>> This N.E.T.

Connects program is produced in partnership with the Nebraska State Irrigation Association.

♪ ♪ Jeff Buettner: What amazes me is that back in the 19th century, this area was part of what was called "The Great American Desert" and the people that were migrating through Nebraska in part, because who would want to live in a desert, right, didn't realize that they were crossing over a veritable ocean underneath their feet.

Roric Paulman: We've got this significant grass covered sand dune that turns a river into a gaining river about the middle of the state and creates this unbelievable metrics of water in Nebraska.

Jim Goeke: The Sandhills store and transmit water in the middle of a desert.

Lee Orton: Nebraska has a lot more water leaving on the surface than enters the state.

Jim Goeke: 1.6 million acre feet of surface and groundwater flow into the state and 9 million acre feet flow out of the state.

It's a desert and we're generating 6.4 million acre feet flowing out of the state.

The Great American Desert Is A Water Machine.

♪ ♪ >> As the state song goes, "Beautiful Nebraska is laced with many rivers."

In all, we have 13 river basins: the White, Niobrara, Missouri, Elkhorn, Loup, North Platte, South Platte, Middle Platte, Lower Platte, Republican, Little Blue, Big Blue, and Nemaha.

Rivers like the Platte and Niobrara begin west of Nebraska and travel across the state.

Others, like the Elkhorn and Loup begin here.

Lee Orton: Water has, from the very inception of Nebraska's settlement by even the American Indians, the native Americans that were here before any of the white settlement, were dependent upon a water supply for their livelihood and for their care and consideration.

Most early settlement were along the rivers and streams in the state because there was access to water there, but nobody knew in those days the kind of access there was to groundwater in the state of Nebraska.

So water, both surface and groundwater, have always been a very, very important part of Nebraska, Nebraska's growth, Nebraska's successes, quite frankly.

Water is the lifeblood of the state.

>> The ability to control water is - in essence - the ability to schedule rain, the ability to prevent floods, a way to grow crops and cities.

Water creates power and sustains life.

Nebraska's settlers realized the importance of water early on and since then we've engineered ways to get surface water to where it's needed - with dams, reservoirs, and a system of canals - large diversion canals that run for miles, branching out into smaller, lateral canals.

Roric Paulman: This whole funnel of bringing water in and dropping it back into Kansas, or bringing water out of Wyoming, Colorado and dropping it into Missouri, or bringing it out of the northern tier of the Niobrara and dropping it into the Missouri.

It's just amazing to me.

>> Nebraska also has an abundance of groundwater.

Dana Divine: To have an aquifer, you need two basic things.

You need water and you need a place to store the water.

I think sometimes people are still picturing underground lakes, or rivers, or that kind of thing.

For us though, we're actually talking about water stored between grains.

>> Nebraska sits atop the Ogallala aquifer, the largest aquifer in the High Plains System which covers most of the Great Plains.

Jim Goeke: The High Plains Aquifer in the Sandhills contained two and a quarter billion acre feet of groundwater.

That is 70% of the groundwater in the High Plains aquifer and it's stored in Nebraska.

That is the future of Nebraska.

Dana Divine: We also have smaller aquifers.

They produce less water and sometimes their water quality is less desirable, but they are important, especially in eastern Nebraska because we don't have the High Plains aquifer in eastern Nebraska, but we do have most of the population in eastern Nebraska, and so those secondary aquifers become really important.

Jim Goeke: We have a lot of groundwater.

And all these streams that intersect the groundwater, the Loup, the Dismal, the Calamus, Niobrara, they are groundwater-fed streams.

They get 90% of their flow from groundwater that comes from discharges in Nebraska.

Groundwater is an act of faith.

You have to believe there's groundwater below the ground and you can set up, and drill a well, and all this mess and everything else.

At the end of the day, you can pump out fresh, sparkling, clear, cold water, and drink it.

That's almost magic and I love that.

Dana Divine: Water is hydraulically connected.

It's all surface water is hydraulically connected to ground water.

In some places, the connection is very dynamic and obvious.

In other places, it's not.

It happens at whole different scales.

Jim Goeke: Groundwater and surface water are different, but they're interchangeable because groundwater can become surface water and surface water can become groundwater.

Groundwater and surface water are a single resource because they change places.

Dana Divine: Losing streams are when the stream loses some of its water to the groundwater, to aquifers, and so it recharges aquifers, basically.

The opposite is true also; it can happen in that the stream is a gaining stream.

And so, the groundwater enters the stream and contributes to its flow.

We're here at the south branch of the Little Nemaha River.

It's a great example of a gaining stream.

In this spot the aquifer is confined.

It means that there's a clay layer on top of the sand and gravel.

And so when you punch a hole through the clay, into the water underneath it and the aquifer underneath it, that water is under pressure.

And so, it rises up inside of the well, and in cases like in this area, it has so much pressure that it flows at the ground surface.

It's just a really great physical example of hydrogeology in action.

>> In general, surface water is governed by local irrigation districts.

Lee Orton: Irrigation districts are districts that manage the surface flows of the state.

Some of them are natural flow districts that actually just divert water from the natural flow of the rivers and streams.

Some of them are organized and actually build reservoirs from which they take water.

>> Nebraska also has a "prior appropriation doctrine."

John Berge: If you're first in time, you're first in right.

