at its core, producing row crops will always be the same process: plant it, grow it, harvest it.

water impacts every stage of this cycle.

if there’s too much water when the seeds are planted, the young plant’s roots can’t get oxygen and die. if there’s not enough, they won’t germinate. a heavy storm after applying nitrogen fertilizer can wash the nutrients into the watershed, making it unavailable to the plant and polluting the water supply. too little rain and the plants can’t take up the nutrients that keep photosynthesis going. another big rain at harvest can make a field too wet for a producer to get equipment in and crops out of a field.

for decades, producers have used technology to control the risk of water.

in wet states like ohio, iowa, and illinois, they use drainage ditches and systems of underground pipes to channel water out of fields and prevent damage from standing water.

in the plains states, producers depend on irrigation, pulling water from below the ground to compensate for the lack of rainfall. the most popular irrigation system, rotating center-pivots, create the circles of green that dot the landscape in flyover country every summertime.

western nebraska sits on the heart of the ogallala aquifer, a vast stretch of water beneath the surface. when rain falls, it recharges the aquifer, but in the last 60 years, producers have been pulling water faster than the aquifer can replace it. according to a recent report from the denver post, the aquifer shrank twice as fast over the past six years compared with the previous 60. (watch this video about the ogallala aquifer to learn more.)

so far, 358 miles of surface rivers and streams in the high plains of colorado, kansas, and nebraska have dried up as a result, according to a study published last year in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences. researchers estimate another 177 miles will be gone by 2060 if water is withdrawn at the current rate.

what’s more, scientists have found impacts of a changing climate will reduce the availability of water in nebraska. a university of nebraska-lincoln report projected the state will have more frequent and severe drought and more days topping 100 degrees. they expect soil moisture to decline by 5 to 10 percent. and less snowpack in the rocky mountains means less water will flow downstream into nebraska.

less water overall makes each step of the “plant it, grow it, and harvest it” cycle more difficult. producing row crops on the plains requires individual farms to do more with a smaller amount.

like most nebraska farmers, roric paulman irrigates with water pulled from the ogallala.

he is among the producers taking action. paulman farms 8,500 acres with his son near sutherland, nebraska. their land sits between the republican and platte river, in the basin of both.

he’s making decisions on his farm with water and climate in mind.

“at my level i could brush that off and continue to do what i do, but collectively, if there’s a million of us that do that, that’s a pretty big detriment to climate change.”

in many ways, paulman works with the land to manage water.

after the growing season, he plants cover crops, like rye and oats, which hold in soil moisture and improve how well rainwater can soak into the soil. the roots of these plants hold soil in place in the off season, preventing it from eroding away when the land isn’t producing cash crops.

he also uses soil probes and weather stations in each field to understand how much moisture each part of a field has access to, so he can irrigate at a variable rate and give the plant only the amount it needs to be successful.

when paulman does irrigate, it is later in the growing season. where he once started irrigating in may, he now waits until july.

much of his land is also “ecofallow.” this system uses minimal tillage and improves how the soil holds moisture by planting the land in a rotation.

paulman also co-founded the nebraska water balance alliance, an organization advocating for better water management in the state. he even retired 400 acres of his farm and converted it to wildlife habitat.

but paulman serves as the exception, not the norm. implementing all these practices takes money and time that some farmers aren’t willing to spend.

cover cropping, for example, has been proven to reduce pollution from nutrient runoff and to improve soil health in a number of measures. cover crops can often reduce erosion and suppress weeds.

still, for most farmers the cost and time it takes to implement cover crops outweigh the benefits. in a 2015 unl survey of 258 nebraska farmers, 34% used cover crops in the 2014 growing season. cover crops are even less common in the eastern part of the corn belt. a study released in 2017 found that in the corn and soy fields of the heartland, only 7.1% of farmers used cover crops in indiana, 2.6% used them in iowa, and 2.3% used them in illinois.

cover crops are planted after the cash crop in the off-season. shortly before the growing season arrives, they are mowed or killed with chemicals. all of this costs money, and for some farmers the extra work and extra seed cost is not worth the benefit.

