FUTURE
YOUR BUSINESS.
Maricopa Farm Bureau President Nicholas Kenny photographed during an interview with reporters outdoors near 54th Street and Ray Road in Chandler Sept. 23.
going to be someone else’s problem do deal with somewhere else. That’s such a strange, dystopian view of what reality is,” Kenny said. The irony is, of course, the best-suited land masses for developers are the existing farms because the infrastructure is already there — the land has been leveled, the utilities are connected and the water is flowing, Kenny said. There’s just one thing the farmers can’t transfer to the developers. Their legacy. It’s not the farm itself. Nor the crops nor even the water. “Legacy is about people,” Kenny said. “I believe there’s something innate in the human species where we want to leave something better than the way you found it, consistently.” In agriculture, that legacy is the land. And in Buckeye, the ground broke a century-and- a-half ago and these same families are on those properties today. “Generation after generation after generation producing something valuable from raw resources,” Kenny said. “Now, that — that truly is a legacy.”
started to see farming locally as a shorter-term business. They don’t see farming next to an expanding city as something that will go on forever. They know groundwater will not last forever,” Porter said. On one hand, legacy families like the Baleses, Deans and Woods want to retain their generational lands. On the other, it’s difficult to do when the odds seem to be increasingly stacked against you. Farming feels like a sacrifice, Wood said, and that makes one wonder — is it worth it? What is the quality of life for farmers in Buckeye anymore? Who will take over the farm? If we must leave, where will we go? Kenny, the Maricopa County Farm Bureau president, said while Buckeye’s milk, steaks and animal feed could conceivably be imported, it’s time for society to decide: “Do you want high- quality food that’s fresh because it’s provided in your back yard? Or do you want to shame the producers and say, ‘Get the heck out of here’? “The argument often is we’re going to build these completely insular cities that are only for residences and then everything else is just
Dr. Hallie Eakin is a global futures scientist and a professor at ASU’s school of sustainability. She said Buckeye farmers are only as adaptable as their perceptions of environmental change. Eakin for the last decade has studied the cognitive effects of urbanization on farmers in central Arizona, and she found while farmers in Buckeye reported an “interest in learning about land use and livelihood transformation,” they also said they were unsure about their self- efficacy to effectuate that transformation. Porter, however, found the opposite in her study of 12 farmers in the Phoenix and Tucson metros who responded to a decline in cotton by planting more alfalfa — a transition Dean Farms made with success. “I reject the idea that farmers are not adapting,” Porter said. But, like Bales, who identified one specific byproduct of urbanization that would surely force him to shutter the family farm, she acknowledged adaptation has limits that do not extend beyond the impossible, nor the impractical. “I think farmers in Buckeye have, over time,
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