Meaning if you have the oldest water right, you have access to that water before somebody else does that has a more junior right later on.

We don't have that situation in groundwater.

So we have to be very careful that any groundwater development that is going to impact surface water is done responsibly.

>> Groundwater is managed by the state's Natural Resources Districts, or NRDs.

Rather than city or county lines, these districts are generally based upon natural river basins - an efficient and uniquely Nebraskan concept.

Lee Orton: There are no other NRDs anywhere else in the U.S. We're the only people that have NRDs in concept.

Even though there are other states that have talked about doing it, they don't have the political courage to do it.

John Berge: There's 23 NRDs across the state of Nebraska.

We have 12 statutory requirements in state law.

But perhaps probably the most important one is the management of the quality and quantity of water.

Michael Jess: Nebraska is a big place, it's a complicated hydrology, and management of its water resources is got to be specifically tailored to those individual locations.

The notion of one size fits all, just doesn't work very well given the circumstances that we have in Nebraska.

>> That's why NRDs work together with local water users and the Department of Natural Resources to agree on a set of goals tailored to their specific area - called an integrated management plan.

Ann Dimmitt: The IMP, or the integrated management plan, is basically a 10-year plan on how each NRD is going to, if you will, have a long range for their water plan.

How are the groundwater and the surface water irrigators going to work with the recreational people, and how are the communities and municipalities all going to use this one natural resource?

Lee Orton: When I first got into this business, the water rights that were given out by the state of Nebraska on surface streams were given out whenever anybody wanted them.

I think the philosophy in those days was the only good river's a dry river, which is a mistake.

Never should have been that way, but that's the way the system worked and because of that and because of the heavy pumping that was allowed and encouraged in those days, we did, in fact, dry up some rivers and streams.

They are for the most part flowing again in Nebraska and because of that, we have water supply downstream in places we didn't have it before, we have recreation potentials in Nebraska that we didn't have before, we have good management of the system that's good for economics in the state of Nebraska.

>> In addition to managing use within the state, Nebraskans also have to manage use across state lines.

Michael Jess: When it comes to managing water among the states, the states are unanimous that they don't want the federal government to do it.

>> As the saying goes, "Whiskey's for drinkin', and water's for fightin."

Negotiations between states can get ugly.

But in the case of the Blue River Compact, Chairman W. Don Nelson says it's gone smoothly, thanks to NRD management and our groundwater supply.

Don Nelson : We are required to deliver certain amounts of water to farmers and ranchers downstream when the river crosses into Kansas.

Because we have such a robust groundwater delivery system, we have to depend less on what falls from the sky, or comes down from the Upper River Basins of many rivers.

So, we have an abundance of supply that we're eager to share with our brothers and sisters down in Kansas.

Nebraska continues to be on the cutting edge of innovation when it comes to merging public policy and governance.

♪ ♪ >> Nebraska has more irrigated acres than any other state.

We make up about 15% of all irrigated land in the United States.

Our producers use a combination of both ground and surface water and they use different methods to apply it.

Dennis Strauch: When you look across Nebraska, probably seven million acres are irrigated by groundwater, about a million by surface water, but when you come out to the panhandle, you've got to switch those numbers.

It's probably 75% irrigated by surface water, and maybe 25% by groundwater.

>> Michael Ann Relka is an agriculturalist and a producer just outside Gering.

She's a part of the majority here who depend on surface water.

Michael Ann Relka: We grow dry beans, corn, and sugar beets on our farm, and we irrigate entirely through surface irrigation with either siphon tubes or gated pipe.

A gated pipe is a long, plastic, white pipe.

We push the water through the pipe and it has small gates on the front of it.

We open those gates to allow the water to flow out into the little furrows that we've created by ditching the crop, and that's how we transport the water from the tops of the fields down to the bottoms of the fields and water the entire field.

Siphon tubes are the tubes that are used to take the water out of a small ditch and draw it down into a furrow or a small ditch that runs between the rows of a crop.

And so it is one way, without the gated pipe, you can use an open ditch and get the water from the ditch to the crop.

Agriculture in western Nebraska, we have a lot of crops that you might not see further east.

Our dry beans and our sugar beets are two things that are different from when you travel east.

The other side of that is our water.

We are very dependent on the irrigation.

We're not using it as just an insurance policy as to if it doesn't rain, "Hey, I can kick some water on and I can water my crop."

We're dependent on it to get a crop off that year.

And so, making sure that we have the water every year is essential to us because we're not going to luck out and produce 200 bushel of corn if we don't have irrigation to go along with it.

Dennis Strauch: I don't think you'll find any place in Nebraska where irrigation isn't more critical than here in the valley.

On average, if you look at a precipitation map of Nebraska, we receive somewhere between 14.5 and 18 inches of precip a year.

So without irrigation, crop production's very limited.

>> Dennis Strauch has helped to bring water across Nebraska's western border for more than 40 years.

He's the manager of the Pathfinder Irrigation District.

Dennis Strauch: The water that comes down through the whole system starts up here.

The water we bring into the Valley through our canals is what feeds down through the river.

Water use throughout the state is dependent on what comes into this end of the state, on the North Platte River.

North Platte River's a snow melt-fed river, which means the snow that falls in the north central and south central Colorado and Wyoming mountains melts, comes down the river, comes into the valley.

