“Some years, all of what you made came from the government,” Wuertz said. “Your bank would finance your farming operation… because they knew the support was guaranteed. They wouldn’t finance wheat, or alfalfa. Cotton was always dependable, it would always work…”
— Arizona cotton farmer Greg Wuertz as quoted by reporters Abrahm Lustgarten and Naveena Sadasivam in the May 2015 Pro Publica article , “Holy Crop: How federal dollars are financing the water crisis in the West.“
Like many farmers in the American West, farmer Greg Wuertz depends upon irrigation to grow his water-thirsty cotton crops in the middle of an arid desert. And like many farmers all across the US, Mr. Wuertz gets a subsidy check from the US government or from his insurance company when his crop does poorly — or when the price of cotton falls below a certain level. Without government subsidies, farmers like Mr. Wuertz might choose to grow a different crop in the middle of a desert, rather than cotton. Like maybe, lettuce?
Lettuce grown in the American Southwest consumes about 8 inches of water during its growing season. A cotton plant sucks up about 41 inches of the precious fluid. By comparison, potatoes absorb about 24 inches; sweet corn consumes about 20 inches.
From the 2015 Pro Publica article mentioned above:
Getting plants to grow in the Sonoran Desert is made possible by importing billions of gallons of water each year. Cotton is one of the thirstiest crops in existence, and each acre cultivated here demands six times as much water as lettuce, 60 percent more than wheat. That precious liquid is pulled from a nearby federal reservoir, siphoned from beleaguered underground aquifers and pumped in from the Colorado River hundreds of miles away. Greg Wuertz has been farming cotton on these fields since 1981, and before him, his father and grandfather did the same. His family is part of Arizona’s agricultural royalty. His father was a board member of the Central Arizona Water Conservation District for nearly two decades. Wuertz has served as president of several of the most important cotton organizations in the state.
But what was once a breathtaking accomplishment — raising cotton in a desert — has become something that Wuertz pursues with a twinge of doubt chipping at his conscience…
As I understand it, the cash subsidies paid to cotton farmers in Arizona arrive in the form of a check, delivered to their mailbox — and the amount of the subsidy is defined by the federal Farm Bill and the USDA. From a 2018 article on the Environmental Working Group website:
A new federal farm subsidy program for cotton growers could cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. The subsidies will flow even as global demand for US cotton is soaring, with projected higher prices prompting one market analyst to advise farmers to “plant, plant, plant.”
This week the Department of Agriculture announced that payments will be made to cotton farmers in 2018 through the Cotton Ginning Cost Share Program. Each farmer can receive up to $40,000 from this program alone. The last time this program was put in place, in 2016, it cost taxpayers $330 million. Cotton farmers also already receive hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies through the Federal Crop Insurance Program. In 2017, cotton growers received over $650 million in premium subsidies. And just last month Congress made cotton eligible for the Agricultural Risk Coverage, or ARC, and Price Loss Coverage, or PLC, commodity programs. So in 2018, cotton farmers can receive payments from three separate programs…
But those are just the cash subsidies. In hot, arid Arizona, cotton farmers additionally benefit from the federally-funded Central Arizona Project — the CAP — a 336-mile diversion canal that delivers water from the Colorado River to central and southern Arizona.
The CAP is the second largest aqueduct system ever constructed in the United States. The project was envisioned to provide water to nearly one million acres (405,000 hectares) of irrigated agricultural land areas in Maricopa, Pinal, and Pima counties, as well as municipal water for several Arizona communities, including the metropolitan areas of Phoenix and Tucson.
The municipal water is used in many different ways. Lawns… swimming pools…
So many federal programs. So little water left in the Colorado River.
But maybe Colorado taxpayers can come up with millions of dollars… to allow cotton farmers and swimming pool owners maintain their lifestyles in the middle of the Arizona desert? With a ‘Drought Contingency Plan,’ perhaps?
Last Thursday, the Colorado Senate adopted Colorado’s $30.5 billion budget for 2019-20 and sent it on to the state House for the next step. According to reporter Marianne Goodland writing for the Fort Morgan Times on March 31:
While most of the budget package sailed through, one bill drew more opposition than one might expect. Senate Bill 212 puts $10 million in general fund revenue into continued implementation of the state water plan. But that’s $20 million less than was sought by the previous administration … and for the first time tapped general fund dollars, rather than severance tax revenues.
That didn’t sit well with Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg, R-Sterling.
“To start asking for the general fund to pay” for the water plan, is a mistake, he told lawmakers. “Allow the severance tax dollars to do what they have always been intended to do… Our highest priorities for general fund should be K-12 education, transportation and mental health.”
We got an email last week from Save the Colorado activist and author Gary Wockner:
Hi Colorado Environmental Media,
Water Education Colorado reports that the Colorado State Legislature has slashed the funding for the controversial Colorado Water Plan by 66%, from $30 million to $10 million.
This budget cut, for implementation of the 2015 Colorado Water Plan — a document that refers to itself as the “largest civic engagement process in our state’s history” — comes at the exact moment that the State of Colorado is in Washington DC arguing in favor of a somewhat different new plan: the “Drought Contingency Plan.” My sense, as an outside observer, is that the Drought Contingency Plan did not involve a great deal of civic engagement.
Here we have an interesting controversy. Everyone is pretty much in agreement on one scientific assumption: Mother Nature is unlikely to provide additional rain and snow in the American West, beyond what she normally provides. And probably less.
We can also agree that human effort over the past century — in the way of dams, reservoirs, aqueducts and diversion pipelines — have changed portions of the landscape west of the 100th meridian from a natural desert wasteland into an artificial wonderland. But the transformation came at an enormous cost, both financially and environmentally.
We can agree on all those things. The question before us now is whether we believe humans can continue to squeeze water out of a stone landscape, to permit continued population and agricultural growth — at an ever greater financial and environmental cost.
Or have we hit the wall?