It’s 4 a.m. and Forsberg and I are on the road to the Crane Trust south of Wood River, Nebraska. I’ve visited the Crane Trust twice before this morning: once for a brief school-sanctioned plunge into the Platte River with my classmates sophomore year, and again a few months ago to watch Sandhill Cranes migrating […]

I lived in the same house in rural Nebraska, situated north of Wood River and south of Cairo, until moving to Lincoln for college in 2011. A year later, I worried my parents by traveling to India as a journalism student for a three-week documentary class. It wasn’t until I returned that I really gave […]

Water is one of our most precious resources. With floods, hurricanes, and droughts occurring more frequently, people are becoming more aware of the fragile planet we live on and taking action to lessen their environmental impact. Urban agriculture has become a popular solution and positive tool that can be used to not only strengthen Lincoln’s […]

Nebraska irrigates more farmland than any state in the nation, and a lot of that water is pumped from underground. A new program for sharing Nebraska’s groundwater may help both farmers and endangered species.

Where Nebraska was once covered by grassland, most of the land is now used for agriculture. The loss of prairie causes problems for native species and on marginal land it can create issues with erosion and water quality. Conservationists are working to rebuild parts of the prairie in the Midwest.

____________________________________ Cheesman Dam At the end of the 19th century Denver was reaching the half-century mark. By 1900, the former mining camp founded in 1858 at the confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River had grown to 130,000. Denver’s early efforts at providing safe and reliable water first depended on water taken directly […]

While staring at the Platte River this past week, I grappled with the severity of the drought in California and the mandatory restrictions of water use there. It was intangible, a concept I just couldn’t grasp while watching the girth of surface water flooding Nebraska this year. California farmers are losing crops because there isn’t […]

Wet meadows are groundwater-fed wetlands within larger grassland environments. Along the Platte…

A couple weeks ago, Ariana Brocious and I were reporting on sugar beets in the western Nebraska panhandle. We packed several interviews into two days talking with large-scale farmers and small-scale farmers, irrigation district managers and natural resource managers. It’s amazing how much there is to know about water policy and the effects humans have […]

Driving into Mullen Nebraska, in the heart of the Sandhills, the wind howled outside our Suburban as the sun set over a vast landscape. The few hundred residents of the biggest little town in Hooker County pride themselves on hospitality—a hospitality that the weariest of travelers would certainly have come to love, providing a brief reprieve from powerful gusts.