but for paulman, who farms with his son, sees it as an investment worth making for the future.

and agriculture has some of the most important innovations in the past 100 years. after all, the world’s population has exploded in the past century. agriculture has had to adapt rapidly to feeding a more crowded planet – and it must continue to do so.

a study conducted by the united nations food and agriculture organization found that a 70% increase in agricultural productivity will be necessary to keep the world’s population fed in 2050, and meeting that demand is not just a matter of finding 70% more land to farm since most of the land on earth that can be used for farming already is being used. then there are the environmental concerns. the global green caucus worries that this increase in productivity will come at the cost of more water, more land, and higher emissions. add up all these woes and you’ll come to find that we’re placing a hefty bet on that nebraskan corn farm finding a way to increase productivity in the face of environmental concerns and a growing population.

maybe it’s time to take a closer look at this allegedly low-tech operation.

scott mcpheeters lives on his gothenburg, nebraska, family farm, bordered by breathtaking sandhills carved from the earth by glaciers and wind. the farm has around 3,000 acres of row crops. most of those 3,000 are dedicated to corn, and most of that corn goes into fritos. (if you eat a frito chip west of the mississippi, there’s a better than good chance that the corn used to make it came from gothenburg.) mcpheeters is also keen on ethanol, and even serves as the vice chair on the state’s ethanol board. he sings the praises of the biofuel to whomever is willing to listen, seeing it as a path to sustainability and american energy independence.

the corn that comes back from ethanol production is used to make starches, sweeteners and road de-icer. there is talk of making ethanol out of switchgrass, since switchgrass grows up huge and has lots of sugar and could be more sustainable than corn-based ethanol. but scientists haven’t developed the enzymes necessary to ferment switchgrass into ethanol — at least not yet.

“it used to be that a farm would have ‘a cow, a sow, a plow and an 80.’ like… 80 acres,” mcpheeters says.  “so if it was true that there would be 80 acres per family… (and if) you had 3,000 acres, you would maybe need 40 people.”

the 10 families of four it would have taken to run mcpheeters’ farm a hundred years ago would have used horse-drawn equipment for planting and plowing, and a hand crank to strip field corn to be used for animal feed from the cob. during planting and harvests seasons, the work days may have been 14 to 18 hours long.

after world war ii, when many midwestern farmers adopted combines and tractors, the number of families necessary to run a mcpheeters’-sized farm dropped to around five. that’s about 20 people total.

today, including mcpheeters himself, five people work full time on his farm. two of those people are his sons, one his son-in-law. mcpheeters says he can operate with such a small team thanks to the technology that’s now commonplace on farms.

drones, for instance, can be used to run diagnostics on central pivot irrigation systems — an enormous row of sprinklers that rotate around a central point, providing water to a circular portion of crops. mcpheeters said their drone could alert the team to plugged outlets in the pivots and detect problems with tires and drive shafts. meanwhile, the pivots themselves could be controlled via ipad. drones provide significantly better imagery than satellite technology, though there are still regulatory concerns.

using apps and ipads to monitor crops has become crucial for farmers, especially when it comes to water.

if you took all the water under nebraska and put it over nebraska, the whole state would roughly be a 42-foot-deep lake, according to math and hydrogeology. (don’t ask.)

but despite the state’s position over the gargantuan ogallala aquifer, nebraska is bone-dry at the surface, with 23.6 inches of rain per year. compare that to arkansas (50.6 inches per year), rhode island (47.9 inches per year) or, if you’re feeling dramatic, hawaii (63.7 inches per year) and the importance of efficient irrigation becomes apparent. over-watering is wasteful and can be damaging. under-watering can be a disaster.

to make sure every corner of the farm is properly watered, mcpheeters embeds 4-foot-long “soil sensors” deep in the ground. the sensors are connected to transmitters that communicate with a software called fieldwise. fieldwise displays a representation of the crops and details on their conditions on mcpheeters’ computer.

both the monitors and the transmitters are powered with energy from solar panels.

