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Should We Be Farming in the Desert?
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BY NINA ELKADI • November 6, 2024
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Just north of the U.S.-Mexico border, California’s Imperial Valley is both a desert and an agricultural wonder. Bordered by sand dunes and barren mountains, the region receives less than three inches of rainfall per year, 27 inches less than the U.S. average. From June to September, high temperatures here often exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit. By most measures, the Imperial Valley is not a great place to grow food. Yet carrots, cauliflower, sweet onions, honeydew, broccoli, and alfalfa all grow here, incongruous crops that spread across half a million acres of cultivated land.
Ronald Leimgruber farms 3,500 of those acres. Given the lack of rain in the region,
Leimgruber says he has “about seven” different irrigation projects on his farm, where he grows an array of crops, including carrots, lettuce, watermelon, and hay. Leimgruber, a third-generation farmer whose grandparents helped build the All American Canal, estimates he has spent millions of dollars on various water conservation techniques over the years. Some of that spending was subsidized by the federal government; some came out of his own pocket. He’s not sure it was worth it, especially because the government does not fund the upkeep of new systems.
“The jury’s still out,” he says. “Short term, there’s no maintenance. Long term, these things don’t last. Technology changes. They get worn out. We get a government grant to get them put in, and they look good at first, and then all of a sudden, we have to operate them.” Read the full story.
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Utah Tries a New Water Strategy
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BY NINA ELKADI • November 5, 2024
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Before he was appointed head of Utah’s Department of Natural Resources, Joel Ferry was a full-time farmer—and a very good one. “I was the top ‘Young Farmer and Rancher’ in the state of Utah a few years ago,” he said on a recent phone call, as he drove across the state, minutes before heading into a meeting with the governor. “My wife was the Utah ‘Farm Mom of the Year.’ I’m raising my kids in agriculture.”
In Corinne, Utah, where his family has farmed for 125 years, Ferry, who is 46, raises cows, corn, and alfalfa. His is the last ranch before the Bear River—the longest river in North America that does not empty into an ocean—flows
into the Great Salt Lake. On his farm, Ferry is witness to the effects of water usage in a drought-ridden region. “I’m personally seeing the impacts on the ecosystem, the impacts on the environment,” Ferry said, “and then also trying to balance these competing demands for agriculture and city growth. We’re right in the thick of it.”
The whole state of Utah, like many western U.S. states, is in the thick of it. Utah recently emerged from its driest 20-year period since the Middle Ages, while the Great Salt Lake, an iconic landmark of the West, is on course to dry up completely in a matter of years, not decades. Read the full story.
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Colorado’s Groundwater Experiment
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BY JENNIFER OLDHAM • November 4, 2024
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On a dry, hot day in June, water manager Chris Ivers plunged his hand into San Luis Creek and extracted a tangled mat of weeds that had blocked icy snowmelt from reaching nearby farms. The free-flowing water is a welcome sight in southern Colorado, an agricultural region in the throes of a groundwater crisis.
Ivers, who helps farmers and ranchers in this arid valley use the scarce resource wisely, pointed out the full ditch and green shoots emerging nearby—a byproduct, in part, of a regional experiment in water conservation. “I’m encouraged,” he said as crows squawked overhead and mustard grass waved in a slight breeze. “I really haven’t been
walking out here in a while.”
Producers in this sprawling valley, cradled between the San Juan and Sangre de Cristo mountains, have just seven years to replenish overtapped groundwater to levels required by law or face state-mandated well shutdowns. Aquifer storage plunged in 2002 on the heels of a severe drought and hasn’t markedly recovered, and much of the region is currently under a federal disaster declaration. Following the 2002 drought, farmers voluntarily created seven governing bodies, called water subdistricts, in the hopes of replenishing two aquifers that make growing food viable here in North America’s largest high-altitude desert. Read the full story.
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For Farmers and Ranchers Grappling With Mental Health, This Fourth-Generation Farmer Offers Help That Works
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BY NICOLE J. CARUTH • November 1, 2024
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Mental health is an ongoing concern in the agricultural industry, where suicide rates are among the highest for any occupation in the United States. Farmers, in particular, die by suicide at a rate up to three times higher than the national average.
“Only recently are farm people becoming more open to seeking mental health assistance,” says Michael Rosmann, a clinical psychologist and fourth-generation farmer, whose latest book, Meditations on Farming: The
Agrarian Drive, Stress, and Mental Health is out this month. His previous book, Excellent Joy: Fishing, Farming, Hunting, and Psychology, was recognized by one critic for “the author’s compassion for the mental health of the farmers who are bonded first and foremost to their land.”
Rosmann, 78, is a leading expert on agricultural behavioral health, a specialization he was instrumental in developing to support food producers’ unique needs. Meditations on Farming isn’t the jargony academic text you might expect from an
influential scholar. Read the full story.
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Op-ed: ‘Blue Foods’ May Not Save the World
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BY BECCA FRANKS AND LAURIE SELLARS • October 31, 2024
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When it comes to food, the world faces a tangle of seemingly impossible choices: Increase agricultural land-use to address food insecurity and you drive deforestation and risk biodiversity collapse. Industrialize meat production to bring prices down and you set the stage for new pandemics and imperil the welfare of billions of farmed animals. Feeding the world’s growing population without worsening parallel catastrophes has become the defining challenge of the 21st century. One could be forgiven for attempting to conjure a portal to a future that would avoid tradeoffs entirely.
And some, it seems, have attempted to cast just such a spell: “Blue foods” is
the way to save the world.
Blue foods—food like fish, shellfish, and seaweeds obtained from bodies of water—and farmed blue foods in particular have been promoted by researchers, industry, NGOs, and the World Economic Forum alike as the way to feed the world; as a solution to hidden hunger and malnutrition; as the path to achieving global food system transformation; and as the fix for multiple global challenges. A common refrain in these circles: “The future of food is not just green—it’s blue.”
But as researchers studying aquatic organisms, their ecosystems, and their welfare, we are compelled to say: not so fast. And not like this. Read the full story.
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