We are off the road today. Fall harvest just began. Silage trucks fill up at a rate of one truck/five minutes.

Brimming with chopped corn plant, they speed down roads to weigh stations.

Biking in these conditions is a death wish.  So instead of cycling, we have the good fortune to join a friend of Jen’s family in an air-conditioned four-wheel tour of the biggest agricultural producing district in the nation.

We begin in a wheat field.

Red winter wheat is planted in the Fall  partly to keep the soil from blowing after corn harvest.  The father of a friend of Jen’s is out planting seed.  He has been farming this land since the 1980s.  Before he farmed for other families for 50 cents an hour while working shifts at the local gas plant. It was hard to break into farming in the 1970s. People who had land kept ahold of it. After WWII, Grant County experienced a gas and oil boom.  Land that the banks gave away a decade earlier became suddenly valuable.

Breaking into farming also was hindered by the cost of equipment.  Each of these combines costs $300,000.

And this is not the only piece of equipment you need. Today’s work requires this John Deere tractor.

It pulls this planter.

The red truck contains the wheat seed which is distributed into 24 wells. This computer ensures that the seed is planted in the right amount in the right place, producing not a square, but a circle.

A circle is important because in this arid region farmers irrigate using a center-pivot system. Water is distributed to an above ground pipe.  The pipe has sprinklers along its length and is mounted on wheeled towers that pivot, making a circle.

Water comes from wells that are often over several hundred feet deep.  We learn about this one, which pumps from a depth of 500 feet.

It takes a tremendous amount of energy to pump water up this distance.  Windmills are no longer sufficient.  Instead of wind power, today energy extracted from carbon lifts water from aquifers of the Pliocene into the fields of the Anthropocene.

1961 Map of an Oil Well

The water itself is “free” to land owners who possess the property rights to minerals and water beneath their land.  However, one cannot just freely take water.  Amounts are regulated by the state and county.  If you look closely, you can see the chain placed around this meter so that no one can remove it to tamper with its reading.

While limits are set, it is not unusual to find a well which is allowed to cover fields with as much as 20 feet of water each year (water limits were set several decades ago when water was more plentiful).  However, the cost of pumping is often prohibitive. Natural gas (a cheaper form of energy) is running out. Now electricity runs 125 horse power motors at $7000/month.

The rising costs of the “inputs” needed to farm mean that to continue to make the same amount of money each year, one has to work bigger and faster.  Those who live on the coasts—like myself—often think there is something called Big Ag that is buying up “the family farm.”  Instead, the family farm is itself becoming big, purchasing larger and larger combines, tractors, and planters to farm more and more land.

Resting in a Combine Wheel

These ever growing scales of operation work on an ever more efficiently designed landscapes. From where we stand, the source of water to grow a crop, the energy to pump it, and the co-op to buy it are all clearly visible.

This is part of what has made this one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world. It efficiently delivers to the farmer’s fields all the inputs needed to grow crops.

Yet despite this extensive infrastructure, the region faces two main limits: water and isolation.  SW Kansas is one of the most remote places in America.  According to a recent Oxford University study, four of this nation’s ten most remote towns—towns farthest from a population center of 75,000 people or more—are here in Western Kansas. One consequence is that it is hard to bring in any kind of manufacturing. The costs of transporting in and out materials for production are just too high. More than a century ago, the railroads largely bypassed this corner of Kansas, making transport difficult. The Cimmaron Valley Railroad runs only once or twice a week, and it is in bad disrepair.

Eldon Ansel did invent the cab for the tractor in Ulysses, Kansas and today Monty Teeter creates drag line irrigation systems, but these are remarkable exceptions.

Instead of developing manufacturing, the region continues to develop industrial agriculture.  In the 1970s, feed lots arrived.  Grant County feeders—the first feed lot in Western Kansas—and the largest in the nation–opened in 1974. I was amazed we could drive right in.

When cattle trucks drive in, they are weighed.

With feed made from the silage we saw earlier, animals gain 900 pounds in 9 months.

In addition to Angus cows headed for the slaughterhouses, the region today raises milk cows and runs large dairies.  The number of Jersey cows grew from a few hundred to 200,000 in a matter of a few years.

While the dairy cows brought a new industry to the region, it put another heavy strain on the Ogallala. One dairy cow consumes 30-50 gallons of water a day, and that can double in times of high stress.

Efforts are underway to harvest the water back.  This year, the nation’s largest dry milk powder processing plant opened in Garden City, Kansas. For every four million gallons of milk processed a day, 1 million gallons of “waste” water is generated.  This water is used to cool the neighboring ethanol plant.  The head of the water district hopes some also might be used for public uses, like watering the football field.

But the margins are thin and the risks are real.  Two hours after we left Garden City, a fire started in the milk powder plant.  It did a million dollars of damage, and it is unclear when the pant will re-open.

“We take whatever and try not to complain,” a local farmer explains to us. “We are always short.”

Life here is lived on the edge.  Things come and things go. The Golden schoolhouse, for example, once stood between these two trees.

Now the only marker of Golden is this petroleum fueling station.

Our day ends in Golden with a visit to Larry Kepley. His family arrived here in 1888.  Larry relays with a twinkle in his eye a story his father once told him:  I asked Grandad, “Why did you come?”  He responded: “They told me there were no trees and no rocks.  They did not tell me there was no water.”  The opportunity did not turn out quite how Grandad Kepley had hoped.  But Golden it would be. In those early years, the Kelpleys hauled water up in a bucket from 90 feet down to grow sweet potatoes. Today their land supports 54 varieties of trees and shrubs.

One is a Hawthorne that is a favorite of the birds. Another is a lightning rod.  It—and the house—have been hit several times.  Yet the beauty of life and the joy of a good story persists.