Wade Stillwater—and yes, he's heard every joke about his name in the past three years—sits in his truck at the edge of a wheat field outside Garden City, Kansas, scrolling through his phone with a kind of manic focus. He's not checking grain futures or weather forecasts. He's looking at photos of sorghum varieties, trying to distinguish between "stay-green" drought tolerance and regular drought tolerance, which apparently are different things that matter a lot when your irrigation wells are producing 40% less water than they did five years ago.
Wade, 47, farms 3,200 acres that his grandfather bought in 1958, back when the Ogallala Aquifer seemed infinite and Kansas wheat was a sure thing. Now he's pivoting to crops he barely knew existed two years ago—sorghum, Kernza perennial wheatgrass, even experimenting with camelina—because the math on irrigated wheat stopped working somewhere around 2022. He agreed to talk on the condition that we acknowledge he's not a climate activist or an early adopter or any kind of hero. He's just a guy whose wells went dry and took his certainty with them.
For the record, Wade Stillwater is a composite character drawn from research on American farmers adapting to water scarcity and drought-resistant crops, though his dilemmas and the technical details of his situation reflect real experiences documented across the Great Plains.
When did you realize you had to change what you were growing?
I'd been watching the well levels drop for years. Everyone around here has. But there's this thing where you keep telling yourself it'll bounce back. One good wet year and we're fine.
Except we haven't had that year. In 2023 I'm running my irrigation and the pressure's dropping and I'm doing the math on diesel costs to pump less water, and I just... I had this moment where I realized I was managing decline. Like, my whole job had become figuring out how to slowly lose money more efficiently.
So I started reading about drought-resistant crops, which is when I discovered that "drought-resistant" is kind of a meaningless term because there's like seventeen different types of drought tolerance and they all work differently. Some plants have deep roots. Some plants shut down during stress and come back. Some plants just need less water period.
And I'm sitting there thinking, I have a degree in agricultural economics and I don't understand any of this.
What did you plant instead?
Well, first I panicked and planted nothing, which was... not my best decision.
Then I talked to some people at K-State, read a bunch of research papers I barely understood, and decided to split my acreage. Kept some wheat on the fields with the best well production. Converted about 800 acres to sorghum because it's drought-tolerant and I at least knew what sorghum was. Then I did something probably insane and put 200 acres into Kernza.
You know Kernza? It's this perennial wheatgrass that some scientists bred to produce edible grain. The roots go down like ten feet, which sounds great when your water table's dropping. But here's the thing—there's basically no market for it yet. I'm growing a crop that might not have a buyer, on land my grandfather would've planted wheat on, because the climate changed and my wells are failing and this is just what we do now, I guess.
How are the yields compared to what you used to get with wheat?
He laughs. Oh man. Okay, so the sorghum is actually doing... fine? Not great, but fine. I'm getting maybe 70% of what I used to get with irrigated wheat, but I'm using way less water and diesel, so the economics almost work. Almost.
The Kernza is a disaster in terms of yield—I'm getting maybe 600 pounds per acre when I used to get 4,000 pounds of wheat. But I'm also not irrigating it at all, and it's a perennial so I don't have to replant every year, and supposedly the yields improve in year two and three as the root system establishes.
The mental shift is the hard part. I grew up in a world where the goal was maximum yield per acre. Now I'm trying to figure out minimum input for acceptable yield, which feels like... I don't know, like I'm admitting defeat? Even though I know that's not rational. The old model doesn't work anymore. The water isn't there.
But there's this voice in my head that sounds like my grandfather saying "600 pounds per acre? Are you kidding me?"
What does your family think about all this?
My dad thinks I've lost my mind with the Kernza. He keeps asking me who's going to buy it, which is a fair question I don't have a great answer to. There's a few craft brewers interested, some boutique flour mills, but we're talking niche markets. Not the commodity system that's kept this farm running for sixty years.
My wife is... look, she's supportive, but she's also the one who does the books, so she's very aware that we're betting our financial future on crops that might not pan out. We've got two kids, one in college, one in high school. We're not in a position to experiment for the sake of experimentation. This has to work.
The weird thing is my son—he's seventeen—he thinks this is all fascinating. He wants to study agronomy, maybe work on developing drought-resistant varieties. He sees this as the future of farming. I see it as a crisis I'm trying to manage.
Both things are probably true.
