Have-nots shouldn’t dictate how ag industry operates

What amazing weather we are having! Even with the winds we experienced, comparing Yuma County temperatures to the rest of the country, we are blessed.

As I drive through the farmlands, more and more fields are being tilled and planted to our vital rotation crops. Wheat is coming up rapidly with the warm days and cool nights and cotton. Sudan grass for hay, watermelons and cantaloupes will be planted as soon as frost danger has passed.

While we rarely have freezing temperatures in the city, fields east of Telegraph Pass and southern Yuma Valley are more vulnerable. While the number of consecutive hours below freezing is usually short, young plants or those crops that are flowering are subject to damage.

By the time this article is published, the Drought Contingency Plan for the Colorado River may or may not be approved. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation gave the Arizona water groups working on the plan a deadline of Jan. 31 to agree on a plan.

There are so many entities involved with such differing statutory and historic rights, consensus will be a monumental task, but one that must occur.

Reading one of the bigtown newspapers, I am amused and appalled at the simplicity of the writer’s understanding of agricultural water use. Under the headline “3 Ways Arizona Could Save a Ton of Water,” the writer offers first the use of drip irrigation. While drip irrigation has its place in irrigation technology among surface flows, sprinklers of various types, gated pipe, siphon tubes, concrete ditches, pipelines and other methods, it is not universally applicable or practical.

Fields engineered with permanent drip systems immediately limit the types of crops that can be grown, the type of tillage operations that can be done on the field. It also limits the width and direction of the rows in the field.

Drip irrigation requires high quality water, pumps and filters to make the system operate properly and a high level of maintenance. If disposable drip systems are used there are the same water quality needs but now labor is needed to install and remove the drip lines and there needs to be somewhere to dispose of all the waste created.

The next two points to save water (gallons, not tons!) had to do with alternative crops. Yuma County farmers have experimented with probably more types of crops to use as rotation crops with vegetable as anywhere in the U.S. We have grown canola, guayule (a natural rubber crop), kenef (a paper substitute), sesame, tomatoes, corn, malting barley, sugar beets, grapes, pistachios, pecans, jojoba (a high quality oil seed crop), soybeans, many types of seed grains, sugar cane and soon hemp. These are just some of the crops I have seen grown in my 50 years working with Yuma County agriculture.

What all the folks forget when trying to tell the farmers how to save water is that it is not the job of agriculture to save the urban areas from their poor planning and management of the water they control. Have the cities ever thought about reducing growth into new areas or strict planning and zoning concerning water use?

All of the “suggestions” about how agricultural water should be squeezed out of the finite supplies farmers control, forget that regardless of what is grown, it has to have a market and it has to make money for the growers. Yes, in Yuma County, we can grow almost anything successfully, but there are few crops that will produce the needed income for the farmers to stay in business.

What right do the havenots have to dictate how our successful agricultural industry be operated. An old saying seems appropriate: “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”

Bobbi Stevenson-McDermott is a soil and water conservationist. She can be reached at rjsm09@msn.com.