I wasn’t even hungry.
And that was probably the worst part — not that I left food on my plate in front of the wrong lunch guest that day, but the reason why.
Can I be forgiven for marooning a few wilted leaves in the salad bowl? Sure. But I wished I didn’t after making the realization.
You know, Hollywood got a lot of it wrong. Accountants aren’t all Affleck-esque savants who crunch numbers with dry erase markers on panes of glass — they use QuickBooks. Cops don’t appear mid-mugging barking, “freeze!” and, believe it or not, most hackers can appreciate a well-lit room.
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.
and Ranch early in the morning Sept. 23. [Bryan Mordt.]
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 that 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.
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.
“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.”
Not in My Back Yard philosophy is an argument made by people who oppose development near their homes, while not necessarily opposing that development happening elsewhere. Farmers adhering too closely to NIMBY 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
The pioneer farmers 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,” said Dr. Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University. “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 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.
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.
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 responsibility 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. 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.”
The farmer has to be an optimist, or he wouldn’t still be a farmer. – Will Rogers
There are 600 million unfarmed acres of arable land in the U.S. right now, according to the USDA’s Economic Research Service.
As available farmland in Buckeye dwindles, more and more is vacated in the lower Great Plains over the Ogallala Aquifer and the lower Mississippi River valley, the Atlantic Coast, North Dakota, northern Montana and eastern Washington, researchers at the University of Wisconsin found in a March study.
If you want to be a senator, you must work in D.C. If you want to be a movie star, you need to go to Hollywood. So, why can’t the farmers just work where the farmland is? Does it matter if my chain restaurant steak was raised in Arizona or Kansas?
While Kenny lamented Arizona Grown labels “used to really mean something,” Porter, the ASU researcher, said “farm to table” philosophy is a want rather than a need in the broad scope of the debate.
“A lot of people have this dream that someone would grow all the food that we want to eat on the farm next door, but it doesn’t work that way,” she said. “That’s kind of a romantic notion.”
The global ag-tech company Syngenta explored this last year in article titled, “Is urbanization a threat or an opportunity for agriculture?” The authors concluded while urban areas account for up to 76% of CO2 emissions despite taking up just 3% of land, they can help agriculture through new technology and optimizing the supply chain. The solution, they said, is a balance of traditional and urban farming.
But a scholarly article published in the peer-reviewed journal Land the same month noted the “conversion is usually irreversible — once urbanized, agricultural lands are very unlikely to be recultivated,” even for urban farming.
“Despite the considerable loss of productive croplands due to historic urbanization in the U.S., little is known about the locations and magnitudes of extant agricultural land still under threat of future urban expansion,” wrote eight land-use scientists.
By 2040, Arizona will see up to 350,000 acres of new urban and highly developed growth, almost perfectly centered around the West Valley, according to their projection model. With the exceptions of Arizona and California, every other western state “showed relatively small urban and highly developed increases,” the researchers noted.
The development is needed to meet the exigencies of housing, said Joan Serviss, director of the Arizona Department of Housing.
“The primary causes of the housing shortage are lack of supply and rising rents not keeping pace with wages,” she said. “We need to build, build, build.”
Serviss said the ADOH has made up ground in the housing crisis since the 270,000-unit shortage was first documented five years ago by awarding tax credits to affordable housing developers in Buckeye.
Solana Villas, owned by Roers Buckeye Downtown Limited Partnership, is a 200-unit low-income housing project funded by ADOH tax credits awarded in 2022. It is 70% complete at 25201 W. MC 85.
Serviss, the state housing director said the department “encourages affordable housing developers to seek local jurisdiction support,” however, she noted support often comes from elected officials rather than the public.
Buckeye’s history has been marked by segregation since Allenville came to be in 1944. It was “Buckeye’s all-Black community,” according to Estrella Mountain Community College, where Black residents were relegated to trailers on Beloat Road and forced to farm rainwater in peach tins. Today, the segregation manifests itself differently — old money versus new, Old Town versus Verrado, legacy farmers versus urbanites — whichever way you slice it, those two groups, elected officials and the public, in Buckeye, are ripe for disagreement.
Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the cornfield. – Dwight D. Eisenhower
This departure became evident during an interview with Buckeye Mayor Eric Orsborn.
