Or, at least that's the case in Arizona. Surprising to me is that Arizona grows a lot of cotton. That requires the importing of billions of gallons of water each year. Cotton is one of the thirstiest crops in existence, and each acre cultivated here demands six times as much water as lettuce, 60 percent more than wheat. The water comes from a nearby federal reservoir, siphoned from beleaguered underground aquifers and pumped in from the Colorado River hundreds of miles away.
Cotton is not exactly a hot product; demand and prices have plummeted. Yet, Arizona uses two to four times as much water per acre as cotton powerhouses like Texas and Georgia because they irrigate their fields more often. Furthermore, to refer to supply and demand principles, China, the world’s largest cotton producer, has enough cotton in warehouses to stop farming for a year. And Texas, the U.S.’s largest producer, harvests enough to cover more than one third of U.S. exports alone, relying largely on natural rainfall, not irrigation, to do it.
Farmers continue to grow cotton in Arizona because the U.S. Farm Bill offers cotton farmers a good deal of money. The farmers receive government checks just for putting cottonseeds in the ground and more checks when the price of cotton falls. They get cheap loans for cotton production that don’t have to be fully repaid if the market slumps. Most recently, the government has covered almost the entire premium on their cotton crop insurance, guaranteeing they’ll be financially protected even when natural conditions — like drought — keep them from producing a good harvest.
Will Congress do something?
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