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Show 692 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT reclamation development in the West, there were 52,848 irrigated farms in Federal projects on which there was a population of 180,413. On other projects receiving Federal water under the Warren Act there were 23,106 farms and on earlier projects receiving supplemental water there were 15,485 farms, or a total of 91,662 farms with a population of 349,856. The total irrigated acreage was 4,162,558, the total crop value for 1945 was $435,184,395, and the average crop value per farm was $4,747. The government-sponsored irrigated farms constituted 1.5 percent of the total farms in the country and the acreage in cultivation constituted 0.3 percent of the acreage in farms. The overall cost of the projects including those designed chiefly for production of power, but excluding the Bonne-ville Power Dam, came to $993 million, according to the Bureau of Reclamation.105 The sale of electric power generated at Hoover, Grand Coulee, Shasta, and other dams which in some instances were expected to repay half the cost of construction of the project, and which early supporters of reclamation looked upon dubiously, had become the principal support of reclamation projects. In any appraisal of reclamation one should give attention to what low-cost electricity has done for the West. The development of the aluminum, air craft, and defense industries which took root in the West, the expansion of agriculture, the movement of population to western cities are all related to and more or less dependent on water and low-cost power from the Colorado, the Columbia, and other rivers that have been made available to them through the irrigation and power projects of the Bureau of Reclamation. Without the 165 Compare this figure as given in the report of the Bureau in Secretary of the Inteiior, Annual Report, 1946, p. 115, with the appropriations in the table given above. water and the power much of this new West, which has meant expanded markets for the rest of the country, could not have come into existence. The tremendous growth of the arid states during World War II continued thereafter, producing a burgeoning demand for workers, food, power, water, and all that is associated with urban development. Reclamation ceased to be primarily a matter of providing irrigated land for settlers. Although advocates of reclamation in Congress still found it helpful to discuss the number of additional farms a project might make available and the large number of veterans who were applying for an allotment they well knew that settlement on public lands within the new projects was slight compared with the great floods of people migrating to the West, not for land to farm but for jobs and urban residences, and that far more vital to the West than new irrigated farms were defense contracts, great power installations, and water for industrial and domestic use. The number of new farm openings being made available with the new project were few and the total number of farm units offered to qualified applicants could not have justified the large expenditures being made. Annually, the Commissioner included in his report the number of farm units being opened to settlers for the first time and equally regularly totalled those since the close of World War II. From 1946 through 1958 there were 2,842 farm openings with a combined acreage of 264,240. These were either public lands on which homestead applications could '>e filed or land which the Bureau had purchased to prevent a rapid rise in price when water was provided, and was now selling at its appraised price. The largest number of farm units thus opened to settlement was in Washington where 1,238 were opened in the Columbia Basin and 56 were opened in Yakima project; next came |