An Arizona Farmer on How to Grow Alfalfa in the Middle of the Desert

Odd Lots

Bloomberg

News, Investing, Business, News Commentary, Business News

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 13 July 2023

⏱️ 46 minutes

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Summary

Due to a combination of drought, climate change and booming growth, Arizona is facing looming water scarcity. But for all the sprawl and population increase, the overwhelming amount of water used in the state is not consumed by residences, but rather farmers. So naturally, many argue that we should be doing less agriculture in the desert and move the production of cotton, alfalfa and various vegetables towards places with more rain. On this episode, we speak with Trevor Bales, the proprietor of Bales Hay Farm & Ranch in Arizona about his family’s history in the state and why he thinks this dry desert is a great place to grow alfalfa.

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1:09.4	Hello and welcome to another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Joe Wiesenthal.
1:14.8	And I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy, do you remember the episode we did with Chase Emerson?
1:19.6	I do about land development in Arizona.
1:22.8	Right. So that was we were talking to a land broker, someone who helped facilitate the sale of sort of unused or agricultural land to homeowners or to sort of home builders.
1:34.1	But there's been a lot of talk and we touched on it a bit in that episode about like the sustainability of water usage in Arizona.
1:40.6	Yes. In fact, there was a pretty big headline that came out quite recently saying that Arizona was going to halt new home approvals in parts of Phoenix because of concerns over water availability.
1:55.4	Right. And so there's this question about like, okay, Arizona is like this boom state, right?
2:00.1	Tons of population growth, tons of land people moving there has been booming for years.
2:05.6	It's booming from industrial standpoint to there's all these new semi-conductors, yeah, Arizona touches everything.
2:12.0	It does. And also Arizona waters seems to touch everything. And I mean, this came up in the Chase Emerson episode.
2:19.2	But I remember I asked someone from the Biden administration about it as well. But, you know, why are we building these big factories,
2:27.7	semi-conductor factories that use a lot of water in the desert? Why are we developing lots of land in the desert?
2:34.4	Why are we farming a bunch of water intensive stuff in the desert?
	...

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