There’s a much-cited statistic we often hear when we’re talking about the Colorado River water and drought in Arizona: Most of it — about 70% — goes to agriculture.
And a whole lot of that goes to grow things like alfalfa to feed cattle. It’s been the subject of much ire over one Saudi Arabian-owned company that used Arizona water to feed cattle halfway across the globe.
The Show caught up with one of the Arizona farmers who grows alfalfa in the state. Nancy Caywood is the co-owner of Caywood Farms in Casa Grande.
Her grandfather purchased the farm in 1930, and it’s been passed down through her family since. She told me, when she was a kid they used to watch their well to make sure it didn’t get hit by lightning. But in recent years, water has become a much more serious problem.
Full conversation
NANCY CAYWOOD: It's much more of a problem now, it was always dependent on surface water from the Gila River that was routed in canals. So the water comes from Coolidge Dam and that depends on rain and snow melt and it goes to Florence where it's diverted into canals.
So my granddad probably experienced years of drought. We never heard too much about it. In 1993, Coolidge Dam over spilled its spillways and you know, everybody thought, oh, man, that's great. We got great water. And then we didn't see the rain and snow pack each year and the, the lake level of San Carlos kept going down.
And in the early 2000s, we weren't able to plant a lot of crops we normally plant. Our, our farm was not in full production. But by the year 2018, there had been several years, we hadn't had cotton in the ground. And by the year 2018, the dam only had 228 acre feet.
I went up to take a picture and,, floating on the top was just, you know, so many dead fish. It was just solid dead fish. And then by the year 2021, the dam only had 47.5 acre feet. And within just a few weeks, it dried up completely.
And then also we are on a unlined part of the San Carlos system. So they've lined about half of the canals with the concrete lining, but unfortunately, we're still probably 10 miles away from a lining. And so therefore, they don't want to run well water or if they had CAP water, they didn't want to run it our way because so much of it would, you know, soak into the soil. So that didn't help either.
LAUREN GILGER: So where do you get water today?
CAYWOOD: Today, we're dependent on the San Carlos Irrigation District. The dam can hold 900,000 acre feet of water, but because of drought today, it only has about 280,000 acre feet. So it's, you know, very, very low.
GILGER: So talk a little bit about, Nancy, some of the other changes you've seen in that part of the state near Casa Grande in recent years, like I'm sure there's been a lot of development, more people moving in, there's also more solar around you.
CAYWOOD: Well, yeah, that's what I was gonna say. You see, we have to pay a water assessment and it is attached to our taxes, and it's around $19,500 a year. So if we don't have water coming to us, you know, we're still expected to pay this water assessment. So a lot of farmers that are in San Carlos Irrigation District are selling to solar development because they don't want to be strapped down to that assessment anymore.
So they, they sell all or part of their land to solar development. The other thing that's happening is, you know, there's a lot of industry that's coming in around here and also in Phoenix and Tucson. And so Casa Grande is sort of like a bedroom community, you know, they're just building and building and building. We have so many apartments going in and there's been approval for even more.
GILGER: Do you often feel pressure to sell your land, Nancy, in that area?
CAYWOOD: Yes. We, well, we have been approached over and over again, mostly by solar and we do not want to sell. It's been tradition in our family to farm. But the other thing is my son lives on that farm and it would be very complicated to have to sell and leave. We don't want to sell, we want to continue farming. That's just kind of in our blood. It's our tradition.
GILGER: So we know that we are running out of water in the Colorado River. And we hear all the time that agriculture, you know, uses most of that 70-some %, right? And I wonder what you think when you hear that. Like, do you feel like you're being blamed or that you have a, you know, a, a right to that much of the water coming in?
CAYWOOD: OK. Here's, here's my thoughts on this. First of all, we all have to eat. Now, the other thing I always say is agriculture is freedom and we need to keep it in our own country. We have a 365-day growing season in parts of Arizona and we're capable of producing, you know, winter crops.
Look at Yuma, they produce winter crops for the whole nation. We depend on our Arizona agriculture to provide food for the nation and for parts of the world. The other thing that I find interesting is people look at the alfalfa because there's quite a bit of, of alfalfa grown around here and they say, oh, those farmers, they waste so much water on alfalfa. It doesn't do me any good.
Well, one of my favorite sayings is alfalfa is milk chocolate in the making because we feed it to dairy cows. They give us milk and we can make chocolate from it. But if you were to go into a grocery store and you went in there just to trace your food back to where it came from, you would find that alfalfa is so important. If you're going in, say, just say to the cereal section, it's in your cereals as dry milk and in the baking section, go into the soup section and you'll find your cream soups. And of course, then there's the meat and the dairy section on top of that.
And so it's a very, very important crop and we can get 8 to 10 cuttings a year to feed animals around here. And if there's an over abundance, it can be shipped to other parts of the country where they might only get one to three cuttings. So R F F is very, very important.
GILGER: So, so what do you make of the argument that farmers in the southwest in the future are going to have to, you know, think about things differently, grow less thirsty crops that alfalfa can be grown in other parts of the country that, you know, have more water.
CAYWOOD: First of all, alfalfa can't be grown in other parts of the country and get the number of cuttings that we get. So that's because of our desert climate that we get all of those cuttings.
We have looked into alternative crops. But when you do that, you're gonna have to purchase new equipment, you're gonna have to learn how to grow them. We've looked into olives, but we are because we have unlined canals. We can't put anything on a drip because our water is so silty.
GILGER: So I wonder if that's where you think the federal government should step in, right? Like I know the federal government is paying farmers here and elsewhere to fallow fields to save water from the Colorado River, right. I know you haven't done that. But I wonder, like, do you think that the federal government should invest in family owned farms like yours to, to help you transition to less thirsty crops?
CAYWOOD: OK. Yes, I do. I really feel that the government should help us. Either one of the things that we would like to see is for them to, to help us pay our, our water assessment when we cannot farm, we're still having to come up with a water assessment. And if we continue to have to do that, if the drought continues, we would probably eventually be forced to sell out because I don't know how much longer we can hang on.
My son does lease land that helps cover water and taxes on this farm. But how long can we keep doing this? So if we could receive some sort of a subsidy from the government, especially in time kind of drought. So when we cannot grow anything, when everything is fallow, it would help us to be able to hang on.
We need to encourage our young people. The average age of the farmer is, I think 61 years old and the kids, the young ones coming up don't want to farm because they see the struggles. I'm very fortunate. We, I have two grandchildren and both of them want to continue our farming tradition.
