The Ocean Below the Grass

One of the great ironies of the natural world is the fact that just below one of Earth's driest agricultural regions lays a 174,000 square-mile ocean. That huge expanse of pure, sweet water has been one of the selling points for the parade of flimflammers who sold and re-sold the Great Plains to gullible immigrants, and dreamers of every sort. The underground ocean is the Ogallala Aquifer. If those hucksters missed the irony of the aquifer's juxtaposition to the arid land above, then they likely also missed the crueler irony of naming it for the dispossessed people of Red Cloud and Crazy Horse.

The existence of that water has always been a blessing and a comfort to the people who lived on, and loved, the land above. Jill and I have marveled, with a quiet reverence, at Ogallala water rushing from the ground with enough volume to providing habitat for rainbow trout in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. We've laid in the shade of cottonwoods on the staked plains of Texas where such trees could never have grown without the tiny spring that somehow found its way to the surface from far below. Every time we come across these astounding incongruities made possible by the Ogallala Aquifer we feel a kinship to the people who came before us and were astounded in the same way.

It is hard to say what the Native Americans and the early settlers would have done with the knowledge that the isolated water they saw on the plains was connected to an ancient reservoir, tens of millions of years old, that, if brought to the surface, would cover the core of the Great Plains with a flood thirty feet deep. That's 3.5 billion acre feet of water; more than any Plains Indian was likely to see in a life-time. We don't know what, if anything Red Cloud and Crazy Horse would have done, but we do know what the homesteaders and industrialist have done with that knowledge. They have done their best to bring it to bear on the fantasy of turning the world's grandest grassland into a densely populated farmer's paradise.

One pumping scheme after another has taken aim at the Ogallala Aquifer. First it was simple, subsistence water for homesteaders, then community water to build fraudulent railroad towns, then the rush to plough and irrigate the ruined rangeland after the dustbowl. At present there are more than 200,000 irrigation wells drilled into the Ogallala Aquifer and still the "farmers" are hanging on by their fingernails. Innocents and cynicisms have danced the Ogallala jig for a century and the upshot has been a 200 foot fall in the water level of the subterranean aquifer and an ecological disaster on the surface.

The exploitation of the Great Plains' legitimate water source is earmarked with monumental hubris, greed, and lack of common sense. But the latest manifestation of the drive to extract, and spray into the atmosphere, the most important element of life on the Great Plains seems the most cynical.

Jill and I just returned from a trip to the Llano Estacada: the High Plains region engulfing most of the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and parts of Kansas and New Mexico. It is a flat and tormented country; the subject of Timothy Egan's award winning book, THE WORST HARD TIMES. I used to travel there with my falcons to hunt lesser prairie chickens. There were hundreds of thousands of chickens in those days and it was glorious to watch the falcons careen through the skies over the pastures that were only then beginning to make a recover from the abuse of the homestead era. I have been a visitor to this area for decades and a witness to pivot irrigators being erected in pastures as ploughs turned the second-growth grass wrong-side up.

Now the prairie chickens are gone, victims of the dishonest and subsidized cultivation of corn and cotton. When Jill and I visited the Llano this year, we had to content ourselves with watching the falcons chase the pigeons that hang around the enormous dairies that are springing up on the landscape faster than farm crops ever did.

Industrial, warm-climate dairies make fantastic pigeon habitat. The open loafing sheds are perfect for roosting and nesting. The spilled grain from the feed bunks insures a constant supply of food so the pigeons are fat and plentiful. Pigeons showed up in large numbers on the Llano when the dairies started coming in but, since I prefer remote pastures for my excursions I had never paid much attention to pigeons or dairies. But this year I had a young bird that liked to chase odd-ball game so the dairy pigeons of the Llano Estacado became our target. It is difficult to catch much of anything with a falcon and wild pigeons are particularly tough, but we set out driving toward each set of distant light poles that indicated that a new dairy had just been built. It was amazing how many dairies there were out there where, over the years, I had only seen failed homesteads being absorbed into battling pastures. Accompanying the dairies were miles of circle irrigators and, I could see by the equipment, that they were growing grain and alfalfa for the dairies. I was swearing at that and searching for pigeons so I didn't pay enough attention to Jill, who having been raised on a traditional dairy farm, was amazed at the operations we were passing.

These brand new dairies were of incredible size but situated on dirt roads, far from any population centers. They were multi-million dollar operations and there were lots of them. Jill was saying things like, "Wow, look at that." I was searching for pigeons. "There's a sick one." I wasn't paying attention to the dairies. "The smell is horrific."

I had to agree that the dairies smelled bad, but there were really a lot of pigeons around. "Look, they don't have any tails!" I was trying to find a bunch of birds that was far enough from the buildings to give the falcon a chance at catching one. "Oh, my God, there's a pile of dead calves."

