“It is unconscionable that as recently as eight months ago, the state of Arizona was approving new deep-water wells designed to pump thousands of gallons of water per minute out from under La Paz County,” said Mayes in the release.
Farms in western Arizona are growing alfalfa – one of the most water-intensive crops – in an area where there’s a shortage of water. Some farms are foreign-owned and are shipping the crop to Saudi Arabia, where it’s illegal to grow because it takes too much water.
The nationality of the farmers is less offensive than proxy exporting limited American resources to international customers. Saudi wells might not be the only ones needing revocation.
I feel the same about this as I would if the headline read
“Jewish-owned” or “black-owned” or “Christian-owned” etc… and I hope everyone else does too.
That said, I’ve seen the irrigation practices in Arizona.
There is no way those are sustainable and it is very unlikely they will end well or smoothly.
“It is unconscionable that as recently as eight months ago, the state of Arizona was approving new deep-water wells designed to pump thousands of gallons of water per minute out from under La Paz County,” said Mayes in the release. “It is long-past time for the state of Arizona to wake up and address this growing crisis head-on before it is too late.”
I don’t know the science behind this but common sense says this is not a good idea. What are you going to fill this space under ground with once the water has been removed? Do you just expect sinkholes and no big deal? My question is, who approved it 8 months ago…were they paid off by the Saudis and do they still have a job?
In November 2016, Fondomonte was notified it needed to cure numerous defaults under its Butler Valley leases, including “a failure to include secondary containment structures on its fuel and Diesel Exhaust Fluid storage units,” the news release said.
In mid-August of this year, an inspection found that Fondomonte had not corrected the default after nearly seven years. The significant default of their lease reportedly gives the department grounds to terminate the lease.
The department also determined renewing the three remaining Butler Valley leases “is not in the best interest of the Trust’s beneficiaries due to excessive amounts of water being pumped from the land—free of charge.”
I’m not a fan of terminating their lease on a technicality. It gets the job done, but it doesn’t solve the problem.
The business model itself should be grounds for terminating these leases. This is a failure of policy.
Why did it take saudi-ownership for the government of Arizona to actually care about managing this precious natural resource?
This is probably a good thing,
but why in the heck is it the AGs business?
Seriously? "Failure to include secondary containment structures on its fuel and Diesel Exhaust Fluid storage units?”
Sounds like a real stretch to me.
It’s an attempt to sound all technical and sciency while saying
“You have outdoor tanks just like everybody else and the tanks are supposed to be housed in a shed.”