Michael Ann Relka: Snow pack is a huge factor for us.

How much snow we get through the winter in the mountains determines how much water we have available to us throughout the rest of the year.

We're considering our water every day, multiple times a day, whether that's which field is hurting the worst and needs that water, whether or not it's a storm coming and we're actually going to receive some rain.

It's a continuous thought process about where our water's coming from and how much we have or how little we have and how to manage it properly.

♪ ♪ Jeff Buettner: If you go way back in history, you would see windmills.

Okay, those would have been your first groundwater wells.

Michael Jess: The 1970s saw the introduction of center pivots, which revolutionized the acreage that could be irrigated in our state.

Simultaneous to all of that technology of center pivots was the knowledge that there was groundwater below the land's surface and could be brought to the center pivot with irrigation wells.

Jim Goeke: The 70's were the golden age of drilling in Nebraska.

We drilled more wells in 1976 than ever.

Jeff Buettner: I think it went from a million irrigated acres back in the '60s to almost nine million now and predominantly those are groundwater irrigated acres.

>> The effects of the groundwater and center pivot boom were soon felt by those who relied on surface water.

Joe Citta: Some of the rivers and streams were drying up, especially.

And you could tell them that during irrigation season, they would dry up when after irrigation, they'd get water back into them.

They realized that the pumping of groundwater can impact the surface water.

Jim Goeke: The Groundwater Management Act was passed in 1976.

And, it provided for establishing control areas where the water supply was diminishing and the Upper Republican NRD established the first groundwater control area in 1980.

And, they started limiting the access to groundwater.

>> Perhaps nowhere in Nebraska is water use more limited than in the Republican River Basin in the southwest corner of the state.

Before much was known about groundwater, old farming practices led to overuse.

Today's irrigators are working to protect this river for future generations.

That means stretching every last drop.

Brad Edgerton: The water supply situation is pretty critical for us.

>> Brad Edgerton is the manager of the Frenchman Cambridge Irrigation District and he's got his work cut out for him.

Brad Edgerton: The Republican River Basin is a water short basin.

We're in a basin where the average rainfall is less than 21 inches a year.

And in a dry year, it can be as low as nine inches.

So, to avoid crop failures and those kind of things, you know, we need irrigation.

We're actually using more water than typically what is allowed under the Republican River Compact, so we have allocations on both groundwater and surface water.

So, the farmers along the canal systems are allocated eight inches per acre per year to do what they can to grow a crop.

>> And unlike some other regions, they don't have the benefit of abundant groundwater or snow melt from Colorado.

Brad Edgerton: Our water supply comes from either runoff events, rainfall, or it's spring activity, along some different creeks.

The Department of Natural Resources makes a forecast every year of what the water supply is.

And if it looks like we're going to short Kansas the amount of water that they're entitled to, then even further restrictions are placed upon not only surface water, but also groundwater users in the basin.

Jim Goeke: That's a tough, tough situation.

In the Upper Republican, when we started talking about limiting access to groundwater, a lot of people were dead set against it.

"it's my water.

I can pump all I want."

And a lot of those people came around.

If we limit the access to groundwater and use it more efficiently, it's going to be around for decades, generations.

Brad Edgerton: We're trying to stretch our water supply as far as we can.

And we've done things to basically reduce the amount of water that we draw out of our reservoirs.

>> The biggest change they've made?

Automating their canal system.

Brad Edgerton: The gates talk to each other and they actually back the water clear up through the system.

I like to refer to it as we're running water uphill.

>> All of the canals across the district can be controlled from the office in Cambridge - which not only saves manpower, but helps them to conserve every drop they can.

Under the old system, a ditch rider could raise or lower the water levels in six-inch increments by adding or removing logs.

The new automated flume gates can regulate it within a quarter of an inch.

Brad Edgerton: Right now we are the only and the first canal to implement this in the state.

When you're in a water short basin and the value of water is pretty expensive, it just makes sense to do what you can to save this water.

>> They've also begun converting open-air canals to underground pipe to prevent water from leaking into the ground or evaporating into the air.

Brad Edgerton: The buried pipe has saved us a tremendous amount of water over the years and really put us in a good position now to further our advancements of water conservation activities.

We don't know what is going to happen 10 years from now, but our district is taking on the challenge to make sure that we're able to maintain and have a sustained balanced water supply for our producers.

>> Marty Petska farms in the North Loup River Basin near Ord.

Petska uses a combination of gated pipe and center pivot.

Marty Petska: It's more efficient than the furrow irrigation.

Easier to get the right amount on at the right time.

>> Center pivot irrigation is an invention with close ties to Nebraska.

After its invention in 1947, it was a Nebraska businessman who licensed the patent and began producing them.

Today, Nebraska remains the largest producer of center pivots in the world.

And the technology has come a long way since those early years.

Marty Petska: We've made the investment to be able to do some controlling of our center pivots through apps on our phone or our computer.

We can control, where they turn on and off, how much water we put on.

It saves us a lot of miles and time.

Like anything else you pay for it, but it does save us a lot of time and allow us to do a better job.

>> The pivot system helps with application and helps monitor how much water has been used.

But Petska, like many other producers, also relies on a low-tech method.

