Stressed Aquifer Puts Pressure on Indiana for Corn
Published: Friday, July 24, 2026
Northern Indiana corn growers are going to be doing more of the heavy lifting for American agriculture in the coming years. The reason sits eight hundred miles west, under the Great Plains, where the Ogallala Aquifer—the underground water supply stretching from South Dakota to Texas—is draining faster than it can refill. Some regions could run dry within 15 years.
Farmers there are pumping harder than nature can keep up with, and increasingly, that's becoming an Indiana problem too.
About a quarter of all water used in U.S. agriculture comes from the Ogallala. The USDA says the decline is speeding up, not slowing down.
Southwest Kansas is where it shows first. Water tables there dropped more than a foot and a half in 2024 alone.
"Some of these areas don't get that much rain, and they need the aquifer," said commodity analyst David Kohli. "You're going to see depletion in some of those areas, dropping to the point where they can't pull up enough water."
The math got serious enough that by July 2026, Kansas Groundwater Management Districts had to file formal plans treating the aquifer as an unsustainable resource.
Purdue ag economist Dr. Michael Langemeier put it plainly: "If we have irrigation problems out west, it's going to shift a little bit more towards the east again."
Part of what's driving that shift is simple math on yield. Irrigated corn in Nebraska outproduces non-irrigated corn by roughly a third per acre.
Go further west into drier Kansas and that gap nearly doubles.
"The production level is just vastly, vastly different," Langemeier said. "You have to work harder to get less, and no matter how you work, you're going to get less because there's not enough water."
Cattle are part of this too. The Plains still feed most of the country's cattle, but as water gets tighter out there, more of that feed has to travel—and Indiana corn is well positioned to make up the difference.
Kohli thinks the fix isn't really about water at all. It's about dirt.
"We're hurting the ground by growing all these crops that are heavy fertilizer users and need a lot of wet weather, and it's just not working out as we expected," he said.
Cover crops like cereal rye can cut runoff nearly in half. Earthworm counts are a decent proxy for how alive the soil actually is. Less tillage means less topsoil blowing or washing away—and that matters because a single bad season of intensive farming can strip off an inch of topsoil that isn't coming back.
"I want to see us save our soil," Kohli said. "That's the one thing that we have here. It's like money in the bank."
None of this happens overnight. But researchers at Kansas State and the USGS figure that at current pumping rates, most of the aquifer's usable water could be gone in about 45 years. Indiana, meanwhile, still gets rain it can count on—a real advantage as the rest of the corn belt deals with more heat and less predictable weather.
Langemeier isn't worried about Indiana's place in that future.
"I think that the future for Indiana corn and soybeans is bright," he said. "We've got a lot of demand in Indiana, but if you look around the world, the U.S. is by far and away the largest producer of corn."
The job for the next generation of Northern Indiana farmers is simple to say, and not so easy to do. That's grow more corn, and don't wreck the ground doing it.
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