You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Hey, shortwaivers, Emily Kwong here, continuing our water series, where we dive into all

things H2O.

With me is producer and fellow mermaid, Burley McCoy.

Hi, Burley.

Hi, Emily.

So I'm here with part two, aquifers.

And don't worry, it's okay if you miss part one.

So an aquifer is just an underground layer of rock or materials that holds water.

Oh, so it's not like a bathtub?

It's not. It's more like water between rocks that gets to the surface through wells and springs.

And that groundwater is responsible for about half of the water people use globally.

Wow. Thank you aquifers for keeping us all alive. Seriously. And for this episode, I called

up someone who has a very close relationship with his local aquifer. Earlyest memory of farming

probably would be sleeping on the floor of a combine while my dad drove

the combine through the field and harvested corn or wheat. This is Hayes Kelman. He's a fifth

generation farmer in western Kansas, and he loves it, getting his hands in the soil, watching a crop

grow from seed to harvest. But around the time he was

in high school, he noticed something about the water they used to irrigate the family farm.

I started watching how certain wells were just dropping off significantly, how we were

removing a sprinkler from a certain area of land because we didn't have enough water.

So his farm sits above the Ogallala or High Plains Aquifer, which is a huge aquifer.

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