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BY ART HOVEY
When it comes to scenic wonders, the closest Otoe County comparison to the towering magnificence of the Scotts Bluff National Monument might be a Nebraska City apple tree.
But if your frame of reference is corn, Otoe County, which depends almost exclusively on rainfall for its results along the Iowa border, is an easy winner this summer over Scotts Bluff County, 450 miles to the west.
It's horticultural heaven in the east, and another year of drought hell along the Wyoming border.
And the human impact reaches much deeper than bragging rights.
"Every year there's more sales and fewer younger individuals coming back to the farm or starting to farm," said Jeff Nichols, 32, a fifth-generation western Nebraska farmer and chairman of the Nebraska Farm Bureau Federation's Young Farmers and Ranchers Committee.
To put things more personally, there's no way Dan Watermeier can reach high enough to touch the top of corn that has been blessed by timely precipitation and mild temperatures near Syracuse.
At the opposite end of the state, seemingly cursed once again by a fickle climate, the corn plants in the field where Nichols stood near much-depleted Lake Minatare barely reached the top of his size 14, triple E boot in late July.
And even though he's 6-foot-4, Nichols feels worn down by the same weather extremes that have taken more than 20 feet off nearby Chimney Rock in the past 100 years.
"There is some discouragement to it," he said, "with the farm prices (falling) and the cost of inputs going up. Between increasing property taxes and the cost of inputs and the yield averages, it takes more acres to do what we used to be able to do."
And, oh, by the way, the most popular export destination for his Great Northern beans - until recently - was Iraq.
"My wife couldn't handle the farming life," said Nichols, now divorced.
Even farther west at Morrill, farm wife Karen Ott, 54, was quick to agree there's a lot of economic and emotional hardship mixed in with the dust.
"We've been in debt so long we wouldn't know how to act otherwise," Ott said of the operation she presides over with husband Dale and two sons. "It's very difficult.
"But," she added, "as I told someone, if you let a drought get inside your front door, your marriage is in trouble, because it's all-encompassing."
Scotts Bluff County has fallen short of normal precipitation every year in the first four years of this millennium. And 2004 looks at least as bleak.
The Lake Minatare irrigation reservoir began the year at 55 percent of capacity. Wind blew so fiercely it sandblasted some of Nichols' corn into oblivion.
Rainfall that has averaged 4.53 inches in the county over the first seven months of the year has left both his corn and dry edible beans so far behind their normal growth pace that much of his crop might be ruined by a typical September frost before it can reach maturity.
And now, left with no other options, the Pathfinder Irrigation District is poised to cut off his precious supply of surface irrigation water from the North Platte River in about three weeks.
The Otts face a similar deadline in dealing with several irrigation districts.
By the time the water flow stops, the Pathfinder Reservoir at the far end of the surface-water irrigation system is likely to be reduced from its normal capacity of 1 million acre feet of water to 50,000. It will be virtually empty.
"The banks around here have been very patient with not selling people out with forced sales," said Karen Ott. "But there's a few."
Meanwhile, although he takes no pleasure in others' adversity, Syracuse farmer Watermeier has watched his corn stretch eagerly toward the sun and his soybeans reach the stage of pod-setting and pod-filling with plenty of bright-green promise.
Might it be the best crop he's seen in his 42 years?
"It's just a little bit early to predict," the eastern Nebraska farmer said. "But I'd say it has every bit of potential that I've ever seen."
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A long trip across a horizontally oriented state is also a long, barely perceptible climb from an eastern elevation of 1,040 feet at Nebraska City to almost 4,000 feet at Scottsbluff and the western end of the North Platte River Valley.
Otoe County and Scotts Bluff County make for close comparison in some ways. For example, there were 797 farms in Otoe County at the time of the 2002 agricultural census and 780 in Scotts Bluff.
But Otoe County normally averages 32.64 inches of rain a year, while Scotts Bluff gets 15.16. Otoe County has about 4,500 acres of irrigated land. Scotts Bluff, depending heavily on both surface and ground sources and long, hot hours of repositioning ground-level irrigation pipes, has almost 173,000.
Even in normal years, most unirrigated acres in western Nebraska cannot produce crops. They're left to cattle and grass.
And even in normal years, higher elevation makes a difference.
Cooler nights and lower humidity make sugar beets and dry edible beans better choices at the western end of the state than the soybeans that share top billing with corn in the east.
Nights that are often 40 degrees cooler than days slow down plant growth.
"Your corn is growing at night," Hemingford farmer Brad Hansen said. "And ours is sitting there wondering where the blanket is."