Agricultural lands are prime locations for development, he said, pointing at Chandler and Gilbert as examples of predominantly agricultural communities in the 1960s and ‘70s that grew into high-density urban cities.
“As we grow, we have farmers that are ready to sell the land and maybe move the farm out to a different location or sell the land and … move onto other things,” Orsborn said. “That is just the way things happen across the metro Phoenix area.”
Buckeye Development Services Director Brian Craig said the city plans to honor Buckeye’s agricultural legacy through farm-themed mural paintings and parades. It’s not the legacy farmers like Bales, Dean and Wood imagined.
But city leaders and policy experts say the farmers would be misleading themselves to expect different.
“It has been the plan and implicit policy that we would grow cities on top of farming,” Porter said. “That’s the way [to] grow a big city in the desert.”
Indeed, according to a study conducted by Julia Bausch, research analyst at ASU’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy in Phoenix, the dominant narrative around agriculture in Buckeye since the late 1970s has been one of “urban-led development” and “agriculture obsolescence.”
Bausch’s 2015 study “Development pathways at the agriculture-urban interface” asked metro Phoenix residents if farming was obsolete. She found only a slim majority said it was not, those participants marking urbanization a “threat.” However, University of Ottawa economist Michael Wolfson, in his paper published the same year, wrote that family farm is obsolete and “inefficient,” arguing an economically viable path is confining agriculture to only the highest output at the lowest cost. In other words, corporatize and move production to the vacant, arable flyover swaths.
Conservatives dismissed the paper as a pedantic missive, saying the liberal Wolfson was too eager to rhapsodize about a utopia of government-grown foodstuffs.
Agri-food policy has quickly risen to become a quotidian right-wing talking point. Especially MAGA Republicans bandy about an Orwellian future where Big Brother force-feeds us a veganesque diet of lab-grown meats and insects, which they claim is part of a conspiracy to lower testosterone levels in men so they are easier to control.
Such pro-ag conservatives in Buckeye pointed to a wing of the city government’s economic development department called Grow Buckeye, which they claim maintains a pro-housing propaganda website, as evidence of their theory.
The conservatives also pointed to an eight-page municipal law first proposed Aug. 13 that limits the number of animals Buckeye residents can own, including livestock and chickens. It levies further restrictions on how the animals may be kept and outright forbids some like pigs.
Jennifer Schjoll is a homeowner in Phoenix Skyline West, a neighborhood in the Sundance area near Interstate 10.
“Our city leaders are trying to keep this under wraps so we can’t do anything about it,” Schjoll said of the new law. “This is not OK.”
But city leaders, touting their own magnanimity, somehow maintain they are not pushing agriculture out of Buckeye. In fact, they claim the farmers happily up sticks. When presented with complaints heard from farmers, Orsborn and Craig appeared visibly shocked.
“We talk to a lot of different farmers in the area, and I haven’t had anybody approach me bitter that they are having to move to different locations,” Orsborn responded. “In fact, generally what I hear from farmers is that they understand this is the evolution.”
Evidently, the mayor and reporters working on this story did not hear from the same farmers.
“City government is changing,” and away from agriculture, Bales said.
Thousands have lived without love, no one without water. – W. H. Auden
The Arizona Groundwater Management Act of 1980 is widely considered the greatest paradigm shift in the history of farming in Buckeye.
That’s when five water management districts were instituted in the Phoenix and Tucson metros, Douglas and eastern La Paz County, and urban water on Arizona farms was regulated for the first time.
The average American farmer was 58 years old and at least one-third were over 65 when the USDA last checked two years ago. As such, the average Buckeye farmer’s foray into the industry was sans water regulation.
Bales and Kenny said farmers are constantly blamed for the state’s water crisis — some 8 in 10 gallons of water from the ever-depleting Colorado River go to agriculture with Arizona using triple the national average. Their stance is backed by beaucoup headlines like Food & Water Watch’s doozy in August: “Ag is draining the Colorado River dry.”
Buckeye Canal on his Beloat Road farm at 7 a.m. Sept. 23. [Bryan Mordt]
“Farmers don’t waste water,” she said bluntly.
Buckeye Water Conservation and Control District’s general manager, Noel Carter, declined to answer questions for this story about whether farmers could do better to conserve the resource. But it’s a fact the government has compelled most Buckeye farmers to change their ways at many junctures without mechanisms to ensure total compliance.
