Water Policy 

Gov. Hobbs’ statements come as Arizona approaches its fifteenth year of drought, one that has surpassed the worst drought in more than 110 years of official record keeping. A 2022 report by the Central Arizona Project details significant reductions in Arizona's allocation of Colorado River water. These cuts primarily impacted agricultural users in central Arizona, while supplies for cities and tribal communities with priority rights over agriculture remained stable in 2022.

Arizona agriculture faced harsher water restrictions in 2022 due to persistent drought, low precipitation, and reduced runoff from the Colorado River's Rocky Mountain headwaters. However, a wetter winter in 2022 helped improve the river's health and reservoir levels. Moving into 2024, Arizona will experience an 18% reduction in its total Colorado River allocation, a slight improvement compared to the previous year.

Still, deeper water restrictions are expected in the coming years, impacting millions of residents across the West who depend on the Colorado River. Climate change is a driving factor, causing a decline in the river's water flow from rain and snowmelt.

These reductions have already significantly impacted agriculture, a major economic driver in Arizona. According to the 2018 Guide to Arizona Agriculture, the industry contributes over $23.3 billion to the state's economy. 

Brian Yerges, general manager of the Maricopa Stanfield Irrigation District, told the Arizona Capitol Times that in 2022, statewide water cuts eliminated 99% of the county's water allocation from the Central Arizona Project (CAP. CAP is a 336-mile canal that diverts water from the Colorado River into central and southern Arizona.

The  Arizona Capitol Times article notes that in Pinal County, farmers were forced to leave large areas of land fallow, in other words, leaving their fields unplanted due to the Colorado River water cuts. With crop yields significantly reduced, Arizona farmers might now be scrambling to find new ways to make a living, perhaps a harbinger for the future of agriculture in the region.

According to the podcast Thirst Gap, a six-part podcast series produced by KUNC — NPR for Northern Colorado — about how the Southwest is adapting to water shortages as climate change, some programs, such as President Biden's 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), implemented to mitigate the climate crisis and support farmers in climate-smart practices, have incentivized farmers in Colorado to fallow their fields. This can ultimately damage the soil health of farmland and create a dust-bowl effect.

Some aspects of the IRA are producing positive outcomes, such as in Yuma, Arizona, where funding will go to updating farming technology to use less irrigation; according to local Yuma station KYMA, Yuma is a significant supplier of winter vegetables across the US. Visit Yuma says the industry contributes over $3.2 billion to the state's 9.2 billion dollar economy. 

However, some critics, like the US Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, & Forestry, argue that the IRA "exclusively prioritizes certain greenhouse gas-reducing and carbon-sequestering activities, ignoring the needs and requests for increased investments in locally-led conservation, natural resource, and wildlife habitat activities desired by farmers and ranchers in the upcoming farm bill," according to a piece by the committee last September. 

The framing of a slow-moving bureaucracy, excessive red tape, and a too-prevalent top-down policy application reveal themselves as common themes the more I speak to producers and individuals who work with them. The federal government is investing millions of dollars to entice agricultural producers and landowners to adopt climate-smart practices and prioritize climate-smart commodity projects. But are they working with the producers to directly support them and meet their needs?

I spoke to Danielle Corral, an agricultural consultant and former program manager of the Coalition for Farmland Preservation with Local First Arizona, in 2023 for an article I wrote for the Arizona Daily Star that covered the USDA grant the University of Arizona received to support climate-smart food production practices. Corral agrees with the inflexibility that comes with the top-down approach of AMAs. She highlighted the approval of an AMA in the Douglas water basin, which is located in Cochise County, in 2022 using a citizen ballot initiative, Proposition 422, to create an AMA. Signatures to put Proposition 422 on the ballot were collected by the Arizona Water Defenders, a grassroots organization made up of residents of the Douglas and Wilcox focused on preserving their groundwater for current and future residents. 

As a result, starting in January 2027, Cochise County will be subject to the same water management system as the other 82% of Arizona. 

While the establishment of this AMA was celebrated as a win for Douglas residents to regulate their water, Corral argues this is a loss for small farmers. "A lot of the small farmers who are out there who are trying to grow more desert-adapted crops or livestock operations and have been mindful of their water use, they now have to be regulated and fill out hours and hours of paperwork, and it will cost them $15,000 I think at least to apply for 'irrigation grandfathered rights.' So, if you're a small farmer and don't have that money, guess what? You are going to be gone," says Corral.

Property owners in the Douglas AMA must secure an irrigation grandfathered right for a non-exempt well to continue using it for irrigation.

"It makes me think that I should just volunteer my time to the Department of Water Resources as an envoy to try and explain things to people because there's just a lot of confused people," says Jacobs. 

Oatman Flats Ranch General Manager, Yadi Wang, is also wary of AMAs. "With having wells being grandfather in [under AMAs], if you don't use [the water], you lose [the water]. For a farm like ours, we're trying to use as little water as possible. How does that regulation help? It doesn't change practices. I could lease that water to someone else, so we're still using the same amount. You can't build new wells, that's fair, but if you're locking these allotments in, less water isn't being used, and you aren’t helping the people who are following conservation practices," says Wang.

When I reiterated the slogan "you don't use it, you lose it," Wang used to Jacobs, she was quick to explain that this is, in fact, false. Yes, an allotment must be used when it comes to groundwater without credit, but Jacobs states that farmers do get credit for unused well water.

