The Gigots
Land bought at five dollars an acre, a center pivot that cost a million, and eight states making it a crime to photograph what comes next.
Another wave of technological innovation occurred in the years following World War II. The engines that were in development to power naval ships, aircraft, and mechanized transport became increasingly available to American industrial interests. Pumping technology had a bevy of new technological advancements that finally brought the Ogallala aquifer into play regarding an exploitable resource in aiding farmers in the region. Combined with American domestic oil and natural gas production starting an explosive increase in 1932 and peaking in 1970 (although shale and fracking from 2015-2017 was producing very close the 1970-levels) saw a new powerful terraformer that could keep a future dust bowl at bay.
Brand new irrigation farming techniques became available--although these were too expensive for a family farmer to afford--which would require massive amounts of financing to install. By the 1940s irrigation began to have a major impact on the High Plains. More than 5,000 water wells had been dug by 1950. By 1947-1956 a dust bowl larger in scope than the 1930's Dust Bowl rocked the Plains again. But this time farmers who could afford the infrastructural investment of water wells and pumping technology that could counteract the horrific conditions, greatly limiting the pain. Throughout the 1950s, new wells were dug at a rate of 5,000 per year and by the end of the 1950's more than 42,000 water wells were drilled, and by the 1970's American oil production peak there were more than 170 thousand water wells pumping water out of the aquifer. Like 170 thousand mosquitos sucking water from the Ogallala.
In the 1950s a 320-acre half section farm would need five wells dug, typically costing the farmer $18,000 in well start-up costs, plus extra for irrigation systems, maintenance, and fuel costs for either gasoline or natural gas. Irrigation systems originally were rudimentary. Furrow irrigation was the practice of creating channels between the raised crop rows; farmers would run the gated pipe along the track filling up the furrows with water like a canal. This irrigation technique proved incredibly wasteful, as the trenches could breach like a levy under flood duress and water would be wasted, forcing the farmer to toil to fix the breach, on top of paying extra fuel costs to run the pump to refill the broken furrow. The improvement came with advances in plastics technologies in the 1950s, with plastic gated piping and water housing advancements. Siphon irrigation ran massive lengths of gated piping across farm tracts, and in each hole, a water hose ran a siphon down each crop row. This method was a significant improvement but was straining the individual farmer regarding cost.
The next advancement, the center pivot irrigator, was the most significant and is the most responsible for eliminating our anxieties for food scarcity. An air traveler traveling over the country will notice an endless gridwork of circle dotted squares reminiscent of Robert Delaunay's circular form paintings. This is the work of a center pivot irrigator. Four wells are dug, effectively subdividing a full 320-acre section into four 160 quarter acre sections. Sheets of high strength low alloy steel are formed into custom sections of piping 40 feet long, with flanges welded on either end for easy field assembly.
The pipe is similar to the plastic gated piping used in previous irrigation methods. It has holes punched in them at regular intervals to place a series of threaded sprinkler heads. There are multiple sprinkler heads for different water applications as well as the ability for liquid fertilizers to be applied to the field through a center-point irrigator. The construction of a center-point irrigator is a custom built farm implement, designed for a specific customer, field, and crop. It is produced in a factory shop and shipped out to farmland for installation and is built onsite like a massive erector set.
The center-point irrigator connects to the centrally placed well pipe on a center pivot, runs the entire length of a full tract section, and has two massive tractor wheels on the outside edge connected to a stepper motor. When assembled, the stepper motor slowly pivots the wheels in a large circle precisely applying water to the crop in times of drought, effectively turning what would be a dustbowl desert into a circular garden oasis in alternating ochre and green hues.
The center pivot typically makes one irrigation circuit in 12 hours.
This tool along with the combine harvester virtually eliminated the volume of work needed to harvest an acre of farmland. During colonial America, a typical farmer labored to supply four people with food. By 1940, just before the invention of center pivot technology, that number increased to 19 people. During the initial implementation of center pivot irrigation systems from 1950-1960, that number increased further from 27-61. By the peak of petroleum production in the United States, that number was 72 people per farmer.
The dependence of irrigation systems like centrifugal pumps and center-point irrigation required farmers to go into deep debts. Land costs during this period skyrocketed in price to reflect the debts and irrigation infrastructure placed on the land. The exponential productivity of monoculture crops like corn peaked at three dollars a bushel before collapsing to 1.25 in the 1970s. This led to land values in the plains collapsing by half from $920 an acreto $500 an acre. As a result, the borrowing power of a plains farmer reduced by nearly two-thirds.
By the 1980s a state of the art center pivot system cost more than a million dollars per 320 acre full section of farmland, before the costs of seed, farming equipment (tractor and combine harvesters), fertilizers, insecticides, labor, and debt amortization payments. The margins in such a business model are razor thin. For instance, if 140 bushels per acre of corn are produced at a market cost of three dollars per acre on 320 acres, then the farmer will gross less than $135,000 before all of the costs of labor, farm materials, and debt payments are factored in. The plains farmer could not be a farmer and live off the production of crops alone. The output of cereal grains, which are responsible for the 10,000-year miracle of human civilization, are not profitable enough for the modern farmer. Solutions were needed to turn cereal grains into more cash to pay for the incurred debts.
