How much of the US is irrigated?
BETAWhere the Lower 48 gets watered year after year — county by county, from 24 years of satellite maps.
In wetter regions this is known to undercount against USDA's county census. Compare counties to each other; don't read it as a county total. More in the layer legend.
The numbers
Fields irrigated in at least 8 of the 24 years mapped by satellite, 1997–2020 (LANID, the Landsat-based Irrigation Dataset), 10 acres and up.
Counts here are mapped field-boundary polygons, not physical fields, farms, or irrigation machines. One center pivot can cross more than one polygon, and one shape in the center-pivot data can stand for more than one real pivot.
An estimated range, anchored to USDA's 2023 center-pivot acreage — not a field-by-field count. 58,890 of those parcels are individually confirmed by an independently mapped pivot polygon — a floor, not a ceiling. These are land parcels, never machines.
Top states
| State | Field polygons | With a pivot overlap |
|---|---|---|
| CA | 104,288 | 908 |
| NE | 76,674 | 27,514 |
| AR | 59,257 | 526 |
| TX | 38,296 | 22,860 |
| ID | 30,100 | 6,384 |
Ranked on this page's definition — 8 or more irrigated years out of 24, 10 acres and up — rolled up from county numbers that undercount badly in wetter regions. Read the ranking, not the totals. Texas is rougher still: in a panhandle stretch we checked by hand, about one in three plainly running pivots showed up nowhere in the center-pivot data.
Data source
LANID (Landsat-based Irrigation Dataset — Xie & Lark, Univ. of Wisconsin–Madison, CC-BY-4.0, 1997–2017; extended 2018–2020 by USGS, public domain) · GCPIS (global center-pivot polygons, CC0) · field boundaries via FTW (Fields of The World, Taylor Geospatial and collaborators, CC-BY-4.0) · U.S. Census Bureau county/state reference, public domain
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