Drinking water for homes and schools in Arizona is DRYING UP because foreign owned megafarms are sucking it up for their crops . . . which are then shipped to Middle East

UK Daiiy Mail ^ | November 6, 2020 | Alastair Talbot

[C19fan]

Drinking water for residents of Wenden, Ariz., has started to dry up as megafarms owned and backed by sovereign nations use it to grow their crops instead.

Groundwater is a necessity to grow agriculture in the Southwest, and while the Colorado River Basin is going through a prolonged drought, overused aquifers in Arizona are rapidly being exhausted, affecting the local lifestyle and economy.

In fact, workers with the state's water district watched, with the aid of a camera lowered into the town's well, the water moving, CNN reported.

[C19fan]

From the very start of the Neolithic, controversies over land ownership, water rigths, etc. caused violence and revolutions. Now just an article in a tabloid.

[C19fan]

Back in the day a foreign entity or aristocrat or gentry that sucked an area dry would expect some violent action from the locals.

[PAR35]

Ag uses pre-date the population influx.

It’s along the line of moving to a house beyond the end of an airport runway and complaining about the noise, or moving next to a pig farm and complaining about the smell.

Blame the developers, not the farm owners.

[metmom]

This is why I take issue with foreign entities owning American land.

[Dr. Sivana]

Drinking water for residents of Wenden, Ariz., has started to dry up as megafarms owned and backed by sovereign nations use it to grow their crops instead.

While I prefer local and smaller ownership in principle, large, foreign ownership doesn't affect how much water is used. If it is a farm, it uses water. The crops (e.g. lettuce) are largely sold in the U.S. This is NOT the Irish potato famine.

We have been asked to use less water, and I am happy NOT to use the sprinklers, less mowing (my wife dislikes dead grass. I wish I could replace it with astro turf. Our opinions on home property landscaping is one of the few things we didn't work out before marriage.)

We have actually had decent rain this summer for the desert, though last year was quite dry. But lack of rain is nothing new. It is the desert. If we want to fix things, California can use its Pacific Ocean access for desalination which would ameliorate things for the whole region.

[cranked]

Ah geez, and all this time my kinfolk living in AZ were telling me for years that AZ’s water supply was steadily drying up due to all the gold courses, and the continued growth of huge residential areas.....

[cranked]

gold = golf

[antidemoncrat]

And where is the US Government protecting our sovereignty?
Oh, now it doesn’t seem to matter if the is a “D” or “R” after your name. Now it’s “Go into politics. Sell out your country. Get rich. Retire with a huge government pension.

[Cincinnatus.45-70]

Globalization, baby!

[mjp]

Drinking water for residents of Wenden, Ariz., has started to dry up as megafarms owned and backed by sovereign nations use it to grow their crops instead.

direct actions are accompanied by opposite direct reactions

[TalBlack]

The food (water) is shipped to a corner of the world that desalinates water for supply. Why do they even need to farm in America?

[C19fan]

Based on the article, many of the countries in Arabia has stopped water intensive farming as moral preening. They still need the water intensive crops so they suck AZ dry.

[ronnie raygun]

selling America from beneath our feet. We need to regain the high ground and regain our sovereignty

[discostu]

AZ doesn’t charge enough for water. It’s just that simple. I live here, I “benefit” from our cheap water. But I also see the math. Tucsonans pay about 1/3 as much for water as Detroit. That’s not right. And I’m pretty sure Detroit isn’t being over charged. This is why all these water hogging businesses keep landing here, cause they go where it’s cheap.

And no this isn’t just causing articles in a tabloid. There’s a WHOLE lot of kerfuffle over this. And there might be violence. But there is an easy fix, AZ needs to quintuple the fees on water. Nestle and all these others will flee in terror then.

[Mr Rogers]

Agriculture uses 70% of the water in Arizona. Maybe it is time to stop growing crops in a desert.

However, your “Ag uses pre-date the population influx” statement is wrong. Most of the high water use by agriculture in Arizona now is from nut farms - orchards that use more water than 20,000 homes. NEW orchards, being planted. Owned by foreign companies and shipping the nuts to Europe and China.

It also comes from a small handful of enormous dairy farms. NEW dairy farms, drilling down 2,000 feet to suck the water until there is nothing left. Spend some time in Cochise County, where they are currently ripping up thousands of acres and planting more orchards. NEW places, owned out of state, selling their produce to China and Europe.

This has NOTHING to do with old time farmers and nothing to do with ranchers. These are almost all new businesses. We nearly bought a home in Cochise County but they were about to plant a square mile orchard across the road. The well at the house will be worthless soon. And it isn’t agriculture that dates back to the 50s.

The stuff causing huge problems is stuff built since 2010 and being built even now.

[4yearlurker]

I was living with my Pop in North Phoenix back in 1979. I remember the local radio station broadcasting for people to stop watering lawns and washing cars,etc. on certain hot days in the summer because water pressure was getting low.

[Mr Rogers]

You don’t know what you are talking about. It is NOT “lettuce”. And large corporations DO have a huge impact on water use. The small existing farms can’t afford the millions to drill down 2,000 feet for water! That takes big money. And it dooms the existing farms nearby.

These are new crops (nuts and dairy) and they are being sold overseas. We might as well be exporting ground water. It is very DUMB, but a lot of money is involved. And a lot of water. You don’t drill down 2,000 feet in a place where the normal well is 300 unless you plan to take water for the people who have lived there (and farmed) for decades.

I’m familiar with Cochise County, not Wenden, Ariz. But I’ve seen the roads buckling. A friend moved out of a rental home when the 500’ well went dry after a NEW orchard was planted nearby. We looked for homes and backed off. Love the area. Love ranching and farming. But this short term profit will suck the life out of the neighboring farms and homes.

[Mr Rogers]

Tucson isn’t being drained. One of the few good things Tucson has done is manage its water. Arizona uses the same amount of water now as it did in the late 50s!

The problem with these new businesses is that they are sucking up groundwater in a place where there was no agriculture before - or very little. Places that rely totally on ground water.

The cities will be fine. The small rural communities are the ones that will be hit as the water in their basins disappears.

[dennisw]

Mega Ping. For mega farms.

[whitney69]

The actual problem is not how much water is being used for what in Arizona. For Arizona, it’s the amount of water being taken to California that is effecting their problem more than their agriculture needs.

Ninety-three percent of Californians rely on publicly supplied water to meet their domestic water needs. Eighty-two percent of the water supplied by public water districts for
domestic and other uses come from rivers, lakes, reservoirs, and other surface water sources. California’s drinking water supply system relies on approximately 157 million acres of land spanning 8 states to collect, filter, and deliver water. 7.7 million acres (5%) of the watersheds supplying California’s drinking water have been converted to agricultural uses and an additional 3.2 million acres (2%) has been converted to urban and suburban development. Most southern California cities obtain some of their drinking water from the Colorado River, which originates in the mountains of Wyoming and Colorado, and then passes through and drains portions of Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada until it reaches Lake Havasu, on the border between Arizona and California. There, after all the draining, it is diverted into the Metropolitan Water District’s Colorado River Aqueduct which carries the water 242 miles directly to southern California.

The cities receiving more than 140 million acres of water annually are Los Angeles, San Diego, Chula Vista and Long Beach. From there it drops to less than 30 million acres for any city in the state the highest being Bakersfield.

So the problem is not that agriculture is sucking up the water as much as people in southern California are drinking it faster than it can be supplied. And the syphoning starts well before the Colorado reaches Arizona.

wy69