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For decades, nations around the world have been promoting irrigation expansion as a method for improving agricultural growth, smoothing production risk, and alleviating rural poverty. Despite its apparent advantages, suboptimal adoption rates persist. According to the existing literature, determinants of irrigation adoption are often highly dependent on cultural, contextual, and/or local institutional factors. Yet, studies from diverse geographies identify a consistent set of factors. Thus, to be able to make generalizable inferences from such studies, a global geographic representativeness assessment of irrigation adoption studies was conducted to determine whether identified factors influencing irrigation were the result of geographic, epistemological, or disciplinary biases. The results indicate that multiple geographic biases exist with respect to studying farmers’ irrigation adoption decision-making. More research on this topic is being conducted in regions that have little to a high percentage of irrigation (>1%), are readily accessible, receive moderate amounts of average annual rainfall, and have moderate amounts of cropland cover. The results suggest the need to expand research efforts in areas with little to no irrigation to identify constraints and help accelerate economic growth, poverty reduction, and food and livelihood security for rural communities in these regions. 

Rates of poverty and economic inequality in rural Alabama are among the nation's highest and increasing agricultural productivity can provide a needed boost to these communities. The transition from rain-fed to irrigation-fed (RFtoIF) agriculture has significantly increased farm productivity and profitability elsewhere in the United States. Despite this potential to enhance stability and resilience in rural economies, irrigated cropland accounts for only 5% of Alabama's total cropland as numerous barriers remain to irrigation adoption. To encourage RFtoIF transition, it is imperative to identify the challenges faced by individual farmers at farm, community, and state levels. This study presents a multi-level mixed effects survival analysis to identify the physiographic, socioecological, and economic factors that influence the location and timing of irrigation adoption. We integrate spatiotemporal cropland and climatological data with field-verified locations of center-pivot irrigation systems, local physiographic characteristics, and parcel-level surface water access and average well depth. Access to surface water, costs to access groundwater, and soil characteristics were generally important influences in all regions, but regions were differentiated by the extent to which new irrigation was more responsive to social influences vs. precipitation and price trends. Our findings also highlighted the diversity of farming conditions across the state, which suggested that diverse policy tools are needed that acknowledge the varying motivations and constraints faced by Alabama's farmers.