Mai Farms Inc is a
farming corporation owned and operated by the second and third
generations of the Mai family. Bill was born in the house that was
near the present home that was built in 1972.
Bill
and Wilma formed the corporation in 1980. Son Carl has been a full
time employee/officer since 1983. Fourth generation
grandchildren are on the farm helping and learning from time to
time. There are no other employees.
William Mai Sr. began farming this place in 1936 in the depth of
the dust bowl and depression, having spent about a year on a
northwest Greeley County farm a little more than 20 miles away. He
had moved his wife and 3 sons west from the WaKeeney, KS farm in
1935. He and my mother, Martha were both first generation Germans
from Russia where their parents had also been farmers.
Those were tough economic times for most Americans but even more
so for those who lived in the High Plains Dust Bowl. In some of
those years there was only enough feed and grain in a crop year to
feed a few animals for milk to drink, a little meat to eat now and
then, plenty of eggs to eat and hopefully enough cream and eggs to
sell for basic grocery needs. The dust blew and when the rain came,
much of it ran off the fields. The hot summers of 1935 and 36
caused higher evaporation rates so there was less usable water left
for plant growth, less residue to prevent soil erosion.
Today we follow a three year rotation of wheat, corn and fallow.
We do no tillage in the three year period except for about the last
60 days before wheat planting. This practice results in greatly
increased residue levels that soften the falling rain, hold the
winter snows and shade the soil from the heat of the sun.
It is our goal as stewards of this land to achieve high
productivity while improving soil structure and fertility through
sound conservation principles. We follow farming practices that are
not destructive of natural processes but try to improve upon what
nature provides. We hope that when the weather conditions that
contributed to the dusty thirties and fifties return, as they surely
will one day, we will have learned enough to avoid those horrible
results of the "dirty thirties".
index
The Kansas Water Appropriations Act was passed in 1945 to create a
basic framework for water law in Kansas. Water in Kansas is
dedicated to the use of the people of the state and to use it for
other than domestic use one must either hold a vested right granted
to users before June 28, 1945 or an appropriated right issued upon
compliance of rules and regulations effected by the 1945 act and
subsequent legislation.
In southern Wallace County there was only one
well southeast of Weskan with a vested right pumping from the
Ogallala Aquifer. The first appropriation right application was
#493 in the spring of 1948 made by my father, William Mai. I worked
with water from that well for 51 years. The well originally was
rated at 1000 gallons per minute and when entered into the Water
Rights Conservation Reserve Program after the 1999 pumping season it
was still capable of 450 gallons per minute at the start of the
season but would fall to 350 by the end of summer.
The well was one of the original
observation wells for depth to water measurement by the Kansas
Geological Survey in cooperation with the Groundwater management
districts. A summary of the depth to water measurements are show in
the table below. The shale or bottom of the water bearing sand is
at 220 feet.
Water
depth, observation well
SW NE 8 15 39, Wallace
-
1/48 105.00
-
1/66 129.72
-
1/71 143.26
-
1/76 158.24
-
1/81 161.18
-
1/86 161.84
-
1/91 165.96
-
1/96 167.85
-
1999 last pumping year
-
1/00 174.38
-
1/01 175.38
-
1/02 178.28
-
1/03 180.13
-
1/04 181.77
-
1/05 183.16
-
1/06 184.4
-
4/07 186.63
www.kgs.ku.edu/Magellan/WaterLevels/index.html
It is worth
noting that in the 7 years after we stopped irrigating, the water
table dropped more than in any other similar time span. In the past
7 years we lost 12.25 feet of saturated thickness or 10.65% of the
original 1948 saturation. With only 33.37 feet of saturated
thickness remaining, that means that only 29% of the original 115
feet remains. One must recognized that the quantity of water
remaining in the aquifer is not likely 29% of quantity even if the
deeper sands hold more water because of their porosity. One must
think of the aquifer as a lake above a dam in a river valley with
most of its capacity in the upper half of the depth of the
reservoir. The bottom half with its ravines and hills has much less
capacity or volume. Most of the irrigation well locations,
including #493, were chosen after drilling numerous test holes to
find the deepest hole with the best sands.
My father was very interested in irrigation because many family
relatives lived where irrigation was common, Colorado and the Garden
City, Kansas area. His desire to irrigate was to ensure a feed
supply for his livestock in times of drought. A side note: his
birthplace was near Milberger, KS but his first experience with
irrigation was near Fort Collins in about 1905 where my immigrant
grandparents went to work the sugarbeet fields during the summer.
He fell into an irrigation ditch and nearly drowned as a very small
child where his parents were hoeing beets.
