I. Nebraska Panhandle, Late April 2026
The grass was brown from fence line to fence line. Brown that had passed through dormancy and out the other side. Past waiting.
Eric Hunt, a climatologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, drove into the panhandle in late April with colleagues from the state climate office and the National Drought Mitigation Center. He'd tracked the numbers for months: drought coverage expanding from 9.1 percent of the state in October to 77 percent by late February, the largest winter drought expansion in the Drought Monitor's history. The panhandle wasn't numbers.
"I didn't see a single blade of green grass at a pasture out there."
He kept reaching for the right word. "It's downright depressing," he told Nebraska Public Media. "It's almost, probably, I almost say, kind of scary."
The winter that produced this landscape barely qualified as one. December through March, Nebraska ran 8.9°F above the twentieth-century average. The warmest such period in 131 years of state records. Total precipitation statewide for those four months: 1.05 inches. Also the driest on record. Much of western and central Nebraska recorded little or no snowfall all winter. Colorado State University climatologist Becky Bolinger ran the probability: before the 1980s, a December-through-March this warm and dry would have been a 1-in-5,200-year event.
Winter wheat needs cold. Planted in fall, it enters dormancy when temperatures drop, holding underground through hard months for spring moisture to carry it forward. This year the cold never held. Wheat broke dormancy weeks early, pushing upward through soil that had nothing left to give. Nearly half the state's crop was rated poor to very poor. The plants had done exactly what the season told them. They grew. The season was lying.
Hunt heard what he called horror stories from panhandle farmers. One stays.
"One farmer last week told me that he was wanting it to freeze because he wanted his wheat to be killed because it's not worth harvesting."
A farmer in spring, praying for frost. Wanting the cold that December, January, February, and March had each withheld. Wanting it now to kill the crop, because the wheat that survived the warmest winter in recorded history would cost more to cut than it could return.
On April 30, the Drought Monitor placed a section of the panhandle into exceptional drought for the first time in more than two years. In Sheridan County, a landowner reported his lake had gone completely dry, the first time since 2012. Thirteen hundredths of an inch of moisture in thirty days.
The water that should have sustained summer was already gone.