What Dominy appeared not to realize was that these three syndromes, often occurring at once—farmers illegally irrigating excess acreage with dirt cheap water in order to grow price-supported crops—were badly tarnishing the Bureau’s reputation. By the 1960s, the Reclamation program was under attack not only from conservationists but from church groups (who objected to its tacit and illegal encouragement of big corporate farms), from conservatives, from economists, from eastern and midwestern farmers, and from a substantial number of newspapers and magazines that had usually supported it in the
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