FUTURE
By 2040, another 18 million acres will be urbanized, some 3% of all U.S. farmland. Many in Buckeye. According to the city government, 3,250 acres of agricultural land in Buckeye has been repurposed in the past decade. But as farmers grieve, environmentalists and housing advocates rejoice — the repurposing saves an estimated 8,700 acre-feet of water annually, enough to supply 26,100 homes. One acre-foot of water is enough to supply three residential homes with water for a year. That represents a loss of 6% of Buckeye’s farmland, which now stands at 50,000 acres. The Buckeye 2040 General Plan calls for another 32,000-acre reduction in the next 16 years, which means two-thirds of existing farms will be forced out. Someone has to sell. Someone has to end the legacy. Shawn Dean Wood is a fourth-generation Buckeye resident and owner of Arid State Land and Ag Associates, a farmland brokerage firm. She’s where some legacies go to die. “I don’t want to tell my neighbor what they can and can’t do to their property,” Wood said, “but at some point, people are forced to sell because it’s not fun to farm anymore.” When Wood helps a landowner sell their farm, she considers the legacy left behind. The process is often accompanied by a sense of loss and grief, she said. But it doesn’t make what follows any less necessary. “You’re getting hammered in this industry. Land value keeps going up. It’s hard to balance that legacy perspective when that takes place,” Wood said. “There’s a lot of weight and responsi- bility that comes with doing the right thing. “And maybe it’s selling.” It’s not the future her brother, Wyatt Dean, wants for Dean Farms, the family business at the corner of Maricopa County Road 85 and Dean Road, named for their forefathers. But the day will come. And when it does, and that crackled street sign is all the legacy left to remember, Dean said he can only hope to go out on his own terms. “That’s the fear that a lot of people have with urban expansion on these farms — that the urban expansion is going to come before they’re ready for it,” Kenny said. “You can look at a piece of farmland and oftentimes see the history on it. But as soon as the big development goes up, the history is exhausted. “All of the hard work, sweat, families that have been raised on that farm … it just disappears.”
A tractor kicks up dust at Bales Hay Farm and Ranch early in the morning Sept. 23.
But those Hollywood buffs nailed it with journalists. Perpetually overworked, scrambling across creation at odd hours in such white- hot pursuit of a scoop, it obfuscates even life- sustaining daily tasks. Come to think of it, that’s probably where my appetite went. What’s the etiquette for a lunch meeting, anyway? I can’t just not order anything. Then, it caught my eye — a half-portion of garden salad topped with three ounces of grilled sirloin and a cup of chicken soup. Light enough fare, I thought. We’re at the Longhorn Steakhouse, a chain restaurant that, like me, was born and raised in the coastal Southeast. But my lunch — did that come from Orlando, too? Longhorn touts its beef is never frozen, sending me tumbling down a rabbit hole. The Chandler restaurant pointed me to its corporate office, which informed me its beef is supplied by Newport Meat, a California packer that ships out steaks from its Desert Meats outfit in Las Vegas. Newport, one of its agents would patiently explain to me, is a subsidiary of the Houston conglomerate Sysco. Sysco, I then learned, sources its beef through a partnership with the multinational food corporation Cargill, based in Minnesota. And that’s when it clicked — Buckeye ranchers I talked to said they sold their beef to Cargill. Every ingredient on my plate could have been grown in Arizona. In fact, my lunch guest informed me, “It’s highly likely.” It was only after Maricopa County Farm Bureau President Nicholas Kenny uttered his next words from the other side of the booth when the realization came. My lunch required some 2,200 gallons of water to cultivate — enough to fill seven average-sized hot tubs — never mind what it took to ship the ingredients, pack them and tote them right back to where they started. Those four cubes of sirloin alone represented a two-and-a-half-year commitment, Kenny noted. I’m not the first person with a platform to blazon that our society needs farmers. “Feed the world,” and all the rest. The real question is where we need them. Despite its legacy of agriculture, is it Buckeye? Now there’s the real rabbit hole.
