At the top of the list of the challenges confronting Western family farmers and ranchers is the daunting number of federal regulatory policy initiatives they face. These types of federal water resource policies and regulatory practices could potentially undermine the economic foundations of rural communities in the arid West by making farming and ranching increasingly more difficult. Environmental pioneers dealt well with the issues of their day, but the water supply and delivery “tools” they built only got us so far. We need to develop the next generation of tools that build on our successes but also recognize our limitations.