PHIL LATZMAN: Amid megadrought, extreme heat and facing even more cutbacks to water supply, modern farming and agriculture have had to make major adjustments. Many farms are changing to more water-efficient crops. And some are going out of business altogether.
Around the Valley, fields of what were once fruit and cotton have been sold off, replaced by rows of new homes as housing demands grow. But not at Schnepf Farms in Queen Creek.
A family business for 85 years and famous for its peaches, Schnepf is doing everything it can to stay viable and profitable in the face of an uncertain climate.
MARK SCHNEPF: “We’re gonna feel it this year. It’s gonna be hard.”
PHIL LATZMAN: That’s owner Mark Schnepf, whose family opened the general purpose farm in 1941. The peaches? Well, they mostly came later.
MARK SCHNEPF: We started growing our first peaches back in the 1960s when I was just a kid. It’s gone from being a side crop to being our Number 1 main crop at Schnepf Farms.
PHIL LATZMAN: And right now, it’s picking season with the work done by the farms’ visitors by hand, who can take six varieties home for $4 four a pound. Why did they decide on peaches? Because you normally don’t think of peaches when you think about Arizona.
MARK SCHNEPF: Peaches in the desert — yes but we actually can grow all kinds of fruit here in the Phoenix metro area and here particularly in Queen Creek, we have incredible soil, which means that combined with the climate means we have some of the first fruit that’s available in the entire country. Many of the things Yuma would grow, we can grow right here in the Queen Creek area.
PHIL LATZMAN: And that’s because this is a specialized soil that you have here that’s really unique?
MARK SCHNEPF: Yeah, it’s a sandy loam soil deposited here over millennia of time because the Queen Creek wash used to just flood this area.
PHIL LATZMAN: You’re not quite getting as many peaches these days. Why is that?
MARK SCHNEPF: Well, this year in particular we had the warmest winter on record. Peaches need chill hours, which means the temperature needs to drop close to freezing for a certain set of hours during the wintertime in order for them to produce a good crop. This year, we just didn’t have those chill hours, so I only have a 30% to 35% crop this year of what I normally have and that’s just all because of the weather. And we’ve never had anything like this before.
In my farming career, I’ve had two crop failures. The last one was more than 20-plus years ago and it’s because we had a hard freeze. If it’s gonna freeze, we have hot water wells that we can pump and run in the orchards and the steam rises and protects the blossoms from freezing. But in a warm winter, there’s not much we can do about that.
PHIL LATZMAN: Do you fear that this is the new normal and not an anomaly?
MARK SCHNEPF: You know, I don’t worry about it too much because it’s simply out of my control. It is unusual and I’m concerned about it. But I’m not going to — I’m not going to let it kind of change what I’m doing. I’ve already ordered 700 more trees to plant for next year. If I felt like this was going to be the norm, I wouldn’t make that investment in the future.
PHIL LATZMAN: So now we're in the megadrought and the Colorado River negotiations. How does that affect your farm?
MARK SCHNEPF: It has affected it. We used to get a lot of water from the Colorado River through the CAP canal, but basically we've had severe cutbacks. I have farmer friends in other parts in other districts that are farming only half of what they normally would because they don't get any Colorado River water anymore. And they only have wells that can pump and supply about half the water that they need. So for right now, my particular farm, we have ample water.
We have two wells on the farm that we use. Our deepest well is 2,000 feet deep. It's a great well. Both wells are great wells. And so we've been using CAP or Colorado River water for the past 25, 30 years. And now we've switched over to groundwater. We're hoping that doesn't become the norm.
PHIL LATZMAN: Despite a difficult year, Schnepf remains optimistic and says farmers are resilient.
MARK SCHNEPF: Farmers are becoming very savvy when it comes to water, water usage, water conservation, different methods of irrigation, monitoring, all the things that we need to do as an industry to really hone in and make sure that we are using the least amount of water necessary to grow the most amount of crops that we have.
PHIL LATZMAN: As negotiations over the future of Colorado River allocations continue, Arizona may face even steeper cuts. Gov. Katie Hobbs has called the state’s farmers essential to feeding the rest of the country in the winter and argues that keeping their share is a matter of national security.
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