The accidental breakdown of an irrigation valve launches a hot confrontation between the mainly Latino farmers in a tiny New Mexico town and the real estate developers and politicians determined to acquire their land for a golf resort.

While building an irrigation system for a Southwestern desert community, an engineer vies with a local cowboy for the affections of a rancher's daughter.

Uprooted from their comfortable home in Pennsylvania, James and Kate Tanner, along with their sons, Virgil and Andy, journey to the wild country of 1890s Wyoming to become farmers. Soon, they come face-to-face with tornadoes, bears and wolves. But through the hardships their love for each other endures, even when a local rancher sees the newcomers as "squatters" on his land, and will stop at nothing – including murder – to drive them out.

Documentary on water usage and the growth of the American west, shown on PBS as a four-part miniseries

Cowboys from Texas is a 1939 American Western "Three Mesquiteers" B-movie directed by George Sherman.Texas has opened up land for homesteaders. Clay Allison wants their land and has his men led by Plummer try to start a range war between them and the ranchers. With each side suspecting the other of their problems, the Mesquiteers realize someone else is responsible. Stony suspects Plummer and fakes leaving the Mesquiteers to join Plummer's gang hoping to find out who it is.

At the heart of the Moroccan High Atlas mountains, water is a resource in short supply. The village of Tizi N'Oucheg has undergone a transformation thanks to Rachid Mandili, who is well-aware that the development of his village depends on access to clean water and on his strong leadership of this project. Mandili rallies all the villagers together and calls upon the knowledge of French and Moroccan scientists to tap water sources, to purify, and reuse waste water for irrigation. The documentary highlights the Berbers' community ties and ingenuity in their dream of independently managing their village water resources. It equally paints a portrait of a man whose initiative and resourcefulness has opened Tizi N'Oucheg up to modernity while still conserving its cultural heritage. Tizi's example presents some of the problems of water access in semi-arid regions and puts forward concrete solutions to these problems.

Mesopotamia was the site of the Sumerian civilisation, which flourished at the confluence of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. From 5000 to 2000 BC, the Sumerians flourished in a hostile environment by developing agriculture and irrigation and they opened up the trade routes of the ancient world. It was the Sumerians who invented writing and the wheel, and they first divided time into minutes and seconds. In the end however the Babylonian civilisation took the place of the Sumerians. However their heritage and myths live on in the Mediterranean and Western worlds to this day.