Preserving a Family Farm and the Environment

Julene Bair talks about inheriting part of a farming empire in Kansas's beautiful Smoky Valley and her hopes to preserve it for the next generation. She also has to come to terms with the ecological harm the Bair Farm has done: each growing season her family—like other irrigators—pumps over two hundred million gallons out of the rapidly depleting Ogallala aquifer. Her new memoir is The Ogallala Road.