" A person must learn the lay of the land to understand the flow of it's water. It takes a second..."
Trey Nickels
President, Nickels Water Well, LLC.
January 02, 2022
I was born & raised on family farms near Muleshoe, TX. where row cropping & methods of irrigation were part of my upbringing. Together, with two older brothers, digging ditches, setting row water tubes, moving side-rows & monitoring circle sprinklers to installing drip-line, I quickly learned just how much our livelihoods depended on water from the Ogalala Aquifer.
Time went by & land values rose due to the dairy industry migrating to our area. A coal powered plant had also been built which stimulated the economy with jobs & then, there were the feedlots, all of which depended heavily on the Aquifer.
To accomodate the stress on our water source, farm irrigation wells were often combined into pipelines in an effort to increase their gallons per minute. Sprinkler heads were renozzled & hose lines extended further into crop beds, creating draglines, to minimize evaporation & loss of moisture.
Our family farms began to incorporate no-till practices & increased our dryland acreage. We grew more wheat & also began custom processing & grazing cattle. We also grew silage & alfalfa hay, which was baled in early morning hours when the moisture levels were good.
Cold weather days were spent in the barn with dad overhauling engines, repairing equipment & learning to weld & build things.
On the homeplace, we ran a grain dryer with storage bins to reduce the corn's moisture content before taking it to the elevator. The family also started custom harvesting corn, cotton, wheat & black-eyed peas which was, once again, all about timeliness & moisture levels.
As time went by, our older brother went more into the cleaning, processing & marketing phase & the middle brother & I took to pulling & setting irrigation pumps to incorporate diversification & be able to service our own irrigation wells.
Eventually, we all had individual operations, but we still helped each other.
Long story short, all the above led to my earning a pump pulling license & the rest of the story led to even more diversification.
From helping design a water flow system for a family production company with my mom in Fort Worth,
to obtaining a water well-drilling license near Houston.
And lastly, from spending time in the rocky areas of Utopia with a friend who I apprenticed as a driller, to putting together the knowledge of everything I'd experienced about land & moisture to establish Nickels Water Well, LLC.