Marty Petska: We do soil probing every week, go down a foot, take soil out of the probe, check the texture of it to see how wet it is.

Go down another foot in the same hole so you're pulling up the second foot and then the third foot, and luckily my agronomists do that most of the time.

That's how we try to manage the amount of water we use.

So we're not wasting water or over-watering.

>> Farmers are allocated a specific amount of water per acre by their local irrigation district.

They decide how much of that to use and when, based on their crop, their soil, and the forecast.

Marty Petska: If you've heard the saying, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.

Well, that definitely applies with rain.

You just don't know.

"Hey need to order some water for tomorrow - Todd's route..." Marty Petska: When it's time to order water, we just call in, give them the turnout number, the amount of water we want, what time we're going to go on.

It's pretty simple.

"Alright, wonderful!

Thanks, Carol!

Have a good day.

Bye."

Marty Petska: I think it's important to have both sources for water.

The surface water, it's a means to help control flooding, in addition to the irrigation, not to mention the recreational aspect of it.

I think a balance of the two is great.

We get about two thirds of our water from groundwater and then about a third of it from surface water.

It comes from the Calamus Reservoir Northwest of Burwell.

>> The Calamus Reservoir is a 5,000 acre lake nestled at the base of the Sandhills.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation completed the project in 1986.

It irrigates about 53,000 acres of farmland for nearby producers like the Petskas.

Mike Wells: For a lot of the farmers in the area, this has really changed the way their operation exists and how much it's improved.

If they were pumping before, the water that we deliver saves them the extra cost of pulling water up out of the ground, which really benefits them.

The impact of this dam has improved the stability of the economy in the area.

A lot of it was dry land earlier and now it's a majority of all the Valley is irrigation.

It has brought in a lot more businesses because of the extra income that is flowing in the area.

A lot more housing development, especially around this lake, a lot more tourism.

So it's been a plus for just about every aspect of the economy.

♪ ♪ >> The district is also responsible for getting that water to each producer in its district.

♪ ♪ Paul Michalski is one of hundreds of ditch riders in Nebraska.

They're the eyes and ears along the irrigation canals that carve their way across the state.

If water is Nebraska's lifeblood, its rivers and these canals are its arteries.

Paul Michalski: What I'm doing this morning I'm measuring the head.

I'm running a little bit of water over top.

This is a 6-foot submerged gate.

>> Ditch riders are responsible for maintaining the levels and flow of the canals in their district, and ultimately, delivering that water to the producers who order it.

It's safe to say delivering water is a little trickier than Amazon Prime.

These workers start their day before sunrise in order to beat farmers to the field, and they're constantly adjusting gates along their canal based on how many farmers are irrigating, the weather, even negotiating trades when a pivot unexpectedly breaks.

Mike Wells: Being able to deliver to everyone without the guy on the bottom end of the canal not getting any, that's our goal, is that everybody gets what they have paid for.

>> To the southeast in the Nemaha Valley, residents aren't worried about having enough water.

They're worried about managing it when there's too much at once.

Bob Hilske: One of the big issues we deal with down here is flood control.

>> Bob Hilske is the general manager of the Nemaha Natural Resources District - a district bounded by the Missouri River to the east, where water leaves the state.

Bob Hilske: This area was settled in the late 1880s and early 1900s.

People moved into the area and they wanted to farm.

Well, the most fertile farm ground that we have in southeast Nebraska is in the flood plain of the river and stream beds.

So, they'd plant their crop and they'd lose their crop to flooding, so it basically became useless farm ground.

Well, the Federal Government came in, the Corps of Engineers and said, "We can solve that."

And what they did in the early 20th century is they started coming in and they straightened many of the stream and river systems in southeast Nebraska.

And they made southeast Nebraska floodplains totally farmable.

A hundred years later, we're starting to face the downside or the negative side to that, is when you straighten a river channel out, it means it speeds up the water and it means it down cuts a lot faster.

And the down cutting creates a lot of problems because you see a lot of sloughing, loss of farm ground.

We have bridges like the one we're on today, is a brand new bridge and the cost of the bridge is actually a lot more expensive because they've got to span the widened channel that they have.

>> Today, instead of straightening streams, they control flooding with small watershed dams.

Bob Hilske: Today, we're at Wilson Creek 10E and this is in the Wilson Creek watershed, which drains into the Little Nemaha River, and this particular structure provides flood control in the Wilson Creek watershed.

The Wilson Creek watershed was one of the first watersheds in Nebraska that was developed specifically for flood control, and most of the structures were built in the 1960s and 1970s.

This is one of the larger structures; it's probably about 40 acres in size, and the structures have various uses around the district.

>> These reservoirs are a great way to control large amounts of water - but the same heavy, clay soils that lead to flooding can also put water quality at risk.

Dana Divine: The area gets more precipitation relative to other parts of the state.

And it's got a lot of silt and clay at the surface, as opposed to sand, that's more prominent in, say, western Nebraska.

And so, when it rains, the rain doesn't soak in nearly as much in southeastern Nebraska as it might further west.

And so, since it can't soak in very quickly, it just tends to run off.

Both mercury contamination and E.coli contamination are very common in the southeastern part of the state, and really worldwide, honestly.

>> E.coli can come from feedlots, a sewage treatment plant, or a fertilized field.

Mercury is trickier because it travels by air.

