American Agriculture History

American Agriculture History Minute: Irrigation Key to Great American Desert Farming

Dan Agri-Business, American Agriculture History Minute, Irrigation, This Land of Ours

American Agriculture History
Lyon’s well in the desert where water was sold, Colorado Desert, ca.1890-1900
Photograph of Six men and a woman stand by a small adobe building and a structure which houses 2 large containers of water that was presumably sold to travelers in the Colorado Desert (old Virginia Dale?), ca.1890-1900
Pierce, C.C. (Charles C.), 1861-1946, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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

American Agriculture History Minute: Irrigation Key to Great American Desert Farming

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.