When I looked to Jill, I saw the discomfort in her face. There was indeed a pile of dead calves along the side of the road. "I've seen a dozen dead ones," she said. "But that's the first pile." We were just passing one of the pens and I looked out at the hundreds of cows confined there. "There's something wrong with those cows," Jill said. "They must all have mastitis." I forgot about the pigeons. "I don't think so,' I said. "I think they have been bred for big utters."

"What about the tails?"

I had read about such things, but I hesitated to tell her what I thought was happening. "I think they cut them off on purpose, so the workers won't get slapped in the face with shitty tails when they're milking."

"The farmers cut the tails off?" She looked at me as if such a notion was impossible. "These aren't farmers."

We drove in silence past another few pens of gaunt Holsteins with gigantic utters. "Right you are, they're mass producers. So much for the farmer's," she said.

The pigeon hunting was over. We drove on but only to confirm that what Jill had been seeing was true at all the dairies we passed. We found thousands and thousands of tall deformed dairy cattle, obviously genetically selected to do nothing but produce milk and to survive in the squalor of confinement. "Why did all these dairies come here?"

The last question I could answer easily. They came for the water.

It takes an enormous amount of water to run dairies of the size now found on the Southern Great Plains. It takes even more water to grow the crops that are forced down those cows throats. For a while yet, the Ogallala Aquifer has that much water and getting to it is easy in states that are too hungry for development to worry much about regulation. The water is being pumped out willy-nilly: every dairy racing its neighbor to the bottom. And it is not just the water regulations that are "relaxed". Sanitation is shaky. Most workers are undocumented. The landlords are absent; still in California or Wisconsin or South America where they either depleted the land under the original farm, or sold it off for development. It is the Wild West of Water – take what you can get, as fast as you can. Because the next phase of the drying up of the Plains might be the worst. It is coming in the form of water for urban centers. Denver is eyeing Nebraska. T. Boon Pickens is angling for permits to drill and pipe the Ogallala from the panhandle to Dallas.

On the way back to the little cabin where we always stay when we visit the Llano Estacado, we drove past a small playa lake that is almost always dry. One day a dozen years ago I found a thousand green-head mallards crammed on the tiny pond that had appeared miraculously after a rare, hard rain. Playa lakes have a mysterious relationship to the Ogallala Aquifer. Every few years, these natural indentations on the prairie gather a little water from the sky and filter it down to mother Ogallala as a sort of thank you. The day we came to understand about the dairies of the Southern High Plains, the playa was dry and cockle burs grew in its bed.

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by Gervase Hittle

Real winter has finally come to us this month. It snowed, maybe a little more than we have seen for the past couple of years, and the temperature fell at night to what I call "hard cold" lows of -19 to -24°F. Sometimes these cold mornings had little or no wind, but a few times the wind was up to about 30 mph. At these times it is best to do outside chores quickly and go inside to catch up on e-mail or read a book or pay bills or watch the Australian Open tennis matches on TV. I did all of the above until I could no longer stand it; so I would go outside for a little while and find something else to do before bolting for the door again. I don't bolt so very well anymore, but I sure give it a good try.

On these days I am always amazed by what I see in the world outside, how little the weather extremes seem to affect the animal life out doors. Usually the first thing I see when I exit my door in the pre-dawn morning is the horses. They come up the hill from the windbreak of trees in their pasture and line up more or les patiently along the fence and wait for me to give them some hay and maybe a little grain. On these really cold days the long hairs on their winter coats are frosted: mane, tail, whiskers, eyelashes and back. The insulation to their bodies is so good that their body heat is retained and does not melt the frost. It takes the sun, perhaps reflecting off a wall to accomplish that.

Then I often see buffalo, deer, antelope, rabbits, coyotes, and birds going about their daily business as if it were summer. The birds have stayed on their roosts and perches, mostly out of the wind, and have remained almost motionless with their feathers fluffed up, burning the previous day's weight gain, until they can see well enough to begin their daily foraging in preparation of that night's cold.

The deer, most have been foraging all night, are seeking a quiet place (whitetails largely in the wooded areas along the creek and mule deer usually in or near brushy areas in a draw on a hillside) to sleep the day through. Rabbits, coyotes, and other four-legged fur bearers like fox and badger, raccoons and squirrels have their own agendas and follow them with what appears to be little regard or concern for the weather--not like human beings--for whom the weather is always a major concern.

The buffalo seem impervious to me. Neither summer heat nor winter storm and cold appear to have any noticeable effect on them. They don't seek much shelter. Oh, they may move on occasion to the lee side of a hill or into a draw, ostensible to avoid the wind--but that may not be at all the case. They may kind of "camp-out" in the sun, on a deceiving zero degree sun filled winters day, lying there peacefully, chewing their cud.

Perhaps being it, they never appear to worry about defining reality.