And things haven’t stopped changing since 1980 — not the kind of change that makes things easier for farmers, either, although it does so for developers.
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs on June 19 vetoed Senate Bill 1172, Sen. T.J. Shope’s (R-Coolidge) piece of an unpopular omnibus bill that let developers take over farm water. Shope declined to comment about the veto, saying he would have a “better grasp of the bill’s potential next steps toward the end of the year.”
Hobbs, a first-term Democrat, said in vetoing the bill she agreed with the sentiment, signaling another daunting paradigm shift in which Democrats and Republicans in power are united in what appears to be a staunch growth-before-agriculturalism stance.
“The concept at the core of this bill — conversion of agricultural lands to lower water use development — is a policy that has broad potential benefits and is one that my administration supports,” Hobbs said. “However, it is critical that the legislation be carefully crafted to ensure that the water conservation savings … are guaranteed.”
State Sen. Sine Kerr, a Buckeye Republican, said she supported the goals set forth in SB 1172, calling it “a good thing” that “we need to be doing.”
Spencer Kamps, vice president of legislative affairs for the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona who lobbied SB 1172, said he believed it was a needed measure for Buckeye.
“It’s a crime they can’t recognize the savings to the aquifers developers brought forward,” he said, “by sustainable practices that for-sale housing employs.”
Kamps and Porter said residential development is more water-sustainable than agriculture. Residential developers inside active management areas like Buckeye are required to prove to the state their land has groundwater available to serve the development for 100 years.
Developers can avoid this red tape if the Arizona Department of Water Resources considers their city a designated water supplier — like how Scottsdale can afford to keep its 200-plus golf courses lush year-round. Buckeye and Queen Creek are the only Arizona cities that lack the designation because of a reliance on groundwater.
Thus, a standing Hobbs memorandum first ordered last year on assured water supply certificates has “the unintended consequence of perpetuating the most unsustainable use of water supply,” Porter said.
The city has been gunning to become a designated water supplier since at least 2010, if not longer, said Mayor Orsborn. He is in negotiations with state leaders to achieve the coveted designation and scored a win June 19 when Hobbs signed SB 1181 into law, allowing the city of Buckeye to pay the groundwater replenishment fees on behalf of housing developers.
That, two weeks after this, Washington Post released a story with the headline: “Phoenix area can’t meet groundwater demands over next century.”
What came as a win for Orsborn was a loss for farmers. The Arizona Farm Bureau stepped away from Hobbs’ Water Policy Council in protest in October.
“While we respect the efforts made by Governor Katie Hobbs’ administration to address pressing issues related to rural groundwater,” said Arizona Farm Bureau President Stephanie Smallhouse, “we believe the current process in place has been deaf to the concerns and priorities of Arizona’s farm and ranch families and we must withdraw from it entirely.”
Sandy Bahr, director of Sierra Club’s local chapter and a former Arizona chief of water, similarly said Hobbs gave developers outsized control over Buckeye’s water.
“Rather than tightening up the Groundwater Management Act, which is sorely needed, they poke more holes in it,” Bahr said.
My grandfather used to say that once in your life you need a doctor, a lawyer, a policeman and a preacher. But every day, three times a day, you need a farmer. – Brenda Schoepp
Arizona agriculture is a $23.3 billion industry, according to Smallhouse. That’s just over 5% of the state’s $434 billion GDP.
That may sound insignificant, but a $ 1.4 billion state deficit this year led to sweeping budget cuts, eliminating water system upgrades, delaying highway construction and slashing resources for public schools and colleges. Imagine, now, if it was 16 times worse.
“Let’s say agriculture isn’t providing much value to us. Let’s just wipe it off the ledger,” Kenny postulated. “What’s misunderstood is that none of the other 94-plus percent of the economy even exists if you don’t have food.”
The question is whether new development built on top of farmland could be more lucrative, assuming we could get our food elsewhere. Maybe even a futuristic kind of farming, although not one of nutritional sustenance. One recent example epitomizes this ag-urban confluence.
A Denver-based startup called Tract in August announced a 2,100-acre, AI-powered data center that would be one of the largest in the country. The facility, which would require 1.8 gigawatts of power — Bales’ 1,000-acre farm requires 186 kilowatts, estimates food science professor Celemens Fuchs —is proposed on existing farmland south of I-10 on Johnson Road in southwest Buckeye.
