Click the link to read the article on the Aurora Sentinel website (AP — Brittany Petersen). Here’s an excerpt:
For some pumpkin growers in states like Texas, New Mexico and Colorado, this year’s pumpkin crop was a reminder of the water challenges hitting agriculture across the Southwest and West as human-caused climate change exacerbates drought and heat extremes. Some farmers lost 20% or more of their predicted yields; others, like Mazzotti, left some land bare. Labor costs and inflation are also narrowing margins, hitting farmers’ ability to profit off what they sell to garden centers and pumpkin patches. This year’s thirsty gourds are a symbol of the reality that farmers who rely on irrigation must continue to face season after season: they have to make choices, based on water allotments and the cost of electricity to pump it out of the ground, about which acres to plant and which crops they can gamble on to make it through hotter and drier summers. Pumpkins can survive hot, dry weather to an extent, but this summer’s heat, which broke world records and brought temperatures well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) to agricultural fields across the country, was just too much, said Mark Carroll, a Texas A&M extension agent for Floyd County, which he calls the “pumpkin capital” of the state…
Steven Ness, who grows pinto beans and pumpkins in central New Mexico, said the rising cost of irrigation as groundwater dwindles is an issue across the board for farmers in the region. That can inform what farmers choose to grow, because if corn and pumpkins use about the same amount of water, they might get more money per acre for selling pumpkins, a more lucrative crop. But at the end of the day, “our real problem is groundwater, … the lack of deep moisture and the lack of water in the aquifer,” Ness said. That’s a problem that likely won’t go away because aquifers can take hundreds or thousands of years to refill after overuse, and climate change is reducing the very rain and snow needed to recharge them in the arid West.