Vertical integration became the solution. A notable farming family operation in the Sandhills Kansas Region, the Gigots, operated hundreds of 160-acre center pivot circles. By the 1960s, the family started to turn their 2,800 acre desert in western Kansas into a massive series of circular gardens. During this time, the government was trying to get people off this land, offering to resettle the drought broken farmers. While seemingly everyone was abandoning western Kansas, family patriarch Clarence Gigot kept buying the seemingly worthless scrubland at prices as cheap as five dollars per acre. Hearing about the center-point irrigation system, Clarence, Dean, and Terry Gigot traveled to see a center-point irrigation system in action. They bought their first center-point irrigator on the spot and the next year produced 120 bushels of corn an acre.
Throughout the 1960s, they expanded their land speculation and increased their scrubland holdings by 10 times what they began with, to 22,000 acres, and drilled over 100 wells for new center-point irrigators to be placed on the land. Instead of the laborious pain of trench irrigation, the numerous sprinklers applied just enough water on the turned up soil. Because of the ease of water application, multiple crops could thrive on the land easily that initially could not be grown. Water-dependent crops like, corn, sugar beets, and potatoes. By the 1980s the gigots operated 700 pivots.
The land the Gigots purchased for five dollars in the 1960's skyrocketed in value to nearly $250 per acre without an installed pivot and $1,500 per acre with a pivot installed. A 320-acre section that Clarence paid $1,600 for in the 1960s could be sold for nearly half a million dollars at the end of the 1970s. Later the Gigots diversified and vertically integrated into the cattle industry. Instead of selling their cereal grains directly to market for low-profit margins, they fed their alfalfa, sorghum, and corn grains as a feed mixture to their cattle, thereby selling the livestock at a higher profit margin than what the grain could fetch at market value.
The Gigot family business made every effort to reduce labor, energy, and water cost. As the strategy developed, they got into the equipment dealership business, selling equipment to other farmers and providing the financing, creating multiple companies ranging from Gigot irrigating, Gigot feeders, and circle feeders. As a byproduct of their cattle operations, they processed the cattle waste into fertilizer and created the Maxima Corporation, a fertilizer producer. The Gigots were an example of how to be successful in the economic environment of the High Plains by creating a series of companies that created a unified value-added, vertically integrated network that took built value from every facet of their operations. From grain farming to ranching, to fertilizer, mineral rights, research and development, equipment dealerships, and financing.
" It's not raping the land to pump water. Water is something put there to use, and I hope that I'm using it to the best of my ability."
— Dean Gigot
"Should we be using the groundwater? Damn, right we should! The same doomsayers are claiming that the buffalo and the Indians should still be here... The water is there for man to use, same as the soil, the trees, and the oil. Use it with all the abilities that you have."
— Dean Gigot
The gigots have been business-like realists, expecting to continue their advanced technology water conserving irrigation for a long time. Yet one gigot feeder manager believed that declining Ogallala water levels would eventually shut everything down and return the region to submarginal scrubland. Dean Gigot also admitted consumption far beyond capacity: "We are overpopulated out here. My family's contention is to stop the drilling, put in a five-year moratorium on new wells, and get a really good monitoring situation in place."
— John Opie, Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land
"The Time will come when we'll be really sorry that the Sandhills was ever developed. There's a tremendous amount of wind erosion already, especially on the irrigated prairie that you wouldn't otherwise be farming. Once you take away the natural vegetation cover on this land, there is no way to restore it. I sure don't want to live here when the aquifer goes dry, because this place is never gonna stop blowing. It's going to be a new desert."LOC 2708
— Gary Baker, Kansas groundwater official
In the 1980s the Gigot conglomerate became the biggest corn producers in the nation. When corn was cheap, they fed it to the cows in their feedlots and benefited when cattle prices rose from $25 per 100 lbs to $75 per 100 pounds by the end of the decade. During the same time, the Gigots understood the magnitude of irrigation overdraft of the aquifer. They switched from corn to wheat partly because corn was too cheap to grow at a profit but also because wheat was more resilient for the region and could be grown in with dry farming methods during drought conditions. If a wheat glut brought federal restriction of the crop, all they had to do was to switch over to growing sorghum, which is even more drought resistant, and feed it their cattle.
"Despite these strategies, if a grain crop was no longer profitable on center pivot land, they could successfully graze cattle on irrigated grasses. Dryland open range beef production stood at 2,700 lbs per acre, while cattle that consumed cool-season grasses under a center pivot unit virtually guaranteed 700 lbs and 900 lbs of beef per acre."
