2018 USDA Irrigation and Water Report
Sunday, November 24th, 2019 -- 7:34 AM
(Wisconsin Ag Connection) -The USDA's National Ag Statistics Service has broken down some specific information from the last Census of Agriculture relating to irrigation and water management on Wisconsin farms.The agency says during 2018, just over 520,000 acres of land was irrigated in the Badger State. Producers relied on ground water from wells, surface water and other various off-farm water supplies as their main sources for the water used for irrigation. More than 1,700 Wisconsin farms used 5,166 wells in 2018 for irrigation, with the average pumping capacity of those wells being 650 gallons per minute. The average irrigation well was 166 feet in depth. The census data further shows that Wisconsin farmers spent $9,256,000 on new or replacement equipment and machinery that year, with construction costs on new wells totaling $368,000.
Meanwhile, horticulture operations in Wisconsin irrigated 11,485 acres in the open that year. Nationally, U.S. farms irrigated 55.9 million acres with 83.4 million acre-feet of water. The top five farm irrigation states include California, Nebraska, Arkansas, Texas and Idaho--which collectively accounted for 50 percent of the U.S irrigated acres in 2018 and 56 percent of total irritated water applied.
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