Every Farmer Took Free Water—15 Years Later, He Was the Only One Left Standing

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.