SHILO, Ill. — While crops such as corn and soybeans have wilted in this year’s drought and during the hottest July on record, water supplies have taken an equally significant hit.

The heat and dryness have meant big business for well diggers and water haulers, with hundreds of wells drying up across Illinois and Indiana. For Scott and Marcy Lakin, owners of a small farm and a dead corn crop in Parr, Ind., the effects of the drought really hit home in mid-July.

That’s when Marcy switched on the laundry machine and heard an unfamiliar chugging sound; the machine was dry. “Then I checked the faucets and couldn’t get even a drip,” she told The Associated Press.

Their well had dried up, and when they checked with well diggers to drill deeper, they were told by several that they would have to wait at least a week because of a backlog.

“I think you could say it’s been a trying summer. Everybody was looking for water,” she said.

For Pamela Lashley, who owns Country Estate Kennel in Shilo, Ill., southeast of Springfield, the drought this year presented her with two options: keep four existing wells she uses maintained by having water trucked in, or hook up to the nearby city’s municipal supply.

She determined that having water hauled to her site, at about $150 a week, was a better deal than paying city water hookup costs of about $28,000, she said. “We do use a lot of water here, and right now I can’t afford to change. It certainly adds to our boarding costs,” Lashley said.

Carl Marion is one of the busy guys these days. He hauls water to dozens of customers around his home in Athens, Ill., just north of the state’s capital.

“It’s seven days a week right now. I work until 12 or 1 o’clock every single night,” Marion said.

He charges about $60 for about 2,100 gallons of water, which customers use to refill wells. He said it has been lasting customers such as farmer Lawren Tucker about a week before a well needs more.

Tucker said he’s using money he normally would spend to mow his pasture ground, but the drought has made that unnecessary. Water is more important now.

“A lot of the farmers in the area have been hauling their own water,” he said. “It’s part of country life in a drought.”

Back in Indiana, where the Lakins have since drilled a new well, the water table serving the area dropped so low that about a dozen other residences were without water, said Mark Basch, who heads the Indiana Department of Natural Resources water rights division.

He said six of 35 wells the state observes on a regular basis had hit record lows as of early August. His department is investigating whether heavy pumping and irrigating by nearby farmers may have contributed to other wells drying up.

George Roadcap, a geologist with the Illinois Water Survey, said given the extreme drought conditions, it is not surprising to see many wells dry up. In some instances, with steady rainfall, water tables eventually will be replenished. But as many farmers are learning, wells will have to be dug deeper.

“The weak wells get shaken out at a time like this. Many people have been using wells that are 100 years old,” Roadcap said.

Also overstressed are the nation’s already-taxed aquifers, including the largest that serves part of this region, the Ogallala. The Ogallala Aquifer spreads out over eight states, from Nebraska to Texas, and it has taken a big hit this year because of dry conditions, said Mark Svoboda, a climatologist who maintains the U.S. Drought Monitor.

As of Aug. 17, more than 62 percent of the United States was experiencing extreme drought conditions, the worst level in more than 50 years. “When you’re not getting any help from what’s coming out of the sky, you are drawing down more than you would like to,” Svoboda said.

He pointed to a study in this month’s Nature magazine completed by researchers in Canada and the Netherlands, that concludes aquifers across the globe won’t be able to sustain the world’s growing population and its need for water, especially to sustain agriculture operations, in the long term.