Dana Divine: What happens with mercury is it's sourced primarily from coal combustion.

So it's an air pollutant, and it precipitates out, can travel hundreds of miles.

>> The Nebraska Department of Environment and Energy takes water and fish samples and monitors those contaminant levels across all 13 river basins to keep people safe.

Bob Hilske: It's extremely important to the state of Nebraska that we protect our water, both the quantity and quality of the water resource that we have.

♪ ♪ >> Along the Platte River in the middle of the state, farmers work in sandy soil with a high water table which presents different risks.

Lyndon Vogt: Our district's about 175 miles long.

Of course, our main water feature in this area is the Platte River.

The Central Platte NRD has about 2.1 million acres in it, and 1,030,000 of them are irrigated.

The Central Platte NRD back in actually the early '70s, I think, realized that they had a water quality problem - our shallow groundwater.

It's not very far to groundwater.

A lot of our sandier soils along the alluvium of the Platte River is just conducive to nutrients moving down through the system.

We had areas along our district where we were seeing our nitrate levels creep up.

I don't know that the NRDs had a lot of authority to do much about it until the statutes kind of caught up and gave us the Groundwater Management and Protection Act, which allowed us to move forward with implementing a groundwater management plan.

The biggest part of the plan was education.

It was really getting the information either from the university or from the NRD research.

It was getting that information out to the producers to let them realize that they could meet their yield goals with maybe less nutrients.

Through that process, we've seen our nitrate level in our district on an average go from about 19 parts per million to 13 parts per million.

>> They've experimented with cover crops as a way to fix or reduce the amount of nitrates in the soil.

Dean Krull: Cover crops can have two different theories: add nitrogen or scavenge nitrogen to basically protect the groundwater and that was our goal here in Central Platte to add another management thing to basically fix that nitrogen in the off season so if we have heavy rains or whatever, that doesn't leach into the groundwater.

>> To lower nitrate levels, timing is key.

Not just with planting cover crops - but with applying fertilizer while irrigating, a process called fertigation.

Dean Krull: We are at one of two sites where we are conducting fertigation research.

So what you see here today basically is the tanks that have the insource in it, and that feeds into the fertigation pump.

>> They're working with the University of Nebraska to optimize how much fertilizer to apply, and when to apply it.

They do that by using drone imagery.

Each week, a drone takes aerial pictures of the field.

A student then analyzes those images and programs the center pivot accordingly, tailoring the amount of fertilizer to each section, so that only what is needed gets applied.

Dean Krull: So what the fertigation project that we're looking at is to maybe improve that timing.

Put the nitrogen on when it's needed, don't load up the ground or the system with nitrogen for potential of leaching, whether that's through excess irrigation or rain or whatever that may be.

>> They're not the only basin working to lower nitrates.

Four NRDs in the Elkhorn and Niobrara basins have partnered to lower nitrates in the Bazile Groundwater Management Area.

Here, groundwater is the source for both irrigation and drinking water.

Like Central Platte, they're changing the way they apply nitrogen, irrigate, and improve soil health.

Dean Krull: Agriculture's future is a lot different now than it was 40 years ago when I first started here.

There's things that can make people better managers now and the effect of that can help the environment.

That's the future.

Roric Paulman: This is the first time we've used cover crop with pin oak.

>> Just up the river, they're also using research to farm smarter.

Roric Paulman is a third generation farmer near Sutherland.

He's also one of the founders of the Nebraska Water Balance Alliance, a group with a simple mission.

Roric Paulman: How do we help Nebraska and fundamentally the water resource, both surface and groundwater?

>> They've worked with the Twin Platte NRD on a water data program to measure their groundwater use in real time and improve efficiency.

Roric Paulman: We're in a rain deficit area, so one of the things early on was understanding the science and UNL led that, of course, in terms of understanding how much water does a crop take.

Ann Dimmitt: If data is making decisions, you need to know that it's the best possible.

In this day and age, you can't not know.

Your bottom dollar is depending on it.

Roric Paulman: Science and actually what happens on the ground are going to come closer and closer together.

And the research is going to be more integrated into actually what is actually happening.

If we're the number one irrigated state in the nation, then why shouldn't we act like it?

>> Ann hopes that projects like this one will help change people's opinions of irrigators for the better.

Ann Dimmitt: To be a farmer you have to be an electrician, an engineer, a plumber some days.

You have to wear so many hats.

I think the stereotype is wrong that they're out there just using and abusing the resources.

You couldn't have a better steward of the land than a farmer and a rancher.

>> You may not think about where your water comes from when you turn on the faucet.

You may not think about where your power comes from when you turn on a light switch and you might be surprised to find out that in many places in Nebraska, they come from the same source.

Hydroelectric plants use water to turn the turbines to create energy, coal plants use steam, and both coal and nuclear plants need water for cooling.

Joe Citta: When you're producing power, you've got to have water.

>> Joe Citta is the Director of Corporate Environmental and Water Resources for Nebraska Public Power District.

Joe Citta: Nebraska is a 100% public power state.

So, we would sell our power to various other public power districts and companies.

>> One of those is Loup Power District.

Neal Suess: We basically are an electric utility, and a hydroelectric generating utility here in the east central part of the state of Nebraska.

>> Water is used to make power, but it's not used up.

