A blanket of bright green alfalfa spreads across western Arizona’s McMullen Valley, ringed by rolling mountains and warmed by the hot desert sun.

Matthew Hancock’s family has used groundwater to grow forage crops here for more than six decades. They’re long accustomed to caprices of Mother Nature that can spoil an entire alfalfa cutting with a downpour or generate an especially big yield with a string of blistering days.

But concerns about future water supplies from the valley’s ancient aquifers, which hold groundwater supplies, are bubbling up in Wenden, a town of around 700 people where the Hancock family farms.

Some neighbors complain their backyard wells have dried up since the Emirati agribusiness Al Dahra began farming alfalfa here on about 3,000 acres (1,214 hectares) several years ago.

  • Norgur@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Isn’t that one of those cases where people farm alfalfa and sich just to keep their water allowance while the state issues water quotas on made up water availability figures which vastly overstate how much water is actually available?

    • Fredselfish@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Salt Lake is drying up in Utah that will make the city unhabitable for the same fucking crop. And no one stops them.

      This kind of shit you get your pitchforks out and start dragging rich people from thier fucking homes.