TWTBACD Ch.39 - The Second Great Drought

Chapter 39

The Second Great Drought

2045 — Climate Rupture

2045: North American drought, wells run dry in Kansas

The North American drought of 2045 was the event that converted the remaining climate skeptics in the American agricultural community — not because of the science, which had been clear for decades, but because of the wells.

In June 2045, twenty-seven percent of the water wells in western Kansas ceased producing. Not ran low. Ceased. The Ogallala Aquifer, which underlaid the Great Plains and had been drawn down for a century of intensive irrigation, reached in that summer the threshold that hydrologists had been warning about since the 1990s: the point at which the extraction rate exceeded the natural recharge rate so comprehensively that the aquifer was no longer a renewable resource but a depleting one, and was now depleted.

Travis Hayes was not in Kansas. His farm was in Iowa, and his stewardship had been among the most careful in the Midwest. But the drought index in Iowa was still the worst in sixty years. The AI farm system had predicted it seven months earlier. Travis had prepared. He had reduced his corn acreage by twenty percent and shifted to drought-tolerant varieties. He had pre-positioned the water management protocols. He made sixty percent of his normal corn yield and a hundred percent of his cover crop yield, which was not economically optimal and was the right decision.

His neighbour Dale Lindqvist — the man who had sat in the back of Travis's 2041 cooperative meeting and later implemented the shared water protocols — fared better than any of his other neighbours. The county cooperative Travis had pushed into existence in 2041 had, by 2045, become a water management institution with genuine collective leverage. Farms that were part of it survived the 2045 drought at twice the yield rate of comparable farms outside it.

Dale Hayes watched from his chair on the porch. He was seventy-one. His knees were bad and his vision was declining and his mind was as sharp as it had ever been. He watched his son manage the farm through the worst summer in memory with the competence of someone who had been preparing for this specific summer, in all its specifics, since he was twelve years old.

'You built this for today,' Dale said, meaning the cover crops, the cooperative, the AI system, the water agreements, all of it.

'I built it for all the todays that are coming,' Travis said. 'Today is just one of them.'