You mentioned there are different types of drought tolerance. How do you figure out which one you need?
Long pause.
That's the thing that keeps me up at night. Because it depends on what kind of drought you're dealing with. If it's early-season moisture stress, you need one thing. If it's late-season heat stress, you need something else. If your water table is dropping but you still get some rain, that's different from no rain at all.
And the research is all over the place. I was reading this paper about how drought resistance involves hundreds of different genes, and they're still figuring out which ones matter most.1 So I'm supposed to choose between sorghum varieties based on "stay-green drought tolerance" versus whatever the alternative is, and I barely understand what that means. Stay-green means the plant keeps photosynthesizing during stress instead of shutting down, which sounds good, but is that what I need? I don't know!
So what I'm doing is basically... diversifying? Hedging? I'm growing five different things and hoping two of them work consistently enough to keep the farm viable. It's like running a very slow, very expensive science experiment where my family's financial security is the dependent variable.
What's the timeline on knowing if this works?
The sorghum, I'll know this year. The Kernza, they say you need three to five years to really evaluate it because the yields improve as the root system develops. But I don't know if I have three to five years. I mean, financially I probably do, barely. But psychologically? I'm not sure.
There's this other layer too, which is that the climate keeps changing while I'm trying to adapt to it. I'm choosing crops based on the drought conditions of the last five years, but what if the next five years are different? What if we get more rain and I've converted to drought-resistant crops that don't yield as well in good conditions? Or what if it gets even drier and the stuff I'm planting now isn't drought-resistant enough?
The research says AI and machine learning are going to help develop better drought-tolerant varieties in the next five to ten years.2 Which is great, but I need to plant something in four months. I can't wait for the perfect crop that adapts to whatever climate we end up with.
Has the way you think about farming changed?
Completely. I used to think about farming as... I don't know, as a partnership with nature where you worked hard and paid attention and mostly things went okay. Now it feels more like I'm in a negotiation where the terms keep changing and I don't have much leverage.
Like, I'll be out in the field and I'll see a plant that's stressed, and instead of thinking "it needs water," I think "is this the kind of stress it can recover from or the kind that means crop failure?" I'm constantly evaluating which problems I can solve and which ones I just have to absorb.
And there's this dark humor to the whole thing. My name is Stillwater and my wells are going dry. I'm a Kansas wheat farmer who might not grow wheat anymore. The Ogallala Aquifer is dropping a foot and a half a year and we're all just... planting different crops and hoping that counts as adaptation.
Sometimes I think the whole thing is absurd. Other times I think, well, this is just farming now. You adapt or you quit.
What do you tell other farmers who are thinking about making similar changes?
Honestly? I don't give advice because I don't know if what I'm doing is going to work. I can tell you what I'm trying, but I can't tell you it's the right answer.
What I will say is that waiting for perfect information is a choice, and it's probably the wrong one. The water situation isn't getting better. The climate isn't stabilizing. If you're still trying to farm the way your dad farmed, you're already behind.
But also—and this is the part that's hard to talk about—you have to be okay with the possibility that you're making the wrong bet. That you're spending money and time and emotional energy on crops that won't pan out. Because the alternative is doing nothing, and that's definitely the wrong choice.
I've got 200 acres of Kernza that might be a complete waste. Or it might be the thing that saves this farm in ten years. I genuinely don't know. And I'm learning to live with that uncertainty, which is not a skill they teach you in ag school.
What would you need to feel more confident about this transition?
He laughs. A crystal ball? I don't know.
Better market infrastructure for alternative crops would help. Right now I'm growing Kernza without a clear buyer, which is insane. More research on which varieties work in which conditions. Some kind of insurance product that actually covers the risk of transitioning to new crops instead of just insuring the crops I used to grow.
But honestly, what I really need is just... time. Time to see if the Kernza yields improve like they're supposed to. Time to figure out if sorghum can be profitable at scale. Time to learn how to farm these crops properly because I'm still figuring it out.
The thing is, I don't know if I have that time. The wells keep dropping. The climate keeps changing. And I'm out here trying to make decisions about the next thirty years based on information that might be obsolete in five.
So I guess what I need is to get comfortable with the fact that I'm never going to feel confident about this. I'm just going to make the best decisions I can with incomplete information and hope it works out.
Which, when I say it out loud, sounds like a terrible way to run a farm. But it's the only way I know how to do this anymore.