Neal Suess: We consider hydroelectric power a renewable resource because we don't use any of what we call fuel, water is considered fuel in this case, to generate power.

The water comes in, the water goes back out, and can be used by anybody, either along the way or afterwards from that standpoint.

♪ ♪ >> Across the North Platte River, Kingsley Dam creates the state's largest reservoir: Lake McConaughy.

This lake stretches more than 20 miles across Keith County and provides water for the state's largest irrigation district.

Devin Brundage: The Central Nebraska Public Power and Irrigation District irrigates over a 100,000 acres here in south central Nebraska directly, but service probably over half a million acres indirectly, as well.

So, we bring water from the Platte River that's stored in Lake McConaughy and that water not only irrigates those farms directly, but has provided a mound of groundwater that our local area farmers are able to utilize to irrigate their crops from that method, as well.

>> The idea for an irrigation project in south central Nebraska began early in the 20th century.

Holdrege mayor C.W.

McConaughy noticed that wheat grew best where snow drifts had collected and melted, providing extra water.

He wanted to provide that supplemental irrigation on a large scale and persuaded many people, including Minden banker George Kingsley, to help make it happen.

Devin Brundage: C.W.

McConaughy and Kingsley - what I call the Elon Musks of the early days of Nebraska - said we got to figure out how to make this work.

So they set about trying to come up with a way to ensure that this could occur because there were no ways to mine the groundwater in the day.

Jeff Buettner: As that idea grew over the years, it eventually morphed into an idea to create an irrigation project that would store water at Lake McConaughy behind Kingsley Dam and deliver it almost 200 miles east to the primary irrigated area in Phelps, Gosper, and Kearney Counties.

>> The drought and depression that crippled the nation during the 1930s may actually have given the project an advantage.

Devin Brundage: Timing was perfect.

The need was there.

The technology was there.

And all of a sudden there was a labor force available.

They were able to utilize those folks that needed a job to help build the project.

And the federal funds were the piece of the puzzle that had to come into place to make the whole project work.

Jeff Buettner: Oh, it was an incredible engineering feat.

One of the stories that I like to relay is about how many times George E. Johnson, who was the engineer and the first general manager of the project, about how many times he was told that he couldn't build this project.

And basically he just said, "Sit back, I'll show you."

And he did.

>> Construction finished in 1941 and farmers began irrigating from it the next year.

The difference between fields that used supplemental irrigation and those that didn't was noticeable.

Jeff Buettner: Someone had the suggestion that, "Well, we're running water downhill.

We might as well put some hydro plants on there, churn out some electricity, raise some revenues to help pay for the project itself."

Devin Brundage: That part has always been incredible to me that these folks had the foresight to build a hydroelectric plant where there were no people that needed power because they knew that there would be a need some day.

>> The Kingsley Hydroelectric Plant and Central's other two hydro plants together can generate up to 113,000 kilowatts of energy.

The water stored behind the dam is also used to cool the state's largest power plant, Gerald Gentleman Station, a coal facility.

Joe Citta: One thing nice about once through cooling: we're using the water, but we're returning most of it back to the environment.

>> That type of efficient re-use is typical along this stretch.

Devin Brundage: You think about the water in Nebraska in general, comes into the state maybe up by Scottsbluff.

How many times has that been utilized?

The canal diverts it.

It's used on a crop.

The return flows come to the river.

That water comes into Lake McConaughy.

Lake McConaughy stores it.

People recreate with it.

We make power with it.

It flows down further.

It cools power plants at Sutherland... Joe Citta: ...enters the Sutherland Project, which is the canal system.

It goes on into Sutherland Reservoir.

Can be used at Gerald Gentleman Station.

Goes to canal system to Lake Maloney.

At Lake Maloney... Jeff Buettner: ...it goes through the North Platte Hydro, near the City of North Platte.

And then back to the river where it can be directed to their irrigation canals... Devin Brundage: ...finally to irrigate and seep into the ground to be used again, maybe next year or the year after, use after use, after use.

Joe Citta: We've got to make sure we've got the water balance and that we're using the water in a sustainable way.

♪ ♪ Jim Swenson: Water is tremendously important for recreation in Nebraska because of the appeal that it brings.

People want to go to the water.

They want to be there to experience it, play in it, splash in it, just feel the cool aspects of the water, fish, boat, do all those tremendous outdoor activities.

And it's just a unique environment, whether it's the aesthetics of that environment or the opportunity to play in the water.

We've got plenty in our inventory across the state of Nebraska, between the rivers, the reservoirs, the lakes that we have statewide, tremendous opportunity.

Lake McConaughey is the first one that comes to mind because of the acreage of that reservoir out there and the miles of sandy beaches and the opportunity to play, to fish, to enjoy that environment.

Pat Gaston: Oh, I absolutely love living out here.

Just enjoy the scenery and the peacefulness and the quietness out here.

It's like paradise.

♪ ♪ Tommy Hicks: We are at Calamus Reservoir State Recreation Area.

A lot of people come here because of the water and also, we have 35 miles of white sandy beaches that are very popular.

Water is important for recreational use for all Nebraskans.

It's a place for people who can come to our parks and unwind.

They get to get away from everyday life.

It's a place for them to just relieve the stress from their everyday life.

They come out here and just enjoy the environment.