“ environment? STEVEN BALES, OWNER BALES HAY FARM & RANCH How long can my family stay here and deal with farming in an urbanizing
for ever-growing metropolises like Phoenix has become. Humans have successfully farmed in deserts for millennia, capitalizing on the heat for extended growing seasons and compensating for the lack of rainfall by harnessing groundwater. To that end, farming itself isn’t the issue, according to Porter. “Groundwater agriculture in an arid place is not a sustainable enterprise,” she said. The Hohokam’s irrigation system became the Buckeye Canal, for which the city is named, and its path was forged specially for Bales’ farm, which it bisects. His ancestors carried on Hohokam agricultural traditions and were adequate stewards of the water given their small numbers. They were just doing what they were taught, Porter said. They moved to the Buckeye Valley where agriculture was thriving, planted crops, drilled wells and fed their families. Now, like the Hohokam, they stand to lose their land, albeit by much less violent means. “Nobody wants to be the one who lost the farm. Even if you sell the farm, it would come with some sort of personal failure status: ‘I wasn’t able to keep the urbanites away,’” said Kenny. “But it would be even more humiliating if it was taken in a way that was ungraceful.” After peaking at 6.8 million in 1935, the number of U.S. farms has declined year-over- year for nearly a century to fewer than 1.9 million today. In just five years from 2012 to 2017, the country lost more than 14 million acres of farmland to urbanization, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“How long can my family stay here and deal with farming in an urbanizing environment?” Bales asked, rhetorically. “It’s very difficult.” When his parents were born, Buckeye had a population of 726 people, according to the 1930 U.S. Census. The entire town could have fit on the average British Airways flight from Boston to London with 127 seats left empty. Today, there are 114,000 people in Buckeye, estimated to balloon to 300,000 in the next decade-and-a-half and 1.1 million at full buildout, according to city economic developers. Those people need to live somewhere. The most recent Arizona Department of Housing analysis of National Low Income Housing Coalition data from 2022 found Arizona is 270,000 housing units short of demand, a “crisis,” The Arizona Republic called it, “thanks to NIMBY opposition.” Farmers adhering too closely to Not In My Back Yard philosophy are vilified under the stigma although their opposition is uniquely substantiated, said the Farm Bureau’s Kenny. Governments famously deride pushback against development as NIMBYism sweepingly, but as Buckeye is projected to overtake Mesa as the state’s third most populous city, tensions mount. Farmers are increasingly expected to
do more with less, to acquiesce and fall in line quietly, ready at a moment’s notice to assume the role of scapegoat when food prices tick up, when wells run dry and newcomers demand housing, they say. Speaking as the government, Kenny describes it like this: “Hey, agriculture, first, we’re going to make you the bad guy. Next, we’ll take your resources. Then, we’ll add 2.5 million people and ask you — where have the resources gone?” When the tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization. DANIEL WEBSTER They weren’t here first. But they were here second. Doesn’t that count for something? “The Hohokam developed a canal system and irrigated thousands of acres of land,” Dr. Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, said of Buckeye. “All the ancient civilizations sprung up in hot, dry places by the river because those are really good places to farm.” There’s a caveat — they’re good places to farm for small, sedentary populations, not
Our deep respect for the land and its harvest is the legacy of generations of farmers who put food on our tables, preserved our landscape and inspired us with a powerful work ethic. JAMES H. DOUGLAS JR. Bar the marshal and postmaster, perhaps, everyone worked in agriculture when Steven Bales’ great-great-great-grandfather settled on the banks of the Gila River in Lower East Buckeye, before Arizona was a state. Hay is the name of the game — always has been. The aptly named farmer spends more time picking out stems than a teen in tie-dye. The early hour was uncomfortable for all non-farmers that mild September morning when Bales played tour guide in the cab of his white pickup truck, whisking a pair of journalists down the dusty arteries connecting a patchwork of alfalfa fields along Beloat Road, a namesake of Bales’ grandparents. Seven generations farmed this land. The eighth may not. For Bales Hay Farm and Ranch, it’s a terminal prognosis — 20 years left to live, estimates Bales, 63. The end times draw nearer.
InBuckeye.com | Fall 2024
Fall 2024 | InBuckeye.com
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