The story of how an ancient aquifer turned the land that blew away in the Dust Bowl into some of the most productive farmland in the country, and why today it's being drained faster than it can ever refill
When the rains returned and the Dust Bowl ended, the land on the southern plains recovered. In the decades that followed, it once again became some of the most productive farmland in the country thanks to the Ogallala Aquifer, an ancient reservoir beneath eight states that took millions of years to fill and, in most places, refills at less than an inch a year. New pump technology turned wells that once watered a household into enough to irrigate hundreds of acres. So who owns water that won't come back, and who gets to pump it? This is the story of how pumping a finite resource became a race, and why the officials in charge of it chose to manage its decline rather than stop it.
