Nebraska’s Natural Resources Districts celebrate 50 years in 2022. With more river miles than any state, the deepest depths of the Ogallala Aquifer, and the Sandhills, it’s no wonder that Nebraskans are longtime conservation leaders.

In March 1935, the Dust Bowl literally hovered over Washington, D.C., in the form of a gritty cloud of midwestern topsoil as legislators were preparing to discuss soil conservation. The Great Depression was raging. The Soil Conservation Service was born weeks later. In 1949, Nebraska merged its counties into Soil Conservation Districts – the predecessors of today’s NRDs.

These SCDs changed, merged and multiplied for two decades. In the late 1960s, Warren Fairchild of Nebraska’s Soil and Water Commission, and Aurora Senator Maurice Kremer, began researching the merger of Nebraska’s 154 special-purpose entities and their more than 500 overlapping districts. Kremer and fellow legislators introduced LB 1357 to the Nebraska Legislature. The Unicameral passed it and Governor Norbert Tiemann signed Nebraska’s NRDs into existence. The nation’s first Natural Resources Districts – organized along stream basins instead of political boundaries – began operating July 1, 1972.