AG AND THE ECONOMY

DURING THE WINTER months, 90% of North America’s leafy green vegetables come from Yuma. From November through April, the area produces 1 billion pounds of lettuce, equaling 170 million servings per day, and 6 million servings of food are produced per 40-acre field.

Bobbi McDermott, a retired soil and water conservationist, explained why it’s so important to protect Yuma’s agricultural water. “The reason everyone in Yuma County needs to fight to maintain Yuma’s irreplaceable Colorado River water supply is that without it there is no Yuma as we know it,” she said.

Agriculture is the main dollar producer for Yuma County at 50% of the county’s income, and 1 in 4 jobs in Yuma is related to agriculture, she noted.

Yuma’s history, and therefore its economy, is rooted in its relationship with the Colorado River, according to Julie Engel, president and CEO of the Greater Yuma Economic Development Corp.

GYEDC, on its web page “The Convergence of Agriculture and Business,” notes that agriculture is a $3.2 billion a year industry. It grows 150 different types of crops annually. The integrated dairy and milk processing operations provide 700,000 gallons of fluid milk each month.

“Agriculture is the region’s historical primary industry which has given us our very strong water rights. The greater Yuma region is poised to grow within not only agriculture but food processing, which provides quality, good-paying year-round jobs to our citizens,” Engel said.

The Yuma region has increased its gross domestic product (GDP) by almost 20% in the last five years due in large part to investments in food production. Consequently, Engel noted, “We are the third largest metro economy in the state of Arizona.”

Companies such as Dole, Green Giant and Taylor Farms continue to invest millions into their processing facilities in Yuma, “which creates thousands of jobs that remove Yumans from the unemployment statistics permanently,” Engel said.

“We are also experiencing more food processing project interest. These firms need labor and water which our competing metros in Arizona cannot support,” she added.

Agriculture and the related industries are about two-thirds of the Yuma economy when talking about jobs and GDP, according to Paul Brierley, executive director of the Yuma Center of Excellence for Desert Agriculture.

“We see all of what’s growing in the fields, but there’s a lot of infrastructure that makes that happen,” Brierley said. “We’ve got the cooling facilities, all the trucking, there’s like 2,500 refrigerated semi-trucks a day that roll out of here. All the boxes that are needed for that, all the logistics and processing, the salad plants. There’s just a lot that goes on besides just what’s in the field.”

He noted that when an industry plays such a big part, it impacts other sectors of Yuma’s economy. “If you think about the two military bases, a lot of what makes that work is the civilian workforce, and the people who get out of the military and decide to stay in Yuma. If you didn’t have such a thriving community and economy that agriculture provides, this would just be a point where those people wouldn’t want to be, and instead they would get out the military and they wouldn’t want to stick around, so it really supports those things, too,” Brierley said.