— John Opie, Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land
The end product for success in the future of the plains is not grain production, it has merely become a means of producing stability in factory livestock production--not just cattle, but pork, and poultry as well. "As long as cattle makes a profit, everyone profits," is the current business maxim. These are massive factory operations, with livestock crowded on large grassless tracts. Hundreds of acres fenced off with barbed wire with large trenches dug along its perimeter. Grains are dumped in the ditches to quickly fatten the heads of cattle.
Christmas day in 2016, I was driving in rural southern New Mexico and encountered a sign enlarging in the vast expanse. It was one of these operations. I stopped and heard silence, not even the vibration of rolling tires on the asphalt. At first just the sound of wind and your own internal heartbeat. I walked up to some barbed wire and some no trespassing signs. I jumped the fence and tore my pants on the barbed wire. I walked a little further up the dirt perimeter road that grain trucks drove and found myself just outside the central enclosure of cattle, the dander and stench of at least ten thousand head of livestock overwhelmed my nose and eyes. About that time, a spatial network of moo's could be heard moving down the feed trough 100 yards away. What seemed like the entirety of the 10,000 head of cattle strolled up to the fence and poked their heads through the barbed wire to look at the disturbance on the road, namely me. I was looking back at an edge of the rectangular perimeter fence moving back to a vanishing point of a row of cows staring at me.
Their eyes were present. They were curious and aware of their environment. I think about that when I look at a plastic foam package of their efficiently cut pieces of corpse in the local supermarket, assuming that is probably the definition of ethically raised beef, and the little white sticker with the primary defining characteristics of our modern understandings of a resource. The cut, the price per pound, the weight of the package, and the price of the package. Some additional statistics should be listed on that white barcode label and not left aside as an externality of the costs. It takes one bushel of grain, 2,500 gallons of water, 35 lbs of topsoil, and one gallon of gasoline to produce one pound of feedlot beef. One cow produces 600 lbs of sellable supermarket beef and will require 50 bushels of corn, 1.5 million gallons of water, and 600 gallons of gasoline to finish, slaughter, package, ship, and sell. The 50 bushels of corn that finished that one cow's 600 lbs of flesh needed an additional 150,000 gallons of water to grow. The volume of water required from the aquifer is absolutely staggering given the necessity of factory meat in the profitability of the plains farmer.
Large-scale slaughterhouses in a 250-mile radius of Garden City, Kansas process 90,000 head of cattle in a week. This radius is the epicenter of beef production in the world. Four out of every ten cows in the United States are slaughtered within this radius. Places like Chicago, Cincinnati, and Kansas City with bloody histories of meatpacking, as notably portrayed in Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle, are now relieved of this work. We now mostly don't know much about the meat we consume on a daily basis, much of the work is hidden out on the plains, out of sight and smell, with only periodic gazes inside through digital devices. States have instituted many pieces of "AG-GAG" legislation to eliminate the chance that a future edition of The Jungle is published for an informed public. In the states that the Ogallala sits, legislation is as follows:
Texas -- Passed H.B. 1643 in June 2017, which makes it illegal to use a drone to take photos over a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO).
New Mexico -- Introduced legislation in 2013. Failed. Introduced a quick-reporting bill in 2015 to make failure to turn over evidence of animal abuse within 24 hours of collection a misdemeanor. Failed. Also introduced S.B. 167 in 2017 to make using drones to conduct surveillance of a farm illegal. Failed.
Colorado -- Introduced S. 42 in 2015 to require reporting of cruelty within 48 hours. This "quick-reporting" bill would prevent the collection of adequate evidence to show patterns of abuse, neglect or abandonment, potentially hindering prosecution of abusers. Bill tabled in February by its sponsor.
Wyoming -- Introduced legislation in 2013, which failed. Introduced S.F. 12 in 2015 to criminalize collection of "resource data" (including photos and video) on private land and prohibit it from being used as evidence in criminal trials. Governor Mead signed S.F. 12 into law in March. A 2016 revision to this law seems to indicate that it is not targeting animal cruelty investigations. In September 2017, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the law as unconstitutional.
North Dakota -- Passed the Animal Research Facility Damage Act, which makes it a class B misdemeanor to "[enter] an animal facility and using or attempting to use a camera, video recorder, or any other video or audio recording equipment."
South Dakota -- This chapter comprises South Dakota's animal enterprise interference laws. Under the section, it is illegal for a person to intentionally damage or destroy an animal facility, an animal, or property in or on the animal facility; exercise control over the animal facility or an animal located therein; enter the animal facility with the intent to commit prohibited acts; enter an animal facility and remain concealed with the intent to commit prohibited acts; or intentionally release an animal on an animal facility. Violation is a misdemeanor of varying degrees if the damaged property value is less than $1,000 and a Class 4 felony if above $1,000. Any person who violates subdivisions 40-38-2(2) to (5), inclusive, is guilty of a Class 4 felony.
Nebraska -- Introduced legislation in 2012 and 2013. Failed.
Kansas -- Passed the Farm Animal and Field Crop and Research Facilities Protection Act in 1990. It criminalizes "enter(ing) an animal facility to take pictures by photograph, video camera or by any other means" with the intent of causing harm to the enterprise.