We have a lot of families that come out to this park and enjoy the water.

Josie Parker: just being here with the whole family and hanging out on the water, the views are amazing.

Every sunset, every sunrise, and everything in between, it's been really cool.

It's just been great to be here on the sand beaches and just the water is amazing.

Neel Keiser: We think it's one of Nebraska's best kept secrets, and it's probably not going to stay that way.

But that's all right.

We still enjoy it.

♪ ♪ Jim Swenson: The Niobrara River valley is a great place to visit.

I always enjoy my trips there because you drive across the Sandhills and all of a sudden you come into a valley that's full of trees and the landscape begins to change.

You see different ecosystems coming together there.

You find the water, you find the river, you see the excitement of the visitors who are enjoying that opportunity.

The opportunity to float that great river and see the diversity that it offers, the various landscapes, We entertain thousands of folks at Smith Falls, and it stretches along the Niobrara River where they're kayaking, canoeing, or floating in tubes.

Great recreation opportunities.

The designation of a national scenic river preserves basically has established to protect and preserve that fragile ecosystem to bring some management oversight to that environment, to protect and preserve against unnecessary actions that are detrimental to the riverine environment and just protect that resource.

>> Nebraska Game and Parks is joined by a network of conservation groups working to protect Nebraska's natural habitat, including Rowe Audubon Sanctuary.

Bill Taddicken: Audubon has been working here for nearly 50 years.

We came in 1971 really to give the river a voice.

Lots and lots of water diversions were happening and people were looking for more and more water all the time, but weren't thinking about what impacts it was having on the river, and the river was in extreme peril.

The Platte used to be what they would refer to as a mile wide and an inch deep.

And it truly was.

The Kearney Bridge, in 1916 was 4,188 feet long.

Today it's about 500 feet long.

(birds whooping) >> The Platte River provides critical habitat for sandhill cranes, whooping cranes, and other migratory birds.

They stop here to gain weight and energy needed to make their way north and lay eggs.

The survival of these birds depends on this river.

Bill Taddicken: I think the four saddest words I know are "you should have seen", and too often, and especially even more now we have to say "you should have seen" things like the great bison migration or the passenger pigeon, and there are species going extinct every day.

And the last thing I ever want people to have to say is "you should have seen the Great Crane Migration on the Platte River."

>> Rowe Sanctuary coordinates with NRDs and irrigation districts so water from canals seeps back to the river as birds travel through.

They also clear the river channel of invasive grasses and other non-native species to increase river flow and habitat.

They're starting to see the fruits of their labor.

Bill Taddicken: The sandhill crane population is slowly increasing, and has been for... since Audubon's been here.

And what we used to say was 500,000 in that flock is now we're estimating over a million in this migratory pathway.

>> Rowe's sister Nebraska Audubon station is located farther east near the boundaries of the Lower Platte and Blue basins.

This part of the state is home to smaller aquifers and springs which feed streams and ponds.

Meghan Sittler: The importance of tall grass prairie in this part of the state is for multiple reasons, the birds and the bugs, and things that we're hearing around us, but largely to hold the soil, and to protect our surface water, and protect the groundwater, and to limit the influence of chemicals down through the water table.

The prairie has an essence.

It is the roots of our landscape in this area, and those roots help protect that water resource that is so critical here.

So when you're at Spring Creek Prairie, you'll notice that we have two ponds and those ponds are created by dams, one of which that we're standing on right now.

And those dams were built in the 1960s as part of the Corps of Engineers.

We also have natural dam builders.

And so down there, we had a beaver return to Spring Creek Prairie this winter and had created this natural dam.

So we have a juxtaposition of the human infrastructure as well as the natural environments that help create those wetland environments and help recharge those important aquifers within our groundwater and surface water connection.

>> They work to preserve habitat for endangered species, but are realistic about what can be done.

Meghan Sittler: I think sometimes within conservation, we work so hard to make things how they were, and sometimes we can't do that.

So what is our new reality?

And how do we fit protection of those species and management of those species within that reality?

Close your eyes for a minute and listen.

Hear the wind.

Hear the water splashing.

Hear the bugs.

You have that moment where you can really center and you become part of the landscape around you.

It sparks that curiosity, and with that curiosity becomes that ability for all of us to understand our role.

I wish Nebraskans knew first and foremost that they are a critical piece to helping protect clean water and available water for themselves, and their family, and their communities.

♪ ♪ >> Water for communities is precisely what Donna Garden is focused on.

Donna Garden : My job is to make sure everyone in Lincoln has safe water, has wastewater, has stormwater removal and solid waste removal, basically everything from your drinking water in your house to flushing your toilets.

Steve Owen: Lincoln gets its water from well fields that are adjacent to the Platte River.

Some of those well fields, we have wells that are truly groundwater sourced wells.

We also have wells that are under the influence of surface water.

Donna Garden: Lincoln uses about 12 and a half billion gallons per year so that comes out to be somewhere about 122 gallons per person per day.

>> Even though Lincoln's population has increased roughly 1% a year since the early 1980s, its water use has remained relatively steady.

Steve Owen: In the last 40 years we've seen per capita or the amount of water that a person uses per day, drop by 34% since the early 1980s.

We've got water fixtures that use less water.

Our customers are more aware that water is not in unlimited supply.

