Yuma Sun e-Edition

WHAT IS BEING DONE

AGRICULTURE IS THE biggest user of the river, so it will always be a target. A misperception is that farming in the desert is a waste of water that could be better used in the cities.

“But that’s not the case. The reality is Yuma is like this amazing, unique ecosystem for producing these crops,” Brierley said.

With 350 days of sunshine a year, Yuma is the only place where many winter crops can grow. “Usually people think, oh, that can be produced somewhere else, but these tender green crops in the wintertime, they can’t, and so if you cut back (water) here, you’re literally going to be cutting back on what’s available in the grocery store,” Brierley said.

“The ecosystem is so perfect that we really have a lot of control over how things are raised. When you grow something in Yuma, it’s going to be high quality, it’s going to be high yield, very reliable food supply,” he added.

McDermott noted that farmers have spent billions of their own dollars to increase the efficient use of water on their farms. They level fields so all the water applied stays on the field. There is no tailwater. Only the precise amount of water that is necessary for each field is used.

Farmers use advanced technology to monitor how much water the plants need and use. Growers keep track of every gallon of water used. All their canals are cement lined.

Fields are engineered to most efficiently use water based on the various soils in the field, as every soil reacts differently.

“The on-farm water use efficiency is as high as is economically practical for them to continue in business,” McDermott said.

Brierley tries to get that message across by asking people to not look just at the quantity of water that’s used for a particular crop but what’s produced per unit of water.

“For every drop of water we use or every acre foot of water we use, what’s the value of the product produced with that? And that’s an important measure,” Brierley explained. “It says in the video, according to this economist, Yuma is about 75% more efficient than any place else on the Colorado River as far as what they produce with the water.”

As a result, Yuma growers are feeding more people with less resources and continually look for ways to become even more efficient. Brierley is heading up the University of Arizona’s Presidential Advisory Commission on the Future of Agriculture and Food Production in a Drying Climate. The goal is to find ways to help farmers stay productive even with less water.

“It’s hard in a place like Yuma because we already use 18% less water than we did 40 years ago, but we’re producing a lot more crops. In some cases, like with lettuce, double the crop that we used to produce,” he said.

Nevertheless, Brierley added, “as good as they are here, Yuma farmers are always trying to figure out ways to feed more people with less resources. And that’s kind of what the Yuma Center of Excellence is, a proactive effort by the growers to say, hey, we’re gonna help fund research to make us even better and more efficient.”

Technological advances are already being made. For example, soil moisture sensors that indicate exactly when a field or even a part of the field needs to be watered.

Drones and broadband are also becoming increasingly important. “They need broadband to send data. If you’re flying a drone and it’s looking for irrigation issues or things, you need to be connected to the cloud and then you can get recommendations on when to water and how much to water, when your crops are ready to harvest, and that kind of stuff,” Brierley said.

Efforts are being made to expand broadband across all farm fields. “If there’s a new technology or if researchers want to come develop new technology, you just know that any farm field you pull into, you got access to the cloud, and so you can put sensors out there, you can fly drones, you can put automated equipment in, and those are the kinds of things that I think are going to help us get even better,” he noted.

“There is always room for improvement with new technology, new practices, and that’s where I hope the university steps up and gives information to the farmers because the farmers are facing doing things differently. They need to know what are the impacts of growing a different crop or of fallowing for part of the year or putting a soil additive in that helps hold the water. There’s lots of different things that you could try,” he added.

Biz Feature

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2023-04-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-04-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://yumasun.pressreader.com/article/281625309552743

Alberta Newspaper Group