U.S. agricultural policy has subsidized farming in place and sought to tame aridity with science, money, and dams. It is no longer possible to maintain western agriculture at its current scale. Nonetheless, federal agricultural policy has hewed to the orthodoxy of maintaining farms and ranches in the West by subsidizing irrigation and compensating farmers for losses.
In response to this growing crisis, this Article advocates a paradigm-shifting reform: federal agricultural policy should adopt managed retreat to aid stranded farmers in the arid West. The authors propose an agricultural retreat policy to ease climate transition for small farmers. As secondary benefits, managed retreat should also improve food security and, to a degree, water shortage when compared to climate transition left entirely to the subsidized agricultural market.
This Article makes two contributions. The first contribution is to establish and describe the third wave of American drought retreat—a significant societal event that has been virtually ignored. The Article’s second contribution is to propose that the federal government fund agricultural managed retreat as part of the solution to this crisis. Government assistance can buffer the disproportionate impacts of drought and climate change on small farms, as well as improve western water supply and food security.
