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Sociology of Agriculture and Food (SAFRIG)

Aqua Dilemmas: Agricultural Land Ownership and Water Use in the Western United States Winona Wood*, Winona Wood,

Concerns about the continued availability of freshwater have been voiced across much of the western United States. Questions have been raised about the role of modern industrial agricultural practices in the production of crops and the process of agricultural modernization in the consumption of this limited natural resource (Flavelle and Tarnowski 2022; Glennon 2010; Reisner 1993; Resnick et al. 2023). Environmental sociology has long been concerned with modernization and its influence on socioecological relationships (Fischer-Kowalski 1997; Foster 2000; Foster and Clark 2016; Gould, Pellow, and Schnaiberg 2004; Mol 2002; Mol, Spaargaren, and Sonnenfeld 2009; Schnaiberg 1980). Concentration of ownership of agricultural lands can be identified as a driver of agricultural modernization. Utah is historically defined by more traditional family farming operations, while California has been on the cutting edge of corporate-driven agricultural modernization in the United States (Fuller 1994; Starrs and Goin 2010). This paper will compare two western U.S. counties defined by irrigated agriculture, Cache County, Utah, and Imperial County, California. I ask: Does the ownership of fields used for irrigated crop production influence the specific crops grown, and the resulting consumption of water? I will use spatial statistics in ArcGIS Pro to complete a cross-sectional analysis, applied to the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) 2024 Crop Sequence Boundaries data, REGRID’s (2025) land parcel data, the USDA’s (2025) Census of Agriculture, and biophysical data from PRISM (2025) and the USDA (2025). This paper is poised to make contributions to environmental sociology, rural sociology, the sociology of food, and related literature on both methodological and theoretical grounds, expanding understanding of this topic, and contributing to practical efforts to engage with it in broader society.