If you've flown across Nebraska, Kansas or western Texas on a clear day, you've seen them: geometrically arranged circles of green and brown on the landscape, typically half a mile in diameter. They're the result of pivot irrigation, in which long pipes-on-wheels rotate slowly around a central point, spreading water across corn fields.
Yet most of those fields are doomed. The water that nourishes them eventually will run low.
That water comes from a huge pool of underground water known as the Ogallala Aquifer, part of a larger system called the High Plains Aquifer. Scientists calculate that farmers are pulling water out of the aquifer about six times faster than rain or rivers can recharge it.
That can't go on forever. In some areas, wells have already gone dry. Yet families and entire towns depend on that flow of water for their survival.
In one small section of northwestern Kansas, farmers now have agreed to do something unprecedented. For the next five years, all the farmers in this area, covering 99 square miles, will pump 20 percent less water out of the ground.
It's a remarkable agreement, but it's also fragile. Whether it survives will depend, in large part, on whether other farmers follow their lead.
Hoxie, the small town where farmers have taken this bold step, is the kind of place where people keep track of how many children go to the town's school. It's a barometer of the town's health.
"When I was in high school, we had 36 to 42 in every class," says farmer Mitchell Baalman. "Now, these classes are down to 15. Ten to 15 in every class."
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