Buckeye City Council greenlit the data farm Aug. 6 as part of its 2,807-acre tech corridor that will save two-thirds of the water that would have been used under its former residential development designation. Shawn Dean Wood called this the early stages of a “data rush” in the city that will see farms replaced with tech ventures that are more lucrative and use less water.
It’s simply a better use of the land, city officials concluded.
Arizona, with 3% of the nation’s land, yields just half a percent of its farm receipts, according to USDA and Farm Bureau calculations. An acre of farmland in Arizona has an average tax value per acre of $4,080, compared to north of $2.5 million for an average Phoenix shopping mall.
Although Arizona leads the U.S. in daily milk production per head, it has only one-tenth of the total production of California, for example. Alfalfa, a nutritious legume for livestock, and its hay, like what Bales cultivates, are far-and-away the most valuable agriculture products in Arizona. According to the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, the alfalfa produced in Arizona last year was worth $1.4 billion.
That’s despite it also being the least valuable crop per acre, according to Craig Chase, a retired specialist at Iowa State University’s ag extension. He said an acre of alfalfa is worth about $480 per year, while the hay from that acre adds another $200.
Compare that to strawberries at $12,000 per acre or mixed vegetables, $10,000 per acre when sold to grocers and $22,000 direct-to-consumer. But there’s a method to the madness.
“The Buckeye Valley grows some of the finest alfalfa in the world,” Bales said. “It’s known. That’s why you see these foreign buyers over here.”
An uproar emerged last year around Saudi Arabian-owned Fondomonte growing and exporting alfalfa west of Phoenix while also taking advantage of unfettered access to groundwater amid the historic megadrought. That’s because deep-pocketed corporations can buy permits to drill for groundwater, something working-class Buckeye farmers can’t afford.
Still, they farm the thirsty crop at a disadvantage, which consumes 4 to 6 acre-feet of water each year, enough to cover a football field with nearly 4 feet of standing water.
Wood’s great-grandparents were heading toward the California gold rush when their mule died in Buckeye. They decided to stay, trying their hand at cattle ranching before settling on alfalfa.
Alfalfa, despite its low cash value, makes sense in Buckeye for many reasons, according to Bales, Kenny and Wood. They said it can grow 12 months out of the year, has excellent irrigation efficiency and is a high-demand product. In the Midwest, alfalfa farmers may get three or four harvests per year, while farms like theirs can see 10 harvests with each yielding a ton of hay per acre.
A study conducted by Porter at ASU found forage crops were the top choice for farmers in Maricopa County, although there is another important reason to choose them over produce, and it’s tied to urbanization.
“You can’t really grow food crops safely near large metro areas because of all the risks of contamination to your crops,” Porter said. “So, they grow forage crops and fiber. It’s really just safer.”
One Buckeye farmer said it’s common to find garbage littered among his crops, something with which rural farmers don’t contend.
“He understands that food safety rules and inspections are rigorous,” Porter said. “Farmers are rationally deciding to grow crops that aren’t subject to that kind of burden.”
Buckeye farmers trade that burden for others. Like Bales, whose new $50,000 water truck was saturating the ground at the front of his farm when reporters arrived that early September morning — a needed investment when the Maricopa County Air Quality Department handed him a blowing dust citation in violation of the ill-famed Rule 310.
Or when the 1-mile daily commute to work from his farmhouse turned into an 8-mile detour for seven months when the county decided to work at the intersection of Verrado Way and MC 85, giving the farmer no advanced notice.
He keeps adapting. And he will keep adapting until he can’t anymore.
What is legacy? It's planting seeds in the garden you won't get to see. – Lin-Manuel Miranda
Dr. Hallie Eakin is a global futures scientist and a professor at ASU’s school of sustainability. She conducted a 2015 study which suggested farmers are only as adaptable as their perceptions of environmental change.
The study investigated the cognitive effects of urbanization on farmers in central Arizona. Farmers participating in the research reported an “interest in learning about land use and livelihood transformation,” however, they also expressed uncertainty regarding 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, started to see farming locally as a shorter-term business,” Porter said. “They don’t see farming next to an expanding city as something that will go on forever. They know groundwater will not last forever.”
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 that 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 going to be someone else’s problem do deal with somewhere else.’ That’s such a strange, dystopian view of what reality is.”.
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.”
