In the first few weeks of a job I took for two reasons – to travel and receive tuition remission (which wouldn’t deliver either outcome) – I researched species impacted by agriculture: dolphins in China’s Yangtze River, koalas in Australia’s New South Wales and Sandhill Cranes in Nebraska. How little I knew about the connectivity […]

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 […]

Sarah Sortum grew up near Taylor, Nebraska, on her family’s cattle ranch in the Sandhills, the descendant of homesteaders. Her family continues to operate on the same property, running their own cattle, custom grazing operations for others, and Calamus Outfitters, a nature-based tourism operation.

The roads were dark, the truck was full of gear, and the Platte Basin Timelapse team was headed to the Nebraska Sandhills.  We were on our way to the Switzer Ranch, 16 miles northwest of Burwell, Nebr., to film a cattle drive for our forthcoming documentary. This would be my first time experiencing a cattle drive […]

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.

While surface water development led the early history of irrigation in Nebraska, it became common for farmers to tap the wealth of water below ground beginning in the 1930s.

Water loss through porous canals and ditches has always been an issue for irrigators, so districts and farmers alike have lined or sealed the waterways to reduce loss. “We can’t afford to lose a whole lot of water out of the canal,” Busch said, but “sealing a canal is a catch-22 because that water that comes out of them canals does replenish our groundwater system.”

In the early 1900s in the arid West, C. W. McConaughy recognized the discontinuity between high river flows in the spring and low flows in the middle of summer, when farmers needed water most. McConaughy, a grain merchant and mayor of Holdrege, Nebraska, developed the idea of supplemental irrigation.

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 […]

Follow a snowflake from the Colorado Rockies through Wyoming dams and reservoirs to fields in the Nebraska panhandle.