Agriculture/Irrigation in the Western United States

“... the Colorado River system is, in a very real sense, responsible for what a large part of the West is today. And What is it? Very simply, in terms of the largest amounts of water consumed and land used, it is a vast feedlot for livestock.” From: A River No More, by Phillip Fradkin

Irrigation in the American West: Area, Water and Economic Activity

Irrigation is the defining characteristic of crop production in the American West. Irrigated agriculture uses the most freshwater (90 percent) of any economic sector in the West. Surface-water sources such as streams, rivers, and lakes provide 68 percent of withdrawals while the remaining 32 percent are obtained from groundwater sources. According to the 1997 Census of Agriculture, 43 million acres of agricultural land were irrigated in the West, and these lands produced 72 percent of crop sales on only 27 percent of the total harvested crop acreage. High-valued orchards, berries, vegetables, and nursery crops account for almost 60 percent of the West’s total value of sales from irrigated crops on just 15 percent of the land irrigated. Field and forage crops account for the remaining 40 percent of sales, but occupy 71 percent of the irrigated area. The wide difference in crop values and the concentrated production of high-valued crops provides flexibility for farmers with irrigation to adjust to changes in water availability through adjusting their cropping choices and participating in innovative water markets…

Excerpt from: The Journal of International Water Resources, Special Issue: Water and Agriculture in the American West. Article title, Irrigation in the American West: Area, Water and Economic Activity, by: Noel Gollehon and William Quinby.

 

Federal Grazing Rights

Outside the national forests, homesteading and unrestricted livestock use on public domain lands continued unabated until the passage of the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, which directed the Secretary of Interior "to stop injury to the public grazing lands by preventing overgrazing." The secretary created the Division of Grazing (renamed the Grazing Service in 1939), complete with "regional graziers" to complement the Forest Service's regional foresters. Like the Forest Service, the Grazing Division was established to bring order from social chaos and to impose controls on public land grazing.

The law was a little late. By the time the Grazing Act was implemented, the range productivity of Grazing Division lands had been depleted by two-thirds.

Part of the problem was that Congressional representatives from the eastern part of the country differed widely with their western counterparts over the fate of the public lands. Westerners wanted privatization. Easterners, wedded to the already failing Progressive ideal, wanted public land. The Taylor Grazing Act was a compromise that failed to give either side what they wanted. Like many compromises, the result was bad from both views.

For example, the advisory committees required by the act to help managers allocate the range were mostly composed of ranchers. This guaranteed that grazing fees on public domain lands were far below market rates. So, by 1941, Grazing Service revenues only covered 20 percent of the administrative costs. Attempts by the agency to increase fees stirred opposition from western senators and cattlemen.

Eastern senators saw the Grazing Service and its below-market user fees as a black hole for federal subsidies. Western senators argued to keep the fees down. By 1946, the dispute over fees and pressure from the cattlemen to transfer the public domain grazing lands to private ownership and avoid Grazing Service regulations led Congress to slash the Grazing Service's budget by 50 percent.
This made eastern senators happy because it cut the subsidy; western ranchers were happy because the Grazing Service was rendered incapable of regulating them. Finally, the Service's headquarters were moved from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City, where more direct control might be exercised by cattlemen.

 

The BLM and Grazing

The 1946 debates over the Grazing Service led the Secretary of the Interior to combine that agency with the General Land Office to form the Bureau of Land Management. The BLM inherited the Grazing Service's mission of managing the public domain while it was still public and the General Land Office's mission of disposing of the public domain. In the eyes of some cattlemen, it was a temporary agency only necessary until they could gain title to the public domain.

But the Bureau survived and managed to hold on to most of its lands until 1976. In that year, Congress passed the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA), which ended the policy of land disposal. This law--which was largely written by the BLM--attempted to bring that agency up to Forest Service standards by prescribing inventories, a planning process, and sustained-yield and multiple-use management.

FLPMA also readjusted the distribution of grazing fees, with 50 percent going to range improvement. Two years later, the Public Rangelands Improvement Act helped ranchers by fixing grazing fees well below market levels with a grazing fee formula that is still used today. [From Bureau of Land Management, Yesterday and Today]

USDA Datasets – Western Irrigated Agriculture:

 

 

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