reclamation of land

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land reclamation, as distinct from land clearance, brought under cultivation previously unfarmed land by remedying major deficiencies in the soil's natural structure, drainage, or fertility. Land clearance achieved the same objective on a wider scale but did not involve this element of rehabilitation. Land reclamation was therefore a comparatively expensive business, whether in terms of capital or labour investment, and consequently tended to take place only after all easily cleared land had already been brought into use. Accordingly, it invariably occurred on the margins of existing cultivation and in response to a pressing demand for increased agricultural land. Its occurrence was thus as much a function of socio‐economic pressure as of environmental opportunity.

In Ireland, land reclamation was particularly widespread between c.1750 and 1845, when it was designed to extend the area of cultivation in response to population growth and, prior to 1815, the growing profitability of agriculture. While most reclamation was undertaken by tenants and their landlords, other institutions such as town corporations and the government were occasionally involved. In 1809–14 the government surveyed Ireland's bogs with a view to reclaiming them in order to alleviate pressure on land. Although nothing came of this scheme, marginal uplands and bogs, particularly in the west of the country, witnessed widespread incremental reclamation by tenants in response to locally extreme pre‐Famine population growth. Arguably, the availability of this reservoir of minimally fertile land encouraged such growth, as may have those landlords who were prepared to facilitate reclamation by letting land at low rents. Thus rising population pressure pushed an impoverished peasant class onto progressively more marginal hillsides and boglands. Here they applied a variety of labour‐intensive appropriate technologies, including the spade cultivation of ‘lazy beds’ and the use of natural fertilizers and soil conditioners such as seaweed and crushed seashells, to raise potato crops on land of inherently limited fertility. With the release of population pressure by the Famine, these newly reclaimed lands were quickly abandoned, and the margins of cultivation receded to environmentally less hostile lowland areas.

Elsewhere, individual ‘improving’ landlords undertook the reclamation of lowland heaths and other marginal areas by underdraining and liming the soil, while by the mid‐19th century coastal and estuarine salt marshes, such as those on the Foyle, Blackwater (Co. Waterford), and Fergus (Co. Clare) rivers, were being reclaimed on a large scale using more modern civil engineering technologies.

Lindsay Proudfoot

reclamation of land practice of converting land deemed unproductive into arable land by such methods as irrigation , drainage , flood control, altering the texture and mineral and organic content of soil (see fertilizer ), and checking erosion . In the United States, all these methods have been used, but the chief effort has been through irrigation. Under the Reclamation Act of 1902, the Bureau of Reclamation supplies water, subsidized by taxpayers, to farmers on arid lands in 17 western states (see Reclamation, United States Bureau of ). The irrigation water has increased production, but at some cost: selenium and salinity poisoning have damaged land once reclaimed, competition has grown between agriculture and municipal interests, and wildlife habitat has been jeopardized. Additional aims of the reclamation program include hydroelectric power generation, recreation, and flood control.

History of Reclamation in the United States

While irrigation schemes were built in the Southwest before the coming of the Spanish, by the Catholic missions in California, and by Mormons in Utah by 1847, moves to gain government help for reclamation schemes began with the Carey Land Act (1894). Focusing on the conservation of natural resources during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, reclamation was advocated for lands ruined by injudicious farming, grazing, and deforestation as well as for lands with little rainfall.

The Reclamation Act of 1902 provided that the federal government should plan and construct irrigation projects using the proceeds of public land sales, and that the water users (usually organized in some type of cooperative) should liquidate the cost and purchase the irrigation works over a period of 10 years. The program was vigorously pushed by Secretary of the Interior Ethan Allen Hitchcock. Among the many projects started then were the Truckee-Carson project (see Newlands project ) and the Salt River project (see Salt River valley ). The 1902 act had an acreage-limitation provision, but it did not halt the process of speculation in lands to be irrigated, which made costs to the actual farmers prohibitive. In 1914 the period of time for the water users to pay for the project was lengthened to 20 years (later raised to 40 years).

Interest in reclamation quickened after terrible droughts in the late 1920s and early 30s, and in the public works program of the New Deal under Franklin D. Roosevelt the reclamation program was linked with projects for flood control and for the development of power. The Bureau of Reclamation began to work alongside the U.S. Army Engineers Corps in building dams and forwarding multipurpose projects. The Flood Control Act of 1944 broadened the powers of the federal government in these matters.

Reclamation has created much new wealth in the United States by turning areas that had formerly been arid into thriving agricultural and industrial communities. However, environmentalists have questioned and even stopped more recent projects, such as the Bureau's 1991 water project on the Colorado River, due to the damage to the environment such dam building has caused. The Columbia River complex has had to limit the amount of water diverted to safeguard spawning salmon, and the Omnibus Water Bill of 1992 limited the bureau to environmentally sound projects. Further, criticism that the bureau's programs have disproportionately aided large, rich farms led, in the 1992 bill, to the restriction of water subsidies to family farms.

Bibliography

See F. Powledge, Water (1982); M. P. Reisner, Cadillac Desert (1986).

United States Bureau of Reclamation agency set up in the Dept. of the Interior under the Reclamation Act of 1902. It is charged with promoting regional economies by developing water and related land resources in the West. The original purpose of developing and executing irrigation projects in arid and semiarid regions of the West has been expanded to include developing and executing projects to provide municipal and industrial water supplies, hydroelectric power generation and transmission, water quality improvement, flood control, navigation, and river regulation and control. The bureau is the second largest producer of hydroelectric power in the United States and would rank as the ninth largest electric utility on the basis of production capacity.

The Bureau of Reclamation contracts for the project beneficiaries to reimburse the government for the cost of constructing and operating the project. In many instances it chooses the sites for dams to be used for power as well as irrigation, and then constructs them. The bureau cooperates other government agencies in distributing the power developed. Among such projects are the Bonneville Dam (with an enormous power project) and Grand Coulee Dam, together with a host of related activities on the Columbia, the Snake, and their tributaries (see Columbia , river); the Central Valley Project in California; the Colorado–Big Thompson Project ; and the Missouri River Basin Project .