Irrigated area increased more than 10-fold from 1890 to 2022, while per acre water use has declined since 1969

Irrigated agriculture in the United States has expanded significantly since it was first included in the Census of Agriculture in 1890. This expansion reflects investments at the Federal, State, and local levels in infrastructure to deliver surface water to farms and ranches, as well as expansions in groundwater irrigation driven in part by improvements in well drilling and pumping technologies. However, water supply and other constraints have limited expansion since about 1997, when the growth of irrigated area began to stall. In 2022, there were 54.9 million acres of irrigated agricultural land in the United States, down from the peak of 58 million acres in 2017 and also below the 56.3 million acres reported in 1997. During this same period (beginning in 1969), water use intensity—the amount of water applied per acre in acre-feet (1 acre-foot = 325,851 gallons)—has generally declined. The average water use per acre irrigated was more than 2 acre-feet in 1969 and decreased to a low of 1.49 acre-feet in 2018 before increasing slightly to 1.52 in 2023. The reduction in water use per acre of irrigated land is driven by farmers’ adoption of pressurized irrigation systems and other improvements in water application technologies. This chart updates information from the USDA, Economic Research Service report Trends in U.S. Irrigated Agriculture: Increasing Resilience Under Water Supply Scarcity, published December 2021.