This year, the typical temperature difference between the state's eastern and western extremes, coupled with the rainfall gap, could be the difference between a bumper crop and a bust for many farmers.
In the east, Watermeier remembers with pleasure how his corn gathered itself after planting for an impressive growth surge.
"When it was relatively cool and moist, the corn was deciding what potential it has."
Weeks later, when he inspects fast-maturing corn ears, he counts as many as 20 rows of kernels, two to four better than normal and a sure sign of bigger yields. Ideal growing conditions also have his corn 10 to 12 days ahead of normal maturity.
Harvest will be early - and barring a major windstorm or some other late-stage disaster - it will be big.
To the west, as a pickup layered in dust and littered with tools rumbles across the ruts near Minatare, Nichols' memories are much darker. Prominent among them is a surface-water irrigation season that offered much less than normal from a reservoir system that stretches westward to Pathfinder and Seminole in Wyoming.
"Less water for less time," he said.
Nichols expects little recognition of continuing weather punishment from eastern Nebraska neighbors who have basked in a beautiful summer.
"A lot of people I talk to think west is Grand Island," he said.
Back near Mitchell, 11 miles from Wyoming and 200 miles from Denver, Bob Busch knows the same feeling of separation from the more populated end of the state.
"I get a bit frustrated about it," the 67-year-old farmer said.
Busch has a softer feeling for hungry cats and dogs that stray onto his property, sometimes after being dumped from vehicles of people who don't want them anymore. Indoors and out, there always seems to be one moving into ear-scratching range.
He feels the same urge to respond to his sugar beets, his mainstay crop.
When the water gets short, he does all he can to get them to their normal marketable size - similar to a football with one tapered end sawn off.
"I don't want to see them suffer."
But as August arrives, the beets are well short of marketable size. And his corn, also a significant source of income, is lagging just as badly.
"When you have a short stalk," Busch said, "you have a short ear."
He also faces an early end to the irrigation season within the boundaries of the Gering-Fort Laramie Irrigation District.
The water is scheduled to be shut off at the other end of the canal system in mid- to late August. His beets will need water until Sept. 15 to deliver fully on months of hard work.
"The typical farmer, he'll say it will be better next year," he said from a seat at his kitchen table. "But we better get a lot of snow."
Busch is quick to laugh. He's also quick to turn serious when he hears serious questions.
"The last three years have been very bad," he said of declining moisture totals, declining ground-water levels and depleted reservoirs.
Earlier this year, the well that provided his family's supply of drinking water went dry and had to be drilled deeper.
Drought takes a lot of the fun out of farming, draining energy and enthusiasm along with water reserves.
"My concern is that it will take some people out of business. Some could be financial and some could be sheer frustration. They'll say, 'Phooey on this. I'm not going to do this anymore.'"
Already his concerns about 2004 are spilling over into 2005.
"We've got a horrendous amount of money invested in this crop, a horrendous amount. And if you don't get paid back, you're gone. You're out of business."
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When there is too little rain in Otoe County, crops wither and die. When there is no rain in Scotts Bluff County, irrigation often can keep plants alive. But it's almost as if they're caught in suspended animation.
Leaves rustle in the breeze, but there's no upward movement from day to day. Much of the corn planted this season in western Nebraska did not come up right away because the soil did not hold enough moisture for the seeds to germinate. When it did, it was held back by cool temperatures and skimpy rainfall during the time between planting and the date irrigation water became available.
The corn and the sugar beets and the dry edible beans stay green, but they stay small, too.
Dennis Strauch, based at Mitchell as general manager of the Pathfinder Irrigation District, feels grateful for rain last weekend that brought as much as 2.1 inches to some areas.
That will provide a brief break in surface-water deliveries and may add a day or two to the irrigation season.
Experience has taught him that year-to-year conditions can improve in a hurry.
"Everything for us is snowpack, because our water supply comes out of the mountains. And what the snowpack has produced is what we've lived on now for the last three years."
And he knows, too, that things can't get much worse.
"Our situation with the North Platte project districts is that we're not going to decline a lot. Because, basically, for the last three years, we've almost entirely used the water supply that we have."
Lingering hopes already have been crushed for many farmers who looked to 2004 for a change in the weather pattern.
"There's a lot of women - they just can't take this stress," said Karen Ott. "I really feel for young married couples."
While high hopes for harvest inch closer to certainty in eastern Nebraska, Chimney Rock and the economic vitality of the Otts, Jeff Nichols and many others will be worn down just a little bit further along the western border.
"Some of these fields," Nichols said, "I'm doubtful they'll yield anything."
Reach Art Hovey at 523-4949 or ahovey@;alltel.net.
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