American Agriculture History Minute: Irrigation Developed in the Great American Desert

I’m Mark Oppold with an American Agriculture History Minute.

Agriculture in what is now Colorado began taking shape in the early 1850s. Then Rocky Mountain News founder William N. Byers passed out seeds to make his newspaper the principal chronicle of early farming in Colorado.

By the 1870s, Byers facilitated the colony of Greeley, Colorado’s first major agricultural settlement and soon discovered that irrigation was the key to farming what they called the Great American Desert. By 1900, Colorado led the nation in acreage of irrigated farmland.

That’s today’s American Agriculture History Minute. I’m Mark Oppold. Thanks for reading. I’ll see you next time.