This story, the first in an occasional series about water challenges facing the American heartland, is a partnership between Stateline and the Kansas Reflector.
MOSCOW, Kansas — Brownie Wilson pulls off a remote dirt road right through a steep ditch and onto a farmer’s field.
He hops out of his white Silverado pickup, mud covering nearly all of it except the Kansas Geological Survey logo stuck on the side with electrical tape. Dry cornstalks crunch under his work boots as he makes his way to a decommissioned irrigation well.
He unspools a steel highway tape measure a few feet at a time and feeds it into the well until gravity takes over. He keeps a thumb on it to control the speed.
How much of the tape comes out wet lets him calculate how much water has been lost here.
Wilson crisscrosses western Kansas every January to measure wells and track the rapid decline of the Ogallala Aquifer, which contains the nation’s largest underground store of fresh water.
Last year, some wells had dropped 10 feet or more because of the severe 2022 drought. But this year, they stayed about the same or dropped a couple feet. Some of these wells have dropped more than 100 feet since Wilson started working for the agency in 2001, he said.
“Some of our issues looking forward look gargantuan,” Wilson said. “But I do think we can peck away at it and make some headway.”
The Ogallala Aquifer, the underground rock and sediment formation that spans eight states from South Dakota to the Texas panhandle, is the only reliable water source for some parts of the region. But for decades, states have allowed farmers to overpump groundwater to irrigate corn and other crops that would otherwise struggle on the arid High Plains.
Now, the disappearing water is threatening more than just agriculture. Rural communities are facing dire futures where water is no longer a certainty. Across the Ogallala, small towns and cities built around agriculture are facing a twisted threat: The very industry that made their communities might just eradicate them.
Kansas Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly acknowledges some communities are just a generation away from running out of water. But she said there’s still time to act.
“If they do nothing, I think they’re going to suffer the consequences,” Kelly said in an interview.
Today, the aquifer supports 20% of the nation’s wheat, corn, cotton and cattle production and represents 30% of all water used for irrigation in the United States.
Depletion is forcing aquifer-dependent communities across the region to dig deeper wells, purchase expensive water rights from farmers, build pipelines and recycle their water supplies in new ways to save every drop possible.
Since the mid-20th century, when large-scale irrigation began, water levels in the stretches of the Ogallala underlying Kansas have dropped an average 28.2 feet farther below the surface, far worse than the eight-state average of 16.8 feet.
