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Legally, under the Reclamation Act, you could irrigate 160 acres and no more. “We didn’t even want them to irrigate that much land,” says Dominy. “The law was created to pack as many farmers as possible in a region with limited water. If they could make a living on forty acres, we gave them water for forty. We were talking about subsistence.” However, many farmers in Bureau projects were irrigating 320 acres, the result of a liberal interpretation of the act that permitted joint ownership and irrigation of 320 acres by a man and wife. (Married men, it was discovered, made more reliable farmers ...more
Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
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