The USDA climate-smart food projects echo Gov. Hobbs' sentiment by describing the projects as "creative collaborations between universities, farmers and ranchers, nonprofits, conservation districts, and tribal organizations," according to Good Food Finder. The article states that farmers whose agricultural practices are already environmentally minded could be compensated through these grants and that conventional producers wishing to transition to more climate-smart practices could also be supported by the grant to adopt these practices. 

When I asked Wang about the USDA grants, he said that he applied for the grant but didn't get funded because, as a producer, he can perhaps be a beneficiary of the grant but not an applicant, which he says was stunning to him. He didn't understand why, if the money is intended to help those who practice climate-smart agriculture, why can't those dollars be awarded to producers directly? He says that all the channels the grant money has to go through to get to the beneficiaries delay the process. 

"If we continue going down this route rather than applying the dollars and understanding what the pain points are that are holding up the funding, if we don't rapidly shift that into action, we might run out of time," says Wang.

One thing Wang and Jacobs do agree on is that economic forces drive farmers in their decision of what to grow. Jacobs says there's a difference between getting a farmer to switch to a crop where there is no market (comparing cash crops to more specialized heritage crops) versus helping a farmer pay for conservation technologies they can't pay. She explains that many programs are out there to support small farmers, but she does not know to what extent farmers use them and if they're making a difference. Jacobs says farmers will switch what they are growing if the economic incentive is there to grow climate-smart crops. 

"Asking a farmer to switch what they are growing out of the goodness of their heart is not going to work. And if you have a whole system that includes the banking, harvesting, planting, fertilizer, and irrigation systems, everything about how you manage your land now has to change because you switched to a new crop. The market you're going after is now in Chicago instead of Nogales. With so many externalities associated with that switch, it's not as simple as planting Tepary beans instead of cotton. Where's the market for Tepary beans? I know it exists, but it's a different market than cotton," explains Jacobs.

Wang agrees that the current commodity structure is going to be hard to change but that there are opportunities to work within that structure and change consumer behavior.

Wang thinks a lot could happen to support farmers who are wanting to grow sustainable agriculture at the policy level, especially at the Farm Bill level but he questions the likelihood of those changes happening when lobbyists from large ag companies have influence on Farm Bill policy.

The Farm Bill establishes the policies and government support for a range of U.S. agricultural prioritie and is reauthorized by Congress every five years. 

According to Wang and confirmed by my research, historically, most Farm Bill spending — three-quarters in the 2018 bill — goes to the Nutrition title, which funds the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). 

“I don’t think buying a KitKat and a Pepsi from the grocery store should be nutritionally incentivised and that shouldn't be allowed in the SNAP or EBT program. Where are the investments in the actual issues,” asks Wang. 

In a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities article, Dottie Rosenbaum, Senior Fellow and Director of Federal SNAP Policy, argues that SNAP’s share of farm bill spending doesn’t divert funding to farm programs. Rosebaum states, “Any projected increase in SNAP spending does not take away from support for farmers. CBO’s projections for farm program spending depend on factors including commodity prices, program rules, and funding levels set in law; their forecasts for SNAP spending have no bearing on projected farm program spending.”

However, a Cato Institute article cited a 2016 USDA study that found that 23% of purchases by SNAP households were sugary drinks, desserts, salty snacks, candy, and sugar.

According to a Food & Water Watch report the most debated section of the Farm Bill is the Commodities title. This title focuses on staple crops like corn, wheat, and soybeans, along with cotton and other major grains and oilseeds. It provides financial support to farmers through crop insurance and farm payments to help them weather declining revenue due to price drops or natural disasters.

Critics from both sides of the aisle argue that the Commodities title is an example of inefficient government spending. Food & Water Watch argue that the title should be reformed to incentivize organic and regenerative farming practices, and broaden its scope to encompass a wider variety of specialty crops. To achieve this, we need to examine the historical and social factors that led us to this point.

Food & Water Watch states that over the past four decades, three major trends have reshaped agriculture: the increasing dominance of large corporations, the dismantling of agricultural supply management systems, and the decline of independent, family-owned farms. These trends are not isolated events, but rather the result of coordinated efforts by multinational agribusinesses to maximize profits within the food system, often at the cost of farmers and rural communities.

Wang believes the most effective measure would be a massive investment in education capacity and awareness for the consumer base to be able to vote with their wallet and have a fundamental shift in their mindset about their food and where it comes from. Wang believes that the producers are the stewards of their land but thinks that people who don't own the land can still help steward it by knowing where to get their food and how to support producers for them to grow more ethically and sustainably.

Jacobs doesn't see a wholesale transition to some of the climate-smart crops the Arizona-funded grants are looking to invest in. She notes that heritage wheat in the region has been successful, which is a win for climate-smart efforts. Still, through so many federal crop pricing incentives and subsidies to grow certain crops like cotton in Pima County and winter greens in Yuma, the market is skewed towards traditional crops. Jacobs thinks that this will ultimately be an economic decision even if water keeps getting cut. She notes that she doesn't see the state shutting down farms, except if they're on state land violating their own lease, alluding to Fondomonte.

Gov. Hobbs is focusing on closing groundwater poaching loopholes from foreign and state entities. A priority of the governor’s, stated on her website reads that she will, "Secure and modernize Arizona's water supply by better conserving and managing our water, investing in and upgrading our infrastructure, and providing the leadership needed to bring Arizonans together so that every stakeholder has a seat at the table."