mcpheeters stresses that the transition from one family having “a cow, a plow, a sow and an 80” to one family managing 3,000 acres of highly productive farmland didn’t come in a straight curve. a huge change came in the past 10 to 15 years, for instance, when global positioning became viable. with gps, mcpheeters can know exactly where a piece of equipment is in the field at any given moment and remotely ensure that it is doing what it needs to be doing, down to the square foot or an individual plant. seeding units can sequence off and on to prevent over-seeding. equipment can run on autopilot for 24 hours a day.

gps is proof positive that a single new technology can have a bombshell effect on how agriculture is practiced — and mcpheeters has an inkling as to what form the next seismic shift in farming might take.

“you may or may not want to hear this,” mcpheeters said. “but i think it’s genetic engineering.”

within the gothenburg city limits is another plot of land that at first glance doesn’t appear all that different from mcpheeters’ family farm. upon closer inspection, it turns out to be a 324-acre science experiment.

the water utilization learning center is managed by monsanto, a biotechnology company that you’ve probably either never heard of or have already made up your mind about. documentaries like food inc. portray monsanto as the big bad wolf of big ag, but however you may feel about the company, it’s clear that some of the most groundbreaking innovations in agriculture come from their work.

the learning center draws people from all over the world, and tours are given regularly. although it is made by another company, the never-browning arctic apple is touted to one tour group as an example of the triumphs of genetic modification. arcane crops like bloody butcher corn (whose kernels are alternately inky-black and the iron-red of martian mud) are presented to demonstrate corn’s genetic diversity.

every season from april to october, the learning center conducts between 60 and 70 studies. problems they hope to crack open include finding a way to double yields within the next 12 years, producing seeds that require fewer resources to grow to maturity and developing crops resistant to everything from roundup to rootworm. (rootworm larva probably cost around $800 million a year in yield loss according to the usda.) they also research ways to manage crop-damaging diseases like goss’s wilt, stalk rot and anthracnose.

monsanto gets creative to mimic adverse conditions for their studies. to approximate hail damage, they use a string weed trimmer. to simulate drought, they have a massive rainout shelter, a sort of retractable barn that extends to shield the crops when it rains.

at any given time, at least 10 to 12 of the studies being conducted by the learning center focus on water and irrigation. to deliver specific amounts of water to different studies in tightly controlled experiments, they use a variable rate irrigation system which applies gps coordinates to deliver calculated dosages of water to each plot. studies are separated into groups by 20- to 40-foot borders to prevent cross-contamination.

 “(we can) choose through genetics different hybrids that will produce better crops for the future,” says a monsanto representative. “we look at water use efficiency, economics and sustainability of the cropping system in addition to yield.”

the next frontier on genetic-level agricultural innovation is likely to take the form of crispr (which stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats,” sort of the “lucy in the sky with diamonds” of biotech acronyms). crispr is a tool for editing genes, not to be confused with genetic engineering, which refers to transplanting a gene from one organism to another. gene editing techniques like crispr have the double-benefit of allowing for more subtle alterations in an organism and being free from genetic engineering’s bad press.

of course not everyone thinks genetic engineering deserves the flak is has taken in the first place. scott mcpheeters for one thinks the controversy is overblown.

“for some people to say ‘oh my gosh, they’re gonna take a horse and make it into corn…’” mcpheeters says. “no. with corn, maybe the stalk is great but it isn’t good for milling. or the ear is really nice but the stalk or the leaves aren’t up right and it doesn’t catch as much sunlight. so what you can do is, you can pick the best things. gregor mendel did this with his peas.”

regardless of how one feels about genetic engineering and gene editing techniques like crispr, it’s inarguable that they’re the bleeding edge of agricultural technology.

it is hard to imagine what this might mean for the future of a family farm like mcpheeters’, or even to know whether the places where our food is grown in the future will even resemble farms as we know them. we can speculate as to what a family farm might look like in, say, 100 years, but speculation is just that. the farmer of a century ago never could have foreseen mcpheeters’ 3,000-acre behemoth, watered by a tablet-controlled pivot irrigation system and harvested by a massive combine. they couldn’t have imagined monsanto’s learning center, where crops are tweaked at the genetic level to withstand drought and disease.

