#alfalfa doesn't take shit for water to grow

[beardedmrbean]

For years, a Saudi Arabia-owned farm based in the U.S. has been using water for free in the drought-stricken state of Arizona.

The water has been used to grow alfalfa for livestock in the Gulf kingdom.

Arizona has decided to not renew the company’s leases following an investigation that found Fondomonte Arizona in violation of some of its lease terms.

Arizona governor Katie Hobbs said this week her administration is terminating state land leases that for years have given a Saudi-owned farm nearly unfettered access to pump groundwater in the dry southwestern state.

On Monday, Hobbs, a Democrat, said the state had canceled Fondomonte Arizona's lease in western Arizona's Butler Valley and would not renew three other leases up for renewal there next year.

An investigation by the governor's office found that the foreign-owned farm had violated some of its lease terms. Hobbs called it unacceptable that the farm "continued to pump unchecked amounts of groundwater out of our state while in clear default on their lease."

IN ARIZONA, FRESH SCRUTINY OF SAUDI-OWNED FARM'S WATER USE

Fondomonte Arizona, a subsidiary of Saudi dairy giant Almarai Co., grows alfalfa in Arizona that feeds livestock in the water-stressed Gulf kingdom.

Through a spokesperson, Fondomonte said it would appeal the governor's decision to terminate its 640-acre lease in Butler Valley. Altogether, Fondomonte farmed about 3,500 acres in the rugged desert area west of Phoenix.

Fondomonte raised eyebrows when in 2014 it purchased nearly 10,000 acres of land for $47.5 million about 20 miles away from Butler Valley in Vicksburg, Arizona. Since then, worsening drought in Arizona has brought renewed attention to the company's water use and the broader issues of foreign-owned farms and groundwater pumping.

The violations the governor's office detailed relate to the company's storage of hazardous materials, among other issues. On Monday, Hobbs' office said that Fondomonte was notified of the violations in 2016, but an investigation in August found the company had not fixed the problem seven years later. That gave Arizona's State Land Department grounds to terminate the lease.

The Arizona governor's office said the State Land Department decided not to renew three other leases the company had in Butler Valley due to the "excessive amounts of water being pumped from the land — free of charge."

The department manages land owned by Arizona, which in Fondomonte's case, had been leased to the company. Butler Valley's groundwater is especially important because of state law that in theory allows for it to be pumped elsewhere. That makes its water of interest to cities like Phoenix, also dealing with water supply-related stress and a fast-growing population.

FRESH SCRUTINY ARISES AS ARIZONA ALLOWS SAUDI-OWNED FARM TO USE FREE WATER FOR FOREIGN PURPOSES

In Arizona, cities such as Phoenix and Tucson have restrictions on how much groundwater they can pump under a 1980 state law aimed at protecting the state’s aquifers. But in rural areas, little is required of water users to pump from underground aquifers besides registering wells with the state and using the water for activities, including farming, that are deemed a "beneficial use."

Fondomonte also farms in Southern California’s Palo Verde Valley, an area that gets its water from the shrinking Colorado River. Those operations have attracted less scrutiny. Not all of Fondomonte's farms in Arizona are affected by the governor's decision. And it’s not the only foreign company farming in the Southwest. The United Arab Emirates-owned Al Dahra ACX Global Inc. grows forage crops in Arizona and California, and is a major North American exporter of hay.

Almarai’s holdings in the Southwest are just one example of the farmland the company and its subsidiaries operate outside Saudi Arabia. It farms tens of thousands of acres in Argentina, which has also faced severe drought conditions in recent years.

Foreign entities and individuals control roughly 3% of U.S. farmland, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Canada is the largest holder — mainly of forestland.

Kris Mayes, Arizona’s Democratic attorney general, praised the governor for cracking down on the foreign-owned farm.

In April, Mayes announced that the state had rescinded permits that would've allowed Fondomonte to drill new water wells after inconsistencies were found in its applications. On Monday, Mayes called the governor's actions a "step in the right direction," adding that the state should have acted sooner.

"The decision by the prior administration to allow foreign corporations to stick straws in the ground and pump unlimited amounts of groundwater to export alfalfa is scandalous," Mayes said.

[agrarianradfem]

I don't mean to start a discourse, but can you speak to how land types and food transportation are ignored in vegan arguments? We transport different foods all over the world of course, but we especially eat what we have locally based on the land, and it doesn't have to be transported nearly as far. Do you think that's significant enough to be worth mentioning?

I’m going to answer this in a shortish form so: A lot of vegan arguments overlook the land use types that exist. For instance, it’s stupid to grow crops in the Great Basin or Chihuahuan Deserts.  But, take the Chihuahuan desert: we grow a shit ton of pecans there. So many pecans, in fact, that they take the VAST majority of water in the region. Pecans take 100-200 gallons of water a day/tree. An acre of pecan trees can take 3400 gallons a day. We are using groundwater tapping to get that much water and it is sucking the desert dry. There aren’t a lot of nutritional crops that can be produced there. Proposed more suitable crops for the region are chili peppers, prickly pear, chiltepines, and blue agave. But clearly none of these plants is very nutritionally dense. But sheep, goats, and turkeys are all desert adapted animals that produce nutritionally dense foods without anywhere near the water requirements to produce pecans and produce that food faster. The sheep and goats can even be used to graze down invasive thistle, cheatgrass, and brush. This doesn’t mean we aren’t doing stupid shit wrt raising animals. A shit ton of alfalfa for animals is grown in the Great Basin where there isn’t enough water for something like that. But that doesn’t mean, again, that raising sheep (like Navaho Churro sheep) wouldn’t be a smart thing to do. Meat eaters just need to fucking eat more sheep. We haven’t adapted our agriculture to place ENOUGH and that includes animals. You can’t have a healthy ecosystem without animals and you miss out on the nutritional benefits animals provide to the entire food system.  As for the transportation component: A very popular vegan blogger on here cites the 2006 FAO report “Livestock’s Long Shadow” which is the report that makes vegans nut (pun intended) because it says that livestock is the #1 contribution to climate change. But the report was criticized from the moment of publication because they take a lifetime view of livestock and only a tailpipe view of transportation as a sector. Which means that every resource that went into raising a cow from the moment of birth to you consuming it was accounted for. Meanwhile, the only thing the FAO report measured for transportation was the emissions at the tailpipe - not the resources that went into the entire lifetime of the car, truck, etc. Dr. Frank Mitloehner published THE article ripping the research methods of the FAO apart. He’s an air quality specialist at UC Davis. So it turns out, that if you actually include more than just the tailpipe emissions of transportation, transportation is a bigger contributor than livestock. There’s no way around that fossil fuels are the biggest contributor to climate change. But I will say that local food doesn’t mean less transportation. For instance, a farmer driving a truck of 50 apples 1 mile has the same fuel cost per apple of 5000 apples 100 miles or 50,000 apples 1,000 miles. Scale matters. So what you want in a sustainable food system is you want the economy of scale that keeps the fuel cost per apple (for instance) low but doesn’t increase fuel cost for something else. Which means focusing on building more efficient food distribution systems that take apples from central New York and grains from southern New York and distributes those efficiently throughout the state, rather than trying to grow wheat in the foothills of the Adirondacks which is a fucking waste of resources because it won’t grow as well and you end up with less wheat at a worse quality for the distribution cost.