Storm lights in the sky near Wood River, Nebraska

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The aquifer’s decline will be twinned with the increasing impacts of climate change, which will add more warm days and longer, more frequent droughts, scientists predict. Already, warmer-than-average evening temperatures in feedlots in southwest Kansas mean that beef cattle drink more water than they did in cooler years. As more farmers return to dryland farming, large farms are likely to swallow smaller family farms, because dry farming, with lower yields, requires more land to be profitable. Irrigation will disappear from most places, so more small towns will fade away. Countless towns across the Plains already teeter on the brink of extinction. The day I visited Lazbuddie, a hiccup of a community in Texas cotton country with fewer than a hundred residents, the postmistress sold a single stamp. This was a week before Christmas.

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