Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nI\u2019m Mark Oppold with an American Agriculture History Minute.<\/p>\nAmerican Agriculture History Minute: Irrigation Key to Great American Desert Farming<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nAgriculture 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 \u201cthe principal chronicle of early farming in Colorado\u201d.<\/p>\n
By the 1870s Byers facilitated the colony of Greeley, Colorado\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s today\u2019s American Agriculture History Minute. I\u2019m Mark Oppold. Thanks for reading. I\u2019ll see you next time.<\/p>\n
Related<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lyon\u2019s well in the desert where water was sold, Colorado Desert, ca.1890-1900Photograph 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.1890-1900Pierce, C.C. (Charles C.), 1861-1946, Public domain, via […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":233303,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12026],"tags":[204,3102,8842,2338,86588],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-233302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-agriculture","tag-american","tag-desert","tag-farming","tag-great","tag-irrigationkey"],"yoast_head":"\n
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