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KATE SMITH: When you walk through Earl Wagner's fields, the snow crunches under your feet. A thin layer of snow covers the ground. Ground that yielded little this year, but heartache and frustration. By the middle of the summer, Earl Wagner and his neighbors in Dakota County were watching their fields shrivel to nothing. In July, Wagner stopped going out to check on his fields altogether.

EARL WAGNER: It's depressing. Why come up and look at it? You can't do anything about it. If you could come up and [INAUDIBLE] it or spray it or something to make it better then you'd-- there's nothing you can do.

KATE SMITH: Wagner plants 375 acres of corn, soybeans, oats, and alfalfa. 125 of them are irrigated. On those acres, Wagner got almost a normal crop, but spent $30 to $45 per acre for irrigation costs. In his other fields, there was little to harvest. Soybeans came in at only 10 bushels per acre. The average yield is more than three times that. Oats yielded 17% of the average. And Wagner says harvesting what was there was tough.

EARL WAGNER: A lot of places, the grain would fall right off the combine, the cut-- the knives would fall right off the because there was nothing near to it wouldn't fall into the machine. It would just kind of lay there, just little seeds. I had to take it down to the ground.

KATE SMITH: There is little stubble out in the fields this year, because most farmers had to cut their crops to the ground to harvest anything. Wagner and other farmers will receive about half of their normal income from a federal aid program that pays for acreage where more than 35% of the crop was lost. Wagner says the drought of 88 has already changed a few things on his farm.

EARL WAGNER: I'm milking more cows to pay some of the Bills, trying to pay some of the Bills. I'm changing in the farm for farming practices because you always do that.

MARK SEELEY: We tried to do our best knowing that our objective opinions were extremely pessimistic and not what people wanted to hear.

KATE SMITH: Mark Seeley is with the University of Minnesota. He and others spent the summer keeping track of soil moisture and weather patterns. By June, when the Army Corps of Engineers was considering the release of water from six northern reservoir lakes and the Twin Cities were issuing watering bans, parts of the state were more than 12 inches below average precipitation levels. The drawdown plan was never implemented, but the Twin Cities maintained sprinkling bans for more than a month. Seeley says now the Northwestern part of the state is about 6 inches below normal, and the central part of the state needs about three inches of precipitation. But for the soil to be recharged by that much, we'll need three times that amount to allow for runoff and evaporation.

MARK SEELEY: Say 30% would go into storage. To get up to that 6 inches, boy, we need a lot of rain. We need an awful lot of rain. And it's unrealistic to think that we would get that.

KATE SMITH: Seeley says some of the effects of the drought won't be felt until next year, and he says the first one might be a late spring.

MARK SEELEY: If we should happen to have a prolonged period of little or no snow cover with our normal wintertime temperatures, the frost will penetrate pretty deeply. It takes a lot of energy to pull that frost out of the ground, and that could push our spring back a little bit.

KATE SMITH: For Earl Wagner, the end of a bad season means it's time to look toward the next one. But he's starting to wonder if next year will be good enough.

EARL WAGNER: It's beginning not to look that way. That's why we mentioned before, it's the right kind of job would come along. I'd maybe consider it and think I'd say it five years ago, probably. It gets tiring constantly losing money and your livelihood.

KATE SMITH: Minnesota's agricultural economy lost more than $1.3 billion in corn, soybeans, and wheat in the drought of '88. As a result, next year's weather is what many Minnesota farmers will be banking on. I'm Kate Smith reporting.