Arizona farmers forced to adapt as main water source dries up

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• Amna Nawaz:

  Yuma County, Arizona, is known as the winter salad bowl capital. From lettuce to cilantro to broccoli, the region produces almost all the leafy green vegetables consumed in the U.S. during winter months.

  But farmers there rely on the nearby Colorado River. And as the West contends with drought and a change in climate, they have had to adapt.

  Stephanie Sy has this report.

• Matt McGuire, Chief Agricultural Officer, J.V. Smith Companies:

  So I'm going to guess about five days ago.

• Stephanie Sy:

  On a crisp November morning, an introduction how to grow vegetables in the Sonoran Desert.

• Matt McGuire:

  So, right now, we would be harvesting this crop at peak maturity probably next week.

• Stephanie Sy:

  Matt McGuire is the chief agricultural officer for J.V. Smith, which grows vegetables on 8,500 acres in Yuma County Arizona.

  I'm standing in the field of lettuce, but I'm surrounded on all sides by desert. How does this make sense?

• Matt McGuire:

  Very fertile soil. You got to remember, this valley, Yuma Valley, Bard, Winterhaven Valley, they're all formed by the river.

• Stephanie Sy:

  That's the Colorado River, which starts in the Rocky Mountains and once flowed so abundantly down to this region that it would occasionally flood.

• Matt McGuire:

  So there's all these sediments from flooding over the years that built up these very rich soils here in this area.

• Stephanie Sy:

  That, plus the consistently mild sunny winters in Southern Arizona, have made lettuce growing a cash cow.

• Matt McGuire:

  You can say, oh, I want to grow them all in Florida. Well, that's great. When they don't get hurricanes or excess rains or freeze, you will have vegetables in the wintertime.

  There are other places that keep trying, but they cannot grow consistent quantities and quality of lettuce that the country needs. So if you want lettuces in the wintertime or broccoli in the wintertime, you got to come to the desert.

• Jon Dinsmore, Dinsmore Farms:

  So these sprinklers are something we have started to implement over the last two years.

• Stephanie Sy:

  Farmer Jon Dinsmore says the winter climate, coupled with irrigation practices, produce a better harvest and a better yield.

• Jon Dinsmore:

  Being able to have such consistent weather is really what allows us to micromanage our farming practices.

• Stephanie Sy:

  And by consistent weather, you mean it's sunny all the time.

• Jon Dinsmore:

  We average just over three inches of rain a year. We don't have many clouds, but that consistent sunlight is what allows us to really be able to focus on our farming practices day by day.

• Stephanie Sy:

  But the climate is also what's creating problems for the farmers here. The Colorado River's major reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, reached historic lows a few years ago. A multiyear drought continues to squeeze supply in the Southwest.

  Scientists say that rising temperatures from manmade climate change have supercharged the drought in the West, causing the last two decades to be the driest in at least 1,200 years. At the same time, the average flows from the Colorado River, which these crops entirely rely on, are down by about 20 percent.

  For several decades, farmers managed to get more so-called crop per drop. They're adopting newer technologies to try and stay ahead of the dwindling water supply.

• Matt McGuire:

  If you look at the statistics, we have increased our production for the last 30 years, high-density beds, different genetics, satellite-driven laser level equipment, and we're now producing more crop per drop than anywhere in the U.S.

• Stephanie Sy:

  The law of the river governs how the Colorado's waters are allocated, with most of it going to agriculture.

  Farmers in Yuma have senior water rights, meaning if there were ever mandated cuts, they'd be among the last to be forced to comply. But the river is so depleted, even they are starting to worry.

  Paul Brierley is the head of Arizona's Agriculture Department.

  Is there a sense that those rights are at in peril, given…

  Paul Brierley, Director, Arizona Department of Agriculture: Absolutely. Yes, there's a lot of competition, so there's — and it's on a lot of different levels.

• Stephanie Sy:

  Scarcity has led to heated negotiations between states and tribes, between the Upper and Lower Basin, and between growers and growing cities. The river is overallocated.

• Matt McGuire:

  If we continued on that drought, there would have come a point where the water available on the water — on the river would have been so finite that it might have come down to a choice, do we grow crops, or do we have to shut the water off to the different cities that get Colorado River just to keep them alive?

• Stephanie Sy:

  Brierley says Yuma has long had a target on its back.

• Paul Brierley:

  Yuma has some of the oldest and highest priorities on the Colorado River, yet they're at the end of the river, right? Like, right over there, it goes into Mexico. So you can have the best rights in the world, but if the water's not flowing down to you, there's not a lot you can do. So…

• Stephanie Sy:

  In 2022, when we really saw it get near dead pool, was there panic in this area? And was that a wakeup call?

• Paul Brierley:

  It was a wakeup call, not just to this area, to the whole region. There was a call from the Bureau of Reclamation to possibly have to reduce water use by 20 to 40 percent, which is a huge thing.

  And so Yuma agriculture got together and put together a plan, trying to navigate to — and this is something I'm passionate about, is not have fallowing farmland taking land out of production be the answer, but to be more efficient with water and continue producing food, because it's national security to have our own food supply.

• Stephanie Sy:

  This past year's snows in the Rockies may have bought farmers some time, but Jon Dinsmore says he's not burying his head in the sand. Supply.

• Jon Dinsmore:

  The science that leads us to these new practices is helpful, as well as the science that gives us a forecast of what the future might look like. It can be scary, but, again, to be a farmer, you have got to have some hope.

• Stephanie Sy:

  They will continue, he says, to take it season by season for as long as the winter salad bowl is on the menu.

  For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Stephanie Sy in Yuma, Arizona.