I went to college with the intent of going into a profession but
decided by my junior year that irrigation provided more challenges
and a more interesting career than any profession offered. I was an
outdoor person who liked physical work and to be able to see what I
had done. I took over the irrigated part of the farm with two wells
in 1960 after Wilma and I were married. We rented more irrigated
land until in 1969 we were farming land with nine irrigation wells.
At that time we had two fulltime hired men and no time for
anything. The decision was made to give up four of the wells and
have no hired help.
This was about the time we started seriously thinking about water
conservation. By 1975 it was becoming obvious that we were
overusing our water supply and we had begun cutting back on water
use by more crop rotations and trying crops requiring less water.
We also experimented with timing of water application, reduced plant
populations in corn and using fallow periods in the rotation. Many
of the things we tried increased our efficiency because of better
use of my own labor and lower input costs per unit of production.
In the 1980’s we started looking at practices such as no-till
continuous wheat and more dryland acres. In 1985 we planted our
first no-till dryland corn and soybeans as an experiment. The
results were very surprising and encouraging. After about 5 years
of success, some of it in very dry years, we began the final
transition from irrigation to dryland farming by changing field
shapes and sizes to suit dryland practices. Each year we reduced
the number of hours of pumping time until in 1999 we down to pumping
only 3 wells on small acreages. Our water rights have been enrolled
in the Kansas Water Rights Conservation Reserve Program for a second
term. index
In 1948 there wasn’t such a thing as a self-propelled sprinkler
system. When we started irrigating the only machine we used was a
Chattin Double Wing Ditcher. It made a beautiful ditch, was pulled
with a tractor and operated by a man on back. At first we used
canvas dams that rotted if left in the ditch a few days and made
cuts in the side of the ditch to run water into borders or rows.
Next we used translucent plastic 4’ X 2” siphon tubes, treated
canvas dams that lasted a season with proper care, and in a couple
of years were able to get 6’ X 2” aluminum tubes and coated nylon
fabric dams with adjustable crossboards to allow controlled flow
over the top of the dam. We also used various smaller diameter
siphon tubes as small as 1” for controlled flow down the furrow. By
1960 we had begun using gated pipe and soon after began laying
underground pipe with well-located risers. By 1970 we had pretty
much converted the whole farm to closed systems of underground and
gated pipe. We used these systems until we stopped irrigating in
1999.
Others who planned to continue irrigating in the
future upgraded their operations first with high pressure water
drive center pivots by Valley. As pumping costs increased water
drives where replaced with electric and hydraulic drives by Valley,
Zimmatic, Reinke, Lockwood and many others. The biggest change came
with the conversion to low pressure nozzles on drops to greatly
reduce power requirements, and most recently computer and wireless
controls to more precisely control water distribution.
index
The first two
tower self-propelled sprinkler system was built by Frank Zybach near
Strasburg, Colorado in 1948 and was mounted on metal skids worked by
two-way water control valves. He continued to build and perfect his
idea and was granted his patent in July of 1952. By then he built a
fully functional a five tower water drive system. He realized he
needed help in marketing his product so he moved back to his
hometown of Columbus, Nebraska and got capital from car dealer,
businessman A. E. Trowbridge.
Our local
John Deere dealer somehow became interested in the Zybach invention
and set up a field demonstration on our farm sometime in the spring
of 1954. The system apparently was one of the very first built
because it had no identifying marks and the pipeline was suspended
less than three feet above the ground. According to information
found in various publications Zybach and Trowbridge manufactured ten
systems from 1952 to 1954. In the fall of 1954 the partnership
agreed to license their center pivot patent to Robert Daugherty who
had a small business on a farm west of Valley, Nebraska. The name of
that company was Valley Manufacturing, now known as Valmont
Industries, Inc. Valley re-engineered the system taller, sturdier
and more reliable and over time introduced new drive systems.
On the day of
the 1954 demonstration it was very windy and the relative humidity
was extremely low. The soil conservation service had set up rain
gages to record the effectiveness of the system in delivering water
to the soil. The sprinkler was set up to deliver one inch of water,
but because of the dry air less than one-fifth of an inch was
measured in the gages. My father was not impressed, so the system
was removed.
Ironically we
purchased a farm northwest of Sharon Springs near the Smoky Hill
River in 1986 and were surprised to find stacked up in a weed patch
the five towers from that system demonstrated on our farm in 1954.
It turned out that a young farmer had purchased that particular farm
a in January of 1955 and later bought the five tower system to
irrigate alfalfa.
We set up one
of the towers in our yard and made three available to Valley dealers
for display. The fifth tower was badly damaged and was salvaged. The
one on display at Western Kansas Valley in Sharon Springs has been
refurbished. Index
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