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 alw
