Cash Crop

A full 90 percent of the Colorado River water that reaches the Imperial Dam near Yuma, Arizona will be diverted to agriculture. It is the life blood of Yuma area farmers and they grow nearly a quarter million acres of those ingredients you love in your salad.

John Boelts is a lettuce grower in what has been dubbed America's "Winter Salad Bowl". It consists of tens of thousands of acres near Yuma, Arizona where farmers grow millions of dollars in produce including head lettuce, leaf lettuce and baby greens. John says, "We try to avoid using any more water than is absolutely necessary and we grow all these crops on beds so we're not just flooding the field, if you will."

John adds that, like their California counterparts, these growers must depend on water from the Colorado River to make these crops possible, "This area right here until it got its Colorado River allocation in the 50's was drying up. There wasn't any water. They were using ground water and it had a lot of salt issues and very alkaline soil out here."

But the Colorado River water along with Arizona's mild winter weather has made possible some of the most successful agricultural enterprises in the world. While the rest of the country shivers through cold temperatures, this region can turn out a lettuce crop in 80 to 90 days. According to John, "In Arizona a large percentage of the water is used by agriculture to beneficial use for everybody and it makes the food you see in the stores reasonably priced. People may complain about it but there are other places in the world that are paying two and three times as much for the same food."

For now, the area has plenty of water to meet agricultural demands. But John says agriculture is an ever changing landscape and growers must adapt while they look to the future, water makes its way through canals into the farm fields of Arizona and California. "We have very labor intensive crops here. They're hand harvested and hand tended to in a lot of different ways and we want to continue be able to be in that business so. It's a good business to be in today and we hope to be able to continue." You're hopeful? "Very."

Produce and Plenty More
Lettuce isn't the only important crop on Arizona's agriculture list. Lemons, tangerines, oranges and grapefruit are also top crops. And while you may think dry desert conditions when you think of Arizona, the state produces more than 90 million pounds of apples each year.