Secure Agricultural Futures: Re-Defining and -Imagining Agricultural Water Landscapes in the US West
Date of Award:
8-2026
Document Type:
Dissertation
Degree Name:
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department:
Plants, Soils, and Climate
Committee Chair(s)
Matt A. Yost
Committee
Matt A. Yost
Committee
Jessica Ulrich-Schad
Committee
Sarah E. Null
Committee
Kaitlyn A. Spangler
Committee
Emily K. Burchfield
Abstract
Aridity is swiftly becoming the US West’s new normal. As agricultural communities adjust to persistent growing-season scarcity, they find their livelihoods under increasing threat. This points to the urgency of finding paths toward more secure water futures. A piece of this future puzzle includes water (re-)distribution – taking excess from one place and delivering it to another in need. To begin thinking about (re-)distribution, this dissertation engages with three mixed-methods and multiscale studies. The first study pairs county-level data across the 11 westernmost US states with survey data collected from individual producers in Utah to assess past and current trends in irrigated agriculture. I show that irrigated agriculture in the US West has consolidated and contracted, is reliant on increasingly scarce water resources, and is anchored to growing feed for livestock and dairy systems. I also find that irrigated agricultural livelihoods are precarious and buoyed against losses by subsidies. Producers are mediating this precarity on the ground using a variety of strategies, with often uneven outcomes. In the second study, I use survey data collected from individual agricultural water managers to explore whether and how water markets, a formal method for water (re-)distribution, might figure into Utah’s secure water future. Results demonstrate that informal transactions are common and preferred over formal water markets via banking, tempering excitement around broad, formal market uptake in the state. The third and final study explores barriers and bridges to re-defining and re-imagining irrigated agricultural landscapes in Utah. I conducted and analyzed interviews with water managers to understand how they currently manage agricultural water and how they imagine alternative futures. I find that water managers are familiar with year-over-year scarcity and short-run hydrologic drought, and that (re-)distribution is one main strategy for adapting to these phenomena. Further, structural and institutional constraints make imagining and implementing alternative water futures difficult, but layered changes to prior appropriation via (re-)distribution help unlock Utah’s water future. Collectively, these three chapters provide a view of how and whether irrigated agricultural landscapes shift in the West, as well as the barriers and bridges to re-defining and re-imagining alternative water futures.
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Recommended Citation
Schumacher, Britta L., "Secure Agricultural Futures: Re-Defining and -Imagining Agricultural Water Landscapes in the US West" (2026). All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present. 832.
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd2023/832
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