[music]
(Jeff) The Colorado River
collectively supports about 40 million people
and about 5 million acres of cropland.
And it covers portions of seven states and two countries.
Our livelihoods depend on the Colorado River
living in this desert southwest.
(Cory) Yuma grows 90% of the winter vegetables
in the United States from the second week of November
to about the first second week of April.
We provide all your leafy greens, your lettuce, romaine,
your broccoli, spinach, and things of that nature
for that time period of the year.
(Jeff) There are three things that really fit in beautifully
agriculturally here to give it its potential, its capacity.
One, of course, is the climate. We're 150 feet
above sea level at about 32 degrees north latitude.
So we can basically grow crops year round.
Secondly, the soil resources are incredible, really.
You look at these alluvial valleys
that have basically been deposited over
eons of time by the deposits from the Colorado River.
And then third, of course, the water. The main
stem of the Colorado River was right here.
So it was a logical place to begin.
If the people could handle the heat and go do
the hard work of clearing and developing land
this quickly became one of the more
productive areas of the southwest. Still is today.
(Cory) When my father
first started farming lettuce and romaine,
they flood irrigated the furrows for 72 hours straight,
and that's what they used to germinate the seedling.
We've gone away from that practice many, many years ago,
and we're now using sprinkler technology.
(Jeff) Situation on the Colorado River
that's a product of over 20 years of drought.
The megadrought has been now declared by some climatologists
saying it's the worst
southwestern megadrought in over 1200 years.
The consequence of that is that the reservoirs,
the major storage reservoirs in the Colorado River,
Lake Powell,
which controls the water for the upper basin
and Lake Mead for the lower basin, are declining
in their reservoir levels.
Those reservoirs are both pretty
much full around the year 2000,
just a little over 20 years ago.
And this drought has been such
that, well, we're taking out more water than is going in
in the watershed.
And as that water declines, it's been recognized that we better
do something pretty quick.
(Meghan) Most of the Yuma
area districts have higher priority rates.
And so when we're seeing these first set of cut backs,
our districts aren't really impacted by that.
As the levels of Lake Mead get lower, then obviously that
threat of seeing a cut back here in our area gets bigger.
For now.
I think the biggest concern is just is the level
of Lake Mead going to fall further?
And what is being done to try to prop that level up?
If you start to eliminate that and you start to
take away that water and they can't produce as much,
obviously that's going to have an impact
on what's available in the store.
Our ability to provide food for ourselves
as a country.
(Cory) Being one of the only areas to grow
leafy greens and dependent 100% on the Colorado River water.
We do have to do our best and be proactive
in reducing the amount of water that we use
and then the things such as laser leveling, GPS control.
There's technologies now that we're using
and there will be technologies in the future that we can
look at that will help us reduce our usage.
[indistinct chatter]
(Jeff) We're in Yuma, Arizona
at the campus of Arizona Western College.
This is where we conduct every year the Southwest Ag Summit,
which is one of the
largest conferences of this type in Arizona the desert southwest,
and certainly
is the epicenter of our conference
and our educational programs here in southwest Arizona
along the lower Colorado River Valley.
It's a nice joint venture between the
agricultural industry and the University of Arizona
coming together and forming this educational and fact
based learning opportunity.
It's a couple thousand people usually register for the
the three day event,
this is the culmination of the of the conference
or the summit right here today.
There's been field
demonstrations and equipment demonstrations
and a number of other activities.
(Jeff presentation) very, very different water
holding capacities
from all the way
from about an inch of water, per foot of soil for a sand
to about two inches in the optimal case
for a lot of our sandy or silty loams.
(Jeff) I directed a session
that was dealing with the Colorado River
water shortage and agricultural implications
specifically.
We're making an effort to communicate
to people in this community what the situation is
and what the implications are for today
and what the future looks like for us
very likely.
(Jeff presentation) how can this head then accomplish
my goal for this particular irrigation
(Cory) We treat water as any other input item in a crop.
The least amount of water we can use
the more profitable we'll be.
So we've been driven for years to reduce those rates of water
we're using to the bare minimum just to get the crop off.
We all recognize that
we're in a long term drought.
We're going to be looking at more
and more technology to reduce the water we're using.