Old timers from the Texas Panhandle through western Kansas agree that what’s not going on during these early spring days has produced sad glimpses of the past.
Inadequate rain over depleting irrigation, contributing mightily to failed winter wheat, has brought back dirty scenes from yesteryear.
But hope still persists in the currently desert-like western Kansas and neighboring regions, with efforts to keep agriculture alive on the semi-arid Plains, by protecting precious soil and underground water supplies.
“We’re definitely in a difficult period with the drought. We’re hopeful things will turn around,” said Katie Durham, manager of Scott City, Kansas-based Groundwater Management District No. 1, where cooperation and stewardship among farmers is showing promise despite these bone-dry times.
GMD 1, encompassing parts of Scott, Wichita, Greeley, Wallace and Lane counties in western Kansas, received roughly 8 inches of rainfall in 2022, she said, the first single digit result in some 117 years.
“We were seeing 13 to 16 inches in the Dust Bowl era,” she said. “We saw arguably worse conditions last year than in (drought years) 2010 and 2011.”
Precipitation so far in 2023 is just as dismal.
“When you have years of drought, you’re gonna have more usage in the aquifer and have higher decline,” Durham said. “You hope for normal or wet years when you see less decline.”
Dryland fields spotted April 1 along Kansas Highway 156 from Garden City northeast through Finney and Hodgeman counties, sported only tufts of green vegetation, or none at all.
Some drill ridges made in the soil last fall, presenting little or no emergence of plant matter, had blown full of dust or what used to be precious topsoil.
Seeds blessed with irrigation presented a more encouraging green blanket to passersby, but those were few.
Much of the patchy rolling landscape had been scratched by chisel plows to lessen soil erosion.
Riding along the lonesome highway, surfing through various radio stations, weather reports were grim, carrying little or no chance for moisture in local forecasts.
Farther north in Lane County, farmers Vance and Louise Ehmke were gearing their two chisels for duty. The April 4 forecast warned of wind gusts up to 70 miles per hour. Lane County dodged that when the winds diverted to the south, but chances for more gales still loom, along with other damage, including prairie blazes.
“We’ve got wheat out here, but our two sets of chisel plows are ready to go. We’ve also got a disc ready, in case of fire,” he said. “We’ll keep our fingers crossed that they’ll stay up here at the farmstead.”
Chisels are fitted with shanks every 3 feet or so that are designed to rip up dirt clods, a.k.a “non erodible aggregates,” Ehmke said, creating a groove in the field to deflect the gusts.
Wind blows the heavier soil that doesn’t become airborne, producing “creeping erosion,” he said. “It rolls along and falls into the grooves. After a period of time, those grooves fill up. Then you need to go back in and do more chiseling.”
Ehmke estimated thousands of wheat acres in his midst have been abandoned so far.
“Some of it looks like the surface of the moon,” he said.
Wheat fields given up for dead might be planted to grain sorghum (milo), Ehmke said, if nothing else, to keep the ground from blowing, but “the outlook for milo is nearly suicide.”
Reporting from Rooks County, Kansas, farmer-rancher Jerry McReynolds was falling short of optimism.
“We’re better here, but we’re bad. We haven’t had much rain at all. Our ponds are nearly dried up, or about dried up,” he said.
McReynolds was blessed with up to three-quarters of an inch of rain last September, which prompted him to begin planting. His wheat emerged, “but it’s just held on.”
Two snows, one of them providing a 6-inch blanket, provided some moisture, but not enough subsoil saturation.
“It’s been a really dry winter, but we’re not as bad as west of us,” McReynolds said. “Once you get west of the state line, around Burlington, (Colorado), it’s better.”
Back in Rooks County, he said “(pasture) grass is trying to come, but it’s not going to last very long unless we get some rain.”
Two late “skiffs of snow” encouraged the farmer to plant some oats, which are showing some promise.
The Ehmkes have two circles of triticale under irrigation.
“It takes way less water than corn,” Vance said.
Some irrigation systems in southwest Kansas have been running since January, said Brownie Wilson, water data manager for the Kansas Geological Survey.
The annual measuring of Kansas wells in January—by the KGS and Division of Water Resources—were predictably alarming, thanks to the lingering drought. Underground supplies of precious water in the Ogallala Aquifer were reduced by 2.8 to 3 feet in southwestern Kansas since they were last measured in early 2022.
Average declines from Ogallala Aquifer wells in western Kansas were 1.9 to 2 feet, and from Hamilton County near the Colorado border, to Harvey County in south central Kansas, Wilson said, a lot of water level declines were two feet or more.
“Levels in south central Kansas go up and down around the zero line, and if the rains come back, you will see some recharge,” he said.
Measurements in some southwest Kansas wells were “a little noisy,” in January he said, meaning the results were difficult to plot, because the pumping season started earlier than normal.
“In Stanton and Grant (counties), anybody who had wheat in—they were irrigating,” he said. “When they got snow events, they turned them off, but if they were pumping, we didn’t measure those wells. Even if we go back a month later, the well hasn’t had a chance to recover.”
Although many wells have dried up, irrigators understand tougher times are ahead without continued efforts to save and protect the resource.
Hope is out there, among those with imagination in their heads and stewardship in their hearts.
Tim Unruh can be reached at [email protected].
