The Center for Rural Affairs’ 1976 report Wheels of Fortune was written five years before I was born and 31 years before I came to work at the Center. And before I sat down to write this newsletter article I had heard of the report, but had not read it.

The report was intended to spur debate about irrigation trends in Nebraska. It worked. 

Rather than being an outright indictment of irrigation, the report examined the impact of center pivot irrigation development on the ownership and control of farmland and water rights in the state. The report found that center pivot irrigation was a more capital intensive form of irrigation, and the popularity of the method was driving concentration of land by non-farm investors.

Wheels of Fortune told a story. We used our research skills to find out who was investing in irrigation and on what kind of soil in Nebraska counties most impacted by irrigation development. The report named names and substantiated the facts.

Knowing the controversy that was likely to follow publication, we put three family farm irrigators on the committee that oversaw the production of the report. They helped us analyze the data, and when that data showed that the growth of center pivot irrigation was resulting in an increase of absentee and corporate control of Nebraska farmland, they stood with us behind the report. Together we warned that irrigation development by non-farm investors was a threat to the social, economic, and political institutions that built Nebraska’s rural communities:

Traditionally, rural Midwestern communities have placed a very high value on equality and independence and self-reliance. These values have shaped a social structure which is relatively free from class divisions. This will change under the emerging pattern of ownership which we have described here. The classic urban-industrial divisions between ownership, management and labor are already apparent in many of the larger farms in Holt and Dundy County.

The report also warned of the environmental implications of corporate control of farmland:

We found that existing development has nearly exhausted suitable soils in the western part of [Dundy] county, but that ambitious plans to develop delicate soils were nonetheless present. There is a very strong correlation between development of such soils and investor ownership, and nearly all of the requests for electrical service for future irrigation development on Class VI soils in Dundy County have been submitted by Investor-owned farms.

Wheels of Fortune drew attention from the Washington Post and the New York Times, but its impact might best be measured by the rueful description given it in the newsletter of the Nebraska Society of Professional Farm Managers and Appraisers: “It appears,” the newsletter reluctantly reported, “to have been professionally done.”

The debate over both water use in the West and corporate control of our agricultural assets continues to this day, driven to an even more fevered pitch by the surge in biofuel production and unprecedented commodity prices. Any thoughtful citizen wishing to understand the environmental, social, and economic implications of this debate should return to this 1976 report. The lessons are timeless.

To read a copy of the original report, click here.

For more information, contact Brian Depew, 402.687.2103 x 1015, briand@cfra.org