Arizona is booming. The state has been a major beneficiary of a recent population shift to the Sunbelt, and it’s a hot destination for high-tech firms looking to set up semiconductor fabs. But long before companies like Intel and TSMC started expanding, generations of farmers and agricultural workers turned Arizona into an agricultural powerhouse.
And yet today, as concerns over water supply in the state grow, Arizona’s agriculture is coming under growing scrutiny.
So why do farmers continue to plant water-guzzling crops out in the desert? In the latest episode of the Odd Lots podcast, Trevor Bales — a sixth generation farmer from Buckeye, Arizona — breaks down the complexities of farming alfalfa and other crops in a place where water distribution is becoming an increasingly hot button issue.
As Bales puts it, Arizona’s warm temperatures and predictable climate make it a great place to grow alfalfa, a cool-season legume with a deep root system that makes it more drought tolerant than many other plants. And because alfalfa can be grown year-round in Arizona, it’s an important crop for farmers like Bales.
“So alfalfa is a very, very unique plant. It’s a forage. It has great relative feed value properties or protein properties. It’s very good for making high-quality milk,” Bales explains.
“Because of our temperature, we are in the field eight to 12 times a year, we’re in there cutting that alfalfa. Now there is no other crop other than grass — and even grass does not have the feed qualities that alfalfa has — that you can go in there and cut multiple times in a year. And then for several years after that, we can keep an alfalfa stand in for four to five years. Where other states, they’re only in there cutting their crop two or three times, they can leave it in six, seven, eight years.”
Where other states might have to deal with lots of rainfall that risks making an alfalfa crop go moldy, the green stuff dries great out in the desert, Bales adds. That means Arizona farmers can dry the crop without losing a lot of its leaves, producing a higher-quality crop.
“The dry-down process, the curing process is extremely important. In a lot of the country, they don’t have the climate we have, so they’re fighting a lot more weather than we fight,” he says. “A lot of these other places have to flip it two or three times. ‘Oh, it’s not dried enough. Let’s flip it over.’ You’ve got to get the bottom to dry out because when you cut it it’s laying there on the ground. Well, the part that's up against the ground of the alfalfa stand, it’s not seeing the sun ever. It’s down there underneath this super thick alfalfa. So, then they flip it over, all right, now you dried out that side. Well darn it. And then a rainstorm came, we got to flip it back over again.”
Even though the intensity of Arizona’s sun may allow efficient farming in the desert Southwest, there are those who point out that alfalfa is still a demanding crop.
Urban water uses in Arizona are much less intensive by comparison, according to Kathryn Sorensen, director of research at the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Morrison Institute at Arizona State University.
While the population of Arizona has boomed and is expected to continue growing for years, agriculture accounts for over 70% of the state’s water consumption. But because residential land use is less water intensive, the state can grow its population and theoretically decrease its water footprint at the same time, Sorensen says.
“It takes on the order of three to six acre-feet per acre to grow cotton or alfalfa in our hot desert sun, whereas it only takes about an acre-foot per acre to grow a subdivision,” says Sorensen. “And so, interestingly, as the Valley of the Sun converted from what was largely an agricultural valley into an urban one, there was a natural water savings built in.”
In the latest episode of Odd Lots, Sorensen explains the challenges of balancing the interests of different stakeholder groups, and the historic policies that shape rights to water today.
Echoing Bales, Sorensen highlights the conditions that explain the state’s agricultural success: “Phoenix was actually very carefully chosen by ancient Native Americans who first settled there and who have lived there since time immemorial, because Phoenix is where three big rivers come together,” she says. “So there’s a large amount of surface water. There’s also this native groundwater fossil groundwater. And then we import Colorado River water from Western Arizona into Central Arizona as well. So there is a lot of water.”
Because water in the area is highly regulated, its availability is a different story, especially for potential developers. The state’s 1980 Groundwater Management Act (GMA) is one of the most progressive in the nation, according to Sorensen, and aimed to cut the state’s per capita water use in half by 2025. Under the law, farmers’ rights to groundwater are grandfathered in, which gives them the perpetual right to grow.
Recent restrictions announced by Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs will further protect these rights and constrain development in central Arizona. Prospective developers will have to demonstrate that they can provide an “assured water supply” for 100 years using water from a source that is not local groundwater.
“We’re very proactive about our water management out here in the desert because we have to be,” says Sorensen. “But what the state is saying is that groundwater over this 100-year chunk of time is spoken for.”
With affordable access to groundwater in Central Arizona cut off, Sorensen says that developers in this area will have to invest in expensive infrastructure necessary to deliver surface water to manufacturing facilities and customer taps. Yet the GMA only applies to central Arizona; rights over the main stem of the Colorado River are held by a Native American tribes and farmers and some farmers have been willing to sell these rights.
“People are now looking at our water thinking ‘Oh, huh. There’s a bunch of water right there that these farmers have that we can have,’” Bales says. “So you just traded from one industry to another.”
Still, Sorensen suggests that these types of transactions will become increasingly common, paving the way for a series of tough choices about who gets water and why. Moreover, with climate change expected to make the weather more volatile in other parts of the world, Arizona could see a continued influx of industry.
“It turns out that the desert is a great place not only to grow cotton and winter vegetables, but it’s a great place to grow the high-tech industry because we do not have natural disasters. We don’t have tornadoes, we don’t have blizzards. It really doesn’t flood often,” Sorensen says. “Our climate is very stable and the high-tech industry likes that. That’s why there are a lot of server farms out here.”
And so, she says, there will be “increasing stress on farmers in western Arizona who have these higher priority water rates precisely because they have the higher priority water rights. And as the Colorado River continues to diminish, the cities in central Arizona who have lower priority water rights to the Colorado River by nature are going to be looking to acquire those higher priority water rights.”