Struggling to survive the worst drought since the dustbowl, three desperate Montana families hire a rainmaker -- a retired New York cab driver -- in a last ditch effort to save their farms. Like Burt Lancaster's magnetic character in the 1950s film 'The Rainmaker', who barnstormed the windswept tumbleweed towns of the drought-ravaged American prairie selling empty promises of rain, the rainmakers of popular imagination are never quite what they claim to be. But what about the rainmaker stories that appear from time to time in farm journals and rural newspapers across the American farm belt - personal accounts from farmers who claim success with rainmakers? Set against the backdrop of the rapid decline of the American family farm, and a prolonged period of drought which has U.N. climate scientists calling for a new understanding of what constitutes 'normal weather', Next Year Country is an exploration of an old American legend set in the contemporary American West.