County-Level View of Irrigation Trends in Utah and the West Matt Yost, Britta Schumacher, LuRee Johnson, Emily Burchfield, and Burdette Barker
As water demand and scarcity increase simultaneously over the coming decades, water managers and growers will need to optimize water use on their irrigated lands. These challenges have been especially noticeable as the Western U.S. faces a prolonged “megadrought” and growers prepare for potential, or declared, water shortages and cuts. For agriculture to persist in the West, we must effectively use increasingly limited and contested water supplies, while providing growers with economically viable livelihood options and limiting negative environmental consequences (Borsato et al., 2020; Rosa et al., 2019). Understanding how growers maintain high yields in arid, water-stressed places while conserving water is of key importance for the future of U.S. agriculture in the West. Tracking irrigation changes as they relate to farm(er) characteristics is difficult because of the lack of long-term, spatially and temporally consistent datasets describing water use across irrigated operations. Data from irrigation surveys of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS, 2021), which provide the most detailed and comprehensive data on irrigation behaviors and water use in the U.S., are only released to the public at state scales. While these analyses are useful for understanding broad trends and relationships in irrigation technology adoption, their scope makes it difficult to develop irrigation and water conservation research, education, or management initiatives that are targeted to growers’ specific needs beyond on-farm technology.
Highlights •
• •
•
•
1
Irrigation productivity (crop yield ÷ irrigation water applied) differs by crop, county, year, and other categories. Irrigation does not always respond dynamically to drought. Growers report a diversity of information sources, with neighbors and university as top-used sources. “Condition of the crop” was the top-cited method for irrigation scheduling and signals large opportunities to improve irrigation scheduling with advanced tools such as soil sensors. The most commonly cited barriers to water efficiency improvements were “low priority” and “inability to finance.”