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.
