in June. The second truck was Dale Heinen.
His well had been producing 300 gall a minute in 75. It was producing 40 in 87. The third truck was Lyall Gunderson, the JD dealer, the man who’d called Alvin a museum piece in 1974. Lyall had closed the dealership in ‘ 86. No one was buying equipment when the water was running out. He’d gone back to farming his own ground, put in a center pivot on his quarter section, and watched it go dry in two years. All three trucks had the same thing in the back.
Empty water containers. Alvin stood by his well with a tin cup in his hand and watched the three men get out of their trucks and walk toward him. Nobody said anything for a long time. Finally, Jean Willard spoke. Alvin, we need water for livestock. Our wells are dry. Alvin looked at the three men. He looked at the empty containers. He looked at his well, still producing, still steady, still pumping the same 8 gall a minute had pumped since 1972.
How many head between you? Alvin asked. About 160 total. That’s a lot of water. We know. We’ll pay whatever you want. Alvin shook his head. I don’t want your money. He looked at Lyall Gunderson. I seem to remember you saying I’d be bankrupt in 5 years and you’d be selling my land. Lyall looked at the ground. His face was red. And it wasn’t from the sun. That was a stupid thing to say. Lyall said quietly. I’m sorry.
Alvin let the silence sit for a moment. Then he nodded. Bring your tanks. I’ll fill what I can, but you’re going to have to take turns. This well gives 8 gall a minute, not 800. Patience is part of the deal. He filled their tanks that morning. He filled them the next day and the day after that. For the rest of that summer, Alvin Ducker’s 42 ft handdug well kept 160 head of cattle alive on three farms that had spent 15 years laughing at the man who dug it.
Now, let me tell you about the year that followed. because the water wasn’t the only thing Alvin shared. In the fall of 87, after the heat broke and a few inches of rain finally came, the county extension agent, a young man named Paul Haske, drove out to Alvin’s farm. He’d heard the stories. He wanted to see the well. Alvin showed him, showed him the fieldstone lining, the shallow aquifer, the windmill pump, the 8 gall a minute that had never fluctuated.
Mr. Ducker Paul said, “Do you realize you’re the only operational private water source in the northwest quarter of the county? Every Ogalala well within 6 mi of here is either dry or declining.” I know your well taps a completely different water source. A perched table fed by surface infiltration. It’s sustainable because it recharges annually. I know that, too. Why didn’t you tell anyone? Why didn’t you share this with the extension service or the water district? Or I tried, Alvin said.
In 72, I left the geological survey report at the co-op. Nobody read it. In 78, I told Gene Willard his well was pulling too much. He told me to mind my own business. In ‘ 82, I went to the water district meeting and asked them to look at the decline numbers. They said the aquafer would last another 50 years. He paused. You can’t help people who think they don’t have a problem. You can only be ready when they figure it out.
Well, Paul Hask sat in Alvin’s kitchen that afternoon and listened to a 66-year-old dryland farmer explain the hydrogeeology of western Kansas in terms that no university professor had ever used. Alvin explained it like this. The Ogalala is like a savings account your greatgrandfather left you. It took 10,000 years to fill. You can spend it fast or slow, but once it’s gone, it’s gone. Nobody alive today will see it refill. A shallow well is like a paycheck. It’s smaller, but it comes back every year.
You can live on a paycheck if you’re careful. You can’t live on a savings account forever if you’re spending more than it earns. Paul asked if he could write that down. Alvin said he could do whatever he wanted with it. The extension agent published a report the following spring. The title was perched water tables as supplemental water sources in western Kansas. It cited Alvin Ducker’s well as the primary case study. The report recommended that farmers in declining aquafer areas explore shallow well development as a backup water source for livestock and domestic use.
The report was read by exactly 12 people in Sheridan County. But word of mouth is more powerful than reports. The story of Alvin’s well, the handdug well that everyone laughed at. The well that was still running when the Ogalala went dry, spread across western Kansas, the way stories always spread in farm country. Slowly at first, then faster, then everywhere. By 1990, four other farmers in Sheridan County had dug or drilled shallow wells targeting perched water tables. None of them produced as much as Alvin’s.
His location was unusually good. But all of them produced something. Enough for livestock, enough for a household, enough to survive while the Ogalala kept dropping. Alvin never charged anyone for the water. He never said, “I told you so.” Except once to Lyall Gunderson, and even then it was gentle. What he did say to anyone who would listen, was this. Don’t depend on what you can’t control. The government didn’t give you free water. They gave you a loan against an aquifer that can’t pay it back.
When the bill comes due, and it always comes due, the government won’t be here. You will. Let me tell you about the end. Because every story needs one. Alvin Ducker died in 1994 at the age of 83. He died the way he’d lived, quietly on his own land, without owing anything to anyone. He’d farmed 320 acres of dryland wheat for 61 years. He’d never installed a center pivot. He’d never borrowed money for equipment. He’d never pumped a gallon from the Ogalala.
His well was still producing 8 gallons a minute on the day he died. His son Wayne took over the farm. Wayne was 55 years old, had worked alongside his father his entire life, and had the same disposition, quiet, watchful, patient. Wayne kept farming dry land. He kept the well-maintained. He kept filling his neighbors stock tanks when they needed it. By the year 2000, the Ogalala aquifer under Sheridan County had declined by over 80 ft from its 1972 level.
30% of the wells drilled during the irrigation boom were either dry or producing less than a quarter of their original capacity. Several farms had been abandoned. The green circles were disappearing from the landscape, replaced by brown earth and idle pivot structures standing like skeletons in empty fields. At the county fair in 2001, the extension service put up a display about water conservation. One panel showed the aquafer decline graph, a line dropping like a cliff from 1972 to the present.
Another panel showed photographs of abandoned center pivots. And in the center of the display, framed and mounted, was a photograph of Alvin Ducker standing beside his hand dug well in 1973. He was 62 years old. In the picture, Lena’s wire holding a tin cup of water. The caption read, “Alvin Ducker, Sheridan County, dug this well by hand in 1972 while his neighbors installed center pivot irrigation. His well is still producing today. The Ogalala beneath his neighbors farms has dropped 80 ft.
Wayne Ducker stood at the back of the fair tent and read the caption. Read the caption. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. His father had said it all in 1972 in a parking lot to a government man with a briefcase full of promises. Free water doesn’t exist. The pumps have been running for 50 years now. The Ogalala is still dropping. The government is still promising solutions. And somewhere in Sheridan County, Kansas, a handdug well lined with field stone 42 feet deep, built with a shovel and a pickaxe and 4 months of patience, is still pumping 8 gall a minute.
The same 8 gallons it’s been pumping since 1972. The man who dug it is gone. The neighbors who laughed are mostly gone. The center pivots that were going to change everything are rusting in empty fields, but the water is still there, right where Alvin said it would be. Sometimes the man who digs by hand sees deeper than the man who drills by machine. Sometimes the cheapest solution is the one that lasts, and sometimes free is the most expensive word in the English language.
Alvin Ducker knew that. He knew it at 61. Standing in a parking lot doing math that nobody else wanted to do. 18 in out. Half an inch back. He went home and dug a hole.
