Farmers' Use of Water Is High Plains Dilemma
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Bazine's plight typifies that of thousands of rural towns on the High Plains as the farm population drops and small farms go under. Overall, the US farm population decreased by 21 percent, to 4.6 million, between 1982 and 1992. In Kansas, the loss of people from agricultural communities was traumatic. In 1990, 43 of the state's 105 counties registered their lowest population since the frontier days a century ago. Ness County has lost half its population in the last 30 years.
The shortage or absence of ground water, competition from highly mechanized corporate agriculture, and other factors are significant causes of the population decline, experts say. (Unlike other regions in the US, the high Plains have so far not seen the selective rural population growth enjoyed by some counties in the early 1990s. City dwellers, aided by modern information technology, are mainly moving to rural areas that offer recreation and natural beauty.)
``Agriculture is all we have, but it's not enough,'' DeWald says.
A few innovative residents, unable to survive on farming, have started small enterprises in order to stay in Bazine.
``We want to stay in the country. We want our kids to grow up in a safe environment,'' says Twylia Sekavec, mother of two boys. ``Our friends who left for Kansas City, Dallas, and the West Coast are fighting traffic and lines and paying off 40-year mortgages - the grass is not greener.''
In 1990, Mrs. Sekavec and her husband, Marvin, started a used-tire-disposal business. They dug huge pits in 30 acres of the family farm and are filling them with tons of quartered rubber tires. Despite local jokes about their ``black bales,'' the Sekavecs' venture has thrived, enabling the couple to hire a dozen employees, buy two large semitrailers, and purchase a $69,000 home. ``Larger towns like Ness City have more progressive people and a better chance,'' says Mr. Sekavec, ``but Bazine probably won't survive.''
Unwelcome reminder of the 1930s
While larger, municipal ``oases'' like Garden City may continue to thrive for years to come, the disappearance of communities like Bazine foreshadows the future for much of the region, some scientists and scholars say.
As the depletion of Ogallala water forces farmers to again rely on the vagaries of rain, some scholars predict a new Dust Bowl. Dust storms are more likely, they say, because of the environmental harm caused by extensive irrigation, which has destroyed vegetation and protective belts of trees and left hundreds of miles of rivers dry.
A dust storm struck western Kansas on March 14, 1989, after months of drought. The storm reduced visibility to one block in Garden City, forced the closing of Interstate 70 for 150 miles from the Colorado border to Hays, Kan., and disrupted air traffic as far away as Kansas City.
For ecological and economic reasons, some scholars propose replanting the High Plains in native grasses and repopulating it with herds of bison to recreate the ``buffalo commons'' of the early 19th century. ``Over the next generation the Plains will, as a result of the largest and longest-running agricultural and environmental miscalculation in America, become totally depopulated,'' assert Frank and Deborah Popper of Rutgers University in New Jersey.
The Poppers' proposal has drawn sharp criticism from Kansans, who are not giving up. ``Abandonment,'' writes geologist White, ``is a regional development policy that looks good only if you are a buffalo.''
* Tomorrow: Looking to the prairie ecosystem for a solution to sustaining High Plains agriculture.
