07/09/2026
Got in the local newspaper this week so it should help spread the word. Here is the article and the text, credit goes to Patrick Murphy at the Humphrey Democrat!
Future of water witching
Scott Hemmer uses age-old technique to find water
Follow the rods.
Scott Hemmer, owner of Hemmer Dowsing and Water Witching, is bringing back an age-old method for locating water veins.
"So what I do is I locate water wells for farmers, homeowners, anybody who's having issues finding water right off the get go," he said. "Whether they say they've drilled four or five test wells and aren't coming up with what they needed and I do it the old-fashioned way. My main tools are the old L-shaped rods, which I carry on my hip most of the time, and then I have the old-school way, where they break a branch off a tree. I also carry a Y-rod that's made out of nylon, so it can't break or crack on me."
Hemmer said 90 percent of his work comes from farmers who are trying to locate water in order to have a well dug that is large enough to irrigate their crops, but their test holes are only finding water that results in a couple hundred gallons of water per minute.
"I go out there, and I drive the whole perimeter with a side-by-side to see what I can pick up," he said. "As we're driving, what I see with my rods is the further back they come toward me, the more gallons per minute we're picking up, so all of a sudden they start pulling in (toward me), and then we stay there, driving another 30-feet, 40-feet, 50-feet, and the rods pull back out (away from me). I know we're across the vein where the vein cuts across the field. You can look at a vein as almost like an underground river, where gravel or sand formations got dropped when the glaciers came through. My job is to go around the whole outer diameter of that field and mark where it's coming in, mark where it's coming out and make a rough visual map, which I plot on Google maps, and then me and the farmer will enlarge it. We'll figure out where it makes sense economically to drill so you don't end up running pipe all the way to the corner, you don't have to run wire all the way to the corner, let's go to the middle and see where that vein cuts across then we'll drive that spot, pinpoint it, and that's where we'll drop the flag to drill," he said.
Hemmer said it's a great feeling when the farmer's drilling only results in water coming at 300 gallons per minute, but he finds a spot where the water flows at over 1,000 gallons per minute.
He said he was hired by a Nebraska farmer who couldn't find an adequate water supply to irrigate.
"It was a last resort. There was a farmer out by Hartington, and I had their last spot marked, he tested it, and he called me the next day and said it was doing 1,400 gallons per minute." Hemmer said.
He said he was hired by a Stanton County farmer, and he knew going in it would be difficult. The farmer had already had several holes drilled that came up dry.
"We drove the whole area, found one main vein cutting through the field, and they drilled it, and the first spot we found they didn't find anything, and I told them next hole go a little bit deeper, and sure enough they went deeper and they ended up finding a 40 gallon a minute well. If they had gone another 40-50 deeper they would have tapped into that on the first hole." he said.
Working the rods is about as old school as you can get, think black and white western movies and the old, scruffy guy walking around with a "Y" shaped tree limb in his hands.
While Hemmer, at 34, is far from old and scruffy, he believes in the old school way of finding water.He learned about water dowsing or water witching by listening to stories from Gib Preister and Erv Dohmen.
"Gib Preister, that's where I got started, riding around with him listening to stories about him and Erv Dohmen. Erv Dohmen was the main witcher around here, and at some point in time you have to think there's some logic behind it, Gib and Erv didn't just run around doing it for fun," Hemmer said.
"The way I explain it to people because so far science has not come up with a thought process behind it, is everything gives off an energy or a frequency or vibe, or whatever you want to call it, and you just have to be able to dial into what that energy is.
"We spend our whole lives walking over ground, and all these energies are shooting out. We've never had to dial into them. Take a car radio for example, you have all these frequencies, but you're never going to hear what you want until you move the dial. It's training yourself to be able to turn that dial in your head to pick up that one specific frequency, and then use your rods to give you that visual effect so you can decipher what you pick up," Hemmer said.
He spent a lot of time tuning into those frequencies, practicing his craft.
"I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to try this before we had to drill a customer's well, so I was able to kind of practice and dial it. If we're going to drill, and once we're all set up, I can tell where we're going to hit, and where we're not going to hit," he said. "Then it got to the point where we were at a spot, and I didn't think we were going to hit anything, and sure enough it was a dry hole."
He said it's all about being in tune with nature and your body.
"It's something you can kind of feel, your body picks it up, and the more I do it, the more I get antsy, I get jittery the closer I get to that vein. I'd classify it more as a feeling," he said.
The rods he uses move on their own as they start to detect the water.
"Your body picks up the signals, but your mind causes micro movements in your hands. It might not be something you can see, but it feels abnormal to me, I don't notice I move my hands, but my hands move very slightly. With the Y rods you hold them with two hands and it'll actually pull down when you get closer to the veins, marking the edges with a light weight "Y" rod," he said.
Hemmer also uses a heavier "Y" rod, which, he said, can be heard crackling in the grips of his hands as it rotates in his hands.
"A customer will look at me and ask 'How are you doing that? What I tell customers is you hold one end of the rod while I hold the other end, and I tell them to hold it as tight as you can, and it'll start rolling out of their hand," Hemmer said.
He said there are some people he has let try the rods, and the rods move in their hands when they get near water, but they do not understand why that happens.
"About 75 percent of the people I've tried to teach, I can get them to get some sort of reaction out of the tool. People can learn, but there's a big mental block. If you think you're going to look stupid doing it, you'll never learn it."
Hemmer said he's 85 to 90 percent accurate identifying water veins for irrigation sites.
"That's being within 25- to 30-feet on depth, and right around 50 to 60 gallons per minute," he said. "So if I'm telling you you're going to be down 340-feet and you're looking at 550 gallons per minute, we're going to be pretty close to those numbers by the time all is said and done. The sky's the limit for what you can find with the rods, but it comes down to practicing on one specific item to get really good at it," he said.
Farmers make up a bulk of his customers setting up irrigation wells, and in southern Nebraska and northern Kansas he locates water for residential wells, but he also has located unmarked graves.
Near Ogallala, off the Oregon Trail, he was hired to locate some unmarked graves.
"They had some records of people who were supposed to have been buried within a 3-to 4-mile stretch, so they had me check it out, and I ended up finding three graves side by side, which matched up with the diaries they found," he said.
It's been about four years since he started water dowsing as a profession, he still also works for an area drilling company. His reputation for finding water has led him to Nebraska, South Dakota, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico.
Hemmer said he is one of the youngest in water dowsing. It's a profession that dates back generations, and most have either quit or passed away.
"I'm trying to keep the old tradition alive. If there's no one young getting into it it's just going to die off, especially with the technology today," he said.
"I wear these rods on me, and it always starts a conversation with the older guys, they say, I used to do it or my dad used to do it. You walk past a younger person, and they don't know what you're doing," he said. "As a kid I heard about it, being a farm kid, but I never thought much of it, maybe it'd be fun to try. In this age we're going through droughts, the Ogallala (Aquifer) is dropping, we're going through water loss everywhere, and I think that's one of the biggest reasons I'm going down to Texas so often, in the Ogallala spots. Unfortunately, I think it is receding so much this certain service is going to be needed in the next 10 to 15 years," he said.
His business has grown spreading the word. He's also by word of mouth, customers on Facebook, and joining the American Dowser Society, where he was on its specialty list to serve the mid-United States.
Hemmer said it's hard to get people to trust the old method still works.
"There's companies that come out and do scans, and the state does it too with fly overs, but they offer the same guarantees that I do. They'll tell you where it's at, but we're not going to guarantee anything, so why pay an extra $20,000 to check it out with a scanner," he said.
