We made this research summary available because folks told us they were curious about why we’re doing this project!
A note on sourcing: some of the research summarized on this page is part of an academic paper the research team is currently preparing for publication.
This page offers a plain-language look at that work for a general audience.
It isn’t a substitute for the paper itself, and shouldn’t be cited in its place; once published, the peer-reviewed version will be the citable source.
Irrigation Is Changing Across the Country
Between 2010 and 2020, irrigation was the single largest use of withdrawn water in the United States. Irrigated cropland makes up only about a quarter of all U.S. cropland, but it produced more than half the total value of the country’s crop sales in 2023. Understanding what is happening on irrigated land matters well beyond the farms themselves.
The picture looks different depending on where you are. Much of the western United States has irrigated for generations, but irrigated acreage there has been shrinking in recent decades as water grows scarcer and more tightly regulated. California’s Central Valley lost significant irrigated acreage during the severe drought from 2012 to 2016, and Texas has lost about 30 percent of its irrigated cropland since 2008, largely to groundwater depletion and drought.
Meanwhile, in the Midwest and Southeast, the opposite trend is underway. Farmers who have historically relied on rainfall are increasingly turning to irrigation, as rainfall becomes less predictable and higher temperatures increase how much water crops need. Researchers expect this shift to continue as the climate keeps changing, with irrigation increasingly used as a way to manage risk rather than a last resort.
Why Good Irrigation Data Is Hard to Come By
Right now, information about farmers’ irrigation activity mostly comes from two places: government reporting programs and satellite-based remote sensing. Both have real limitations.
Government surveys, such as those run by the U.S. Geological Survey, use methods and quality standards that vary from state to state, which makes it hard to compare data across regions. Some farmers are also hesitant to participate, out of concern about how the information might be used down the line, for example, in future water regulations.
Satellite data has gotten much better at spotting where irrigation is happening, but it is still uncertain when it comes to how much water is actually used, where that water comes from, or which irrigation method is involved. That level of detail matters for understanding water efficiency and impact, and it is exactly what satellites alone struggle to capture. Even where good satellite tools exist, adoption by farmers and water managers has lagged. Researchers point to a mix of reasons: cost and technical accessibility, uncertainty about how accurate the data really is, and the fact that many water management institutions do not yet formally recognize satellite-derived data as valid input.
Taken together, this has led researchers to call for approaches that combine satellite data with real, on-the-ground reporting, and that are built around what farmers actually need to know, not just what technology can measure.
A Different Way of Doing Science
For a long time, the standard model of science communication ran in one direction: researchers study a question, then explain their findings to everyone else. Many scientists now think that model falls short. It treats scientific knowledge as the only kind that counts, and it leaves little room for the experience, priorities, and values of the people the research is actually about.
Farmer Irrigation Nation is built around a different idea, sometimes called the dialogue model of science communication: a genuine back-and-forth between scientists and the people closest to an issue. In this project, that means farmers.
Citizen science, where people outside the research team help collect and shape real data, is one concrete way to put that back-and-forth into practice. Similar approaches have worked well elsewhere in water research. In one Michigan stream-monitoring project, involving local volunteers helped researchers learn what information people actually found useful, not just what scientists assumed they would want. In two water projects in Nepal, a citizen science approach produced data that was more locally relevant than a top-down study could have managed on its own.
Water researchers have also connected this kind of local participation to what is sometimes called polycentric governance: water systems managed by many overlapping, locally grounded groups instead of a single central authority. Systems like this tend to be more adaptive and more trusted than top-down management alone, and monitoring, in this case, farmers’ own reporting, is a key part of making them work. That distinction matters here, because some farmers’ hesitation about sharing irrigation data comes from a fear of regulation. Choosing to take part in a citizen science project, and being able to see how the information is used, is a different relationship than being required to report to a government agency.
Getting this right also means designing the project around real farmer input from the start, which is exactly what the focus groups in this project are for.
What We’re Trying to Learn
Two questions sit at the center of this work:
- What are farmers’ biggest challenges with irrigation, and how can scientists and Extension professionals genuinely help?
- Can a citizen science partnership between farmers and scientists actually serve farmers’ day-to-day information needs, not just researchers’ data needs?
Everything else in this project, the focus groups, the CitSci survey, the satellite modeling, is in service of answering those two questions.
Want to Be Part of Answering Them?
Join the project at citsci.org/projects/farmer-irrigation-nation, or look for one of our upcoming focus groups. Either way, your experience is exactly the kind of information this research is built to include.
The full literature review, with complete citations, is available from the research team on request.
Farmer Irrigation Nation 