Donna Garden: The water that comes to the City of Lincoln comes through your faucet, goes down your drain, goes into our wastewater system, gets cleaned back up, and gets put right back out into Salt Creek, and heads right back to the Platte River.

Steve Owen: Over 80% of the water that we deliver to customers is returned back through that system.

Municipal water systems tend to be out of sight, out of mind.

Much of our system is underground.

We're actively going out and replacing many miles of water mains each year.

Donna Garden: We want to be able to provide that safe water for the history of Lincoln going forward.

And what that means for us is to make sure that we have a second source of water, make sure we have a reliable system, make sure we don't have aging infrastructure that could fail.

I think all of Lincolnites would join and say, we have really good water and a really reliable system, and we want to keep it that way.

>> It's important that tomorrow's leaders understand all of Nebraska's water needs - from agriculture, to power, from wildlife habitat and recreation to the water we drink.

Dennis Strauch: I think it's important to build your leadership early and have it ready to go when you need it.

Things change constantly, and you have to keep up with it.

We need to be building our replacements, our people that are going to step into these roles into the future and be versed and ready to take over.

>> The Nebraska State Irrigation Association is educating those future leaders today, with a program called the Water Leaders Academy.

Matt Lukasiewicz: The Water Leaders Academy is a one-year class that meets every other month, six times a year at different areas of the state so that you get different challenges that you get to learn about with water.

And it's not just focused on surface water, it's groundwater, it's surface water, it's municipal uses, all water and beneficial uses of that water and how everybody works together to meet their challenges.

You get to talk to anyone from producers to legislators, attorneys - it's just a real broad learning experience if you're interested in water.

>> Matt Lukasiewicz, a graduate from the Academy's first year - now serves as the General Manager of the Loup, Farwell, and Sargent Irrigation Districts.

He's active on his local NRD board, and with the Nebraska State Irrigation Association.

Matt Lukasiewicz: I was brought in at the age of 31 when I started my position here, so I had a lot to learn obviously being young and not a lot of experience.

Getting to know how some of this infrastructure works and why there's lakes and streams and these different facilities that are across the state and their function, it was a huge learning tool for me just as a start in my career.

>> It's not just new employees.

The Academy provides new perspectives to lawmakers and veterans of the water industry.

Bill Taddicken: It was interesting because I've been working in water for 20 years.

And so you have this idea of what everybody else thinks, and you find out a lot.

I found out lots of different opinions that I didn't know existed and different ways of looking at how we manage our water and what our goals are.

John Berge: I don't think you're going to find a more broad-based, diverse education on water in Nebraska than that one.

We learned about not just irrigation, but we learned about municipal projects.

We learned about the sewer separation project in Omaha.

We learned about recreation.

It is really a fascinating program.

And the reason that that's so important is not long ago, we had an elected official from Nebraska come out here who had never seen an irrigation canal.

I don't think that's okay.

Those are educational opportunities, not just for people like you and I, but for elected officials, making sure that they have a broad base of information before they go and make decisions about our livelihoods.

>> And those decisions take cooperation.

Whether it be between surface and groundwater users, between different districts, states or special interests, we have to find common ground.

Devin Brundage: Water is water.

And we have to realize that every action that occurs on the surface water site has a groundwater reaction.

And every groundwater action has a surface water result.

So, working together as we move forward is important to making sure that each person is not adversely affecting the other.

John Berge: We have to work together.

There has to be that cooperative spirit between both groundwater users and surface water users.

Bob Hilske: That doesn't mean we always agree on everything but we always know that for something to work, we're going to have to work together because we can't have three or four different entities out there going in three or four different directions.

So, that's why I think things work in Nebraska.

Ann Dimmitt: Sometimes the NRDs can be in a tricky place.

We have the state on one side and we have local growers and producers on the other side, and I think we're educating both sides good enough that that relationship is improving and has been over time.

It's just trying to get people to communicate about an issue and all understand it and see it from different perspectives.

Bill Taddicken: You know, think Nebraska is really fortunate in that we are willing to sit down at the table and talk about things and work together.

Today I can say it's been a huge success so far.

John Berge: There are people in my job across the state that make very different decisions than I would make.

That's because they're in very different situations than I am.

It's because they have different boards than I do.

It's because they have different kinds of constituent needs than we do.

It doesn't mean that they're right and I'm wrong.

It means that we need to look at all of these different aspects of these problems across the state and make individual decisions.

Michael Ann Relka: Stewardship is important because we all share the same resources.

We have to be very aware of the resources we use because our livelihoods depend on it.

Water is life.

Drinking water, irrigation for lawns.

Fire protection Irrigation, municipal supply, individual supplies endangered species It's important to the economy of our great state.

We need it for power.

We need it for recreation.

Cooling water for commercial purposes Well, the economic impact is in the millions, billions of dollars.

Water's important because water is vital to life, not just human life, but agriculture and every living organism.

Water's important for recreational use for all Nebraskans.

Water's important to us just because we need it to survive, quality water, good water, available water.

They say we owe our existence to six inches of topsoil and the fact that it rains and I think that says it all.

We're doing what we need to do today, to make sure that the resource is here for the people of our state for tomorrow.

Quite simply, there is no life without water.

This NET Connects program is produced in partnership with The Nebraska State Irrigation Association with support from these sponsors.