For those who measure Nebraska's success by green irrigation circles, the news of an increase of almost 500,000 acres between 1998 and 2003 might seem cause for a red, white and blue celebration.

A gain from 7.07 million acres to 7.5 million of irrigated land, as reported at midmonth by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, leaves the state solidly in second place in the nation in that category, behind California and ahead of Texas.

And Nebraska remains ahead of everybody in the USDA's 2003 Farm and Ranch Irrigation Survey in total acres irrigated with groundwater.

But the more important number, as farmers park their harvesting machinery and look toward another uncertain moisture situation in 2005, might be 962.

That is, LB962, Nebraska's new water policy law, which went into effect July 16.

The inch-thick law, the Legislature's response to water wars with adjoining states and rising tensions between surface and groundwater irrigators within the state, appears to signal the end to an aggressive irrigation advance that dates to the 1950s.

"A lot of people have had contact with (962) and are aware of it in an abstract way," said Al Smith of Arcadia and the Nebraska State Irrigation Association. "I don't think many people — maybe none of us — have realized the impacts it will have on our businesses and our lives as private citizens."

Incredible as it might have seemed as recently as the 1990s, the new reality could be taking land out of irrigation along the Platte and Republican rivers, and other previously reliable resources.

As the Governor's Water Task Force — drafters of the document that now allows the state to decide when river basins are tapped out — prepares to meet in Kearney Tuesday, few things seem certain in the irrigating world, except, perhaps, that water still runs downhill.

Mike Jess, director of the Department of Water Resources for the 18 years before Mike Johanns was elected governor in 1998, is among many water experts in the state who sees a very finite future arriving for what once seemed an infinite resource.

"Obviously, growers have an enormous investment in what we're doing," said Jess, now part of the natural resources faculty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. "And to simply say you can't irrigate the land anymore is going to have profound economic consequences, not just for growers, but for communities in Nebraska."

The means toward that end is a law that now allows the Department of Natural Resources to decide when river basins are fully appropriated and when they're overappropriated.

Might there be some areas that are already candidates for rollbacks in watering?

Roger Patterson, Jess's successor in state government, expects to deliver an authoritative answer very soon.

"About a year from now, we're required under 962 to evaluate all the basins in the state and answer that very question," Patterson said.

Up to now, the state left most of the job of managing groundwater resources to the 23 natural resources districts headquartered at the local level. But from now on, the state can act on the widely accepted principle that groundwater pumping depletes rivers and streams, that surface and ground water are hydrologically connected.

When the state decides the demand has reached the limits of supply, its water leadership can block well drilling and any expansion in total irrigated area not compensated for by reductions in water use elsewhere in the same basin.

Pressure to change course comes from other states already operating on that basis. It comes from federal officials trying to preserve river flows for fish and wildlife. But the bigger and more recent factor might be divisions in the ranks of Nebraska irrigators themselves.

Surface-water irrigators see neighbors' new wells as a clear and present danger to their future.

"You could call it a sea change in Nebraska water law," said Dave Aiken, a specialist in that area at UNL, "because, before, groundwater development and use was almost exclusively the prerogative of NRDs.

"Now, when we're in surface-groundwater types of situations, the state's role has been expanded considerably over what it used to be. And it's more in line with the way things are in other states."

A growing recognition of what 962 does has not necessarily upgraded the reputations of the people responsible for it on the task force or in the Legislature.

"Things are very nasty right now," Aiken said. "You have some people saying that, ‘We didn't think this was what the law was going to do when it was explained to us,' and all that type of stuff.

"And it's hard to know how much of this is people saving face when they go home."

One group that won't be accused of changing its story as it moves between the formation end of policy and the delivery end is Nebraskans First, a water user group that draws much of its agricultural membership from areas where signs of water trouble seem the most obvious.

Lincoln-based spokesman Don Adams radiates certainty in uncertain times, even though it's delivered in judgmental tone.

"We are the only group that appeared and testified against 962 when they had the public hearings," he said. He called it "another move by the Legislature to shift regulative power from local NRDs to the state DNR."

There's nothing fuzzy about where this is headed, Adams said.

"Already, we've got fully appropriated and overappropriated status on the Platte — the Central Platte NRD going west — and on the Republican."

Adams is adamant an NRD system unique in the United States was doing its job of managing local resources at the local level and that drought is mostly responsible for water shortages. He's quick to dismiss suggestions Nebraska is simply accepting the regulative system that prevails in other western states.

"I would say we have had — since the Groundwater Management Act was passed in the early 1970s — we have had the best water law for our state, which is predominately a groundwater-irrigated state.

"The other states are primarily surface-water irrigated states, far and away."

Jess, criticized during his time in state government for wanting a stronger state role in irrigation matters, agrees with Adams about differences among states in water sources.

However, he said, "where we've been different, and now we're coming more in line with other western states, is in the legal recognition that the use of groundwater does impact the flow of western streams."

"We've not tackled that very effectively as a policy issue in the past," Jess said.

In that context, the flurry of well drilling now evident in many natural resources districts doesn't represent continued confidence in the water supply. It's the last gasp in irrigation expansion that is likely to move to contraction and well-drilling moratoriums in many more areas in the western two-thirds of the state — and soon.

John Turnbull, water task force member and general manager of the Upper Big Blue Natural Resources District in York, cited "very hard, tough negotiations to come to some common agreement on what we ought to do."

It is a complicated matter and, yet, in some ways, the question is very simple, Turnbull said.

"What's a reasonable amount of irrigated land for the water that's available?"

Reach Art Hovey at (402) 523-4949 or ahovey@alltel.net.