science fiction writers often see new technologies coming before even the scientists who ultimately develop them, according to university of toronto professor dena taylor. they have imagined everything from utopian futures in which humans terraform other worlds with earthly vegetation (see: kim stanley robinson’s mars trilogy books or the tv series the expanse) to worst-case-scenarios in which agriculture falls short of the demands of population growth and people turn to desperate measures (see: movies like soylent green and snowpiercer).

but it’s hard to find popular sci-fi that even begins to cope with the genetic engineering and gene editing of food in any substantial sense. maybe that’s because techniques like crispr — developing in fast forward to match the demands of a skyrocketing population and a straining climate — make predicting the future feel like hitting a moving target. the only thing that seems certain is that whatever comes next will make drones, pivots, and global positioning look like a cow, sow, plow and an 80.

ready to meet five women influencing agriculture in nebraska?

jump over to this story map to see and read more about how these diverse women demonstrate resilience in a heavily male-dominated field. 

it’s a farm that has been maintained and thrived thanks to sustainable practices.

“i know that we (farmers) are an integral part of the ecosystem of the earth,” mcpheeters said. “we need to make it sustainable for everybody. we have to do it well and do it right.”

while major cities across america and the world grapple with ideas to make their cities more sustainable, farmers like mcpheeters seem to be ahead of the curve when it comes to sustainability. it’s not a fad or trendy thing for rural farmers; sustainability means protecting the environment they exist in and improving the life of the farm and crops.

“when you take things from the earth and don’t give anything back, that’s just taking,” mcpheeters said.

tech advances improve sustainability

it’s no surprise that farmers want what’s best for their land — better crops bring better incomes, making sustainable farming practices crucial to farmers. over the past few years, agricultural technology such as temperature and moisture sensors, aerial images, gps technologies and even robots have helped farmers produce better crop yields, limit overuse of water and pesticides — which help keep food prices low — and improve worker safety.

“we’ve made great strides thanks to technology,” mcpheeters said. “the monitoring of irrigation, we just know way more and it takes the guesswork out of things.”

controlling the irrigation of crops helps eliminate issues of overusing or wasting water. mcpheeters has heavily invested in implementing farming technologies to help track how much water the farm uses. agricultural tech firms have helped develop these tools for farmers, like the new lincoln, nebraska-based epicrop technologies, that use technology to improve plant yields and stress tolerances on crops like soybeans, corn, and wheat.

from farm to flex fuel

mcpheeters has heavily invested in growing corn. some of his corn goes to frito-lay, and some of the corn he produces has been used in ethanol fuel production. but as the business representative and vice chair for the nebraska ethanol board, mcpheeters has said ethanol is a “win for all parties. it’s good for farmers, livestock producers, consumers, and the environment,” according to a press release about his appointment.

nicknamed the “cornhusker state,” nebraska’s agricultural economy is largely dominated by corn. in 2014 alone, 8.95 million acres of nebraskan land were used to grow corn. outside of its use for cattle feed and livestock, corn is used to produce around 2 billion gallons of ethanol each year. the state’s mass production of the renewable fuel makes nebraska the second largest producer of ethanol in the u.s.

in other words, the relationship between the growth of corn and its use to produce ethanol is quite common in the state.

when i first met mcpheeters outside a flex-fuel gas station in gothenburg, nebraska, the rural farmer gushed about a brightly lit billboard that towered above the gas station; the colorful display was an ad for ethanol that he had helped create.

the nebraskan native has become a fierce advocate for ethanol due to how the fuel produces fewer emissions than fossil fuels, he said. he’s been sharing his beliefs of the positives of the alternative fuel from the small town of about 3,500 people to the halls of congress.

mcpheeters believes ethanol is cleaner in terms of air quality purposes — and growing corn for ethanol isn’t as environmentally costly either. but mcpheeters believes those opposed to ethanol gloss over the positives of using corn for fuel and said things that are propagated from ethanol opposition are not substantiated.

“i think that the people who are on the other side of the issue, i understand. they don’t want to lose market share and they have oil to sell and they need to sell it,” mcpheeters said.

those opposing ethanol believe ethanol hurts rather than helps the environment. c. ford runge, professor of applied economics and law at the university of minnesota, said in yale environment 360 that growing corn already has an environmental impact — and converting the corn to ethanol for fuel use only makes that impact worse.  

“higher-ethanol blends still produce significant levels of air pollution, reduce fuel efficiency, jack up corn and other food prices, and have been treated with skepticism by some car manufacturers for the damage they do to engines,” runge wrote. “e85 fuel in ‘flex-fuel’ vehicles may increase ozone-related mortality, asthma, and hospitalizations.”

but for scott, the fight to bring ethanol beyond his community is a fight he’s willing to continue with. after all, corn is his lifeline.

“i would love to have everyone have something to eat and have clean air,” mcpheeters said. “that’s what sustainability means to me.”

our trip west began in lincoln, where we first met a group of environmental and science journalists working with net nebraska. they shared stories of the characters they’ve interviewed. the environmental challenges faced by agriculture in the area. and the unique storytelling projects they led. 

inspired and with open minds — and ready to get to know each other — we hopped on i-80 in two vans, one driven by planet forward director dan reed, and the other by nebraska native and global consumer engagement leader at monsanto, holly butka, who also was the inspiration and lead coordinator for this trip. our trip would take us to gothenburg, and to sutherland — butka’s hometown.

we left early in the morning on our second day, with a bit of a drive still to go to get to the monsanto water research learning center in gothenburg. in true nebraskan fashion, the early morning air was already warm with the sun breaking through the clouds, promising a dry and sunny day. as the drive began, a glance to either side of the road revealed only endless fields of green and gold, scattered with the occasional house and barn. this sea of soybeans, corn, and wheat was periodically broken up by the establishment of rural towns and small watering holes.

prior to this trip, our experiences and perspectives of agriculture — and even rural areas — were varied. personally, primarily growing up in an agriculture-heavy state like nebraska, and involving myself in an agriculture college and major, this is not an area i am uninformed about. but just a handful of other students had similar backgrounds, like kansas state university student topanga mcbride, who was raised in a family working in the dairy and beef sector, and continues to pursue a degree and career in the field.

while others knew only so much, knowledge primarily influenced by movies and books.

“before this trip i had a more traditional view of agriculture from what i had seen in ‪’field of dreams‬,’” george washington university student ilana creinin said.

in what she now realizes to be a rather old-fashioned interpretation of agriculture, creinin said, “i thought only men worked long hours in the field with very little technology. i had also seen documentaries about big ag, but otherwise i didn’t know or experience much else.”

getting to hear directly from producers, exploring their family farms, and interacting with researchers from one of the world’s largest agricultural companies, all helped to inform and help many of us shape new outlooks on agriculture. mcbride stated she has always has a positive attitude toward agriculture, and getting to visit farms in nebraska has continued to help her understand the diversity and challenges that differs regionally in the industry. an experience like this helped many of the group put a face and name to what goes into producing their food.

“i am much more interested in agriculture now. i have much more appreciation for the hardships and discrimination they face in agriculture and their ability to manage the farm operations. i feel like i just have more background knowledge in the field than i did before the trip,” creinin said.

the stories that came out of this trip stemmed from the people we met, and the experiences they shared with us — from the large part technology plays in ag to the view of women in agriculture. for myself, that was learning more about the sustainable practices many farmers use today and how industry leaders are introducing new technology to help producers move forward as they are challenged by decreased resources and even just the personal pressure to be a good environmental steward. 

many of these students are taking this experience and lessons learned back to their schools and applying them to classes, work, and their daily lives. this trip helped all of us better understand some of the issues facing agriculture in nebraska — and also have a better appreciation for farmers and rural life. 

said mcbride: “i see agriculture as one of the noblest jobs one can pursue, as it is a thankless job that every single person relies on. it takes a strong person to do so successfully and humbly.”