By Julie Murphree
Why is alfalfa so important to you and me? We eat beef, right? We eat dairy products, right? Then Arizona agriculture needs to grow alfalfa.
When uninformed, we equate Arizona agriculture’s market-driven ability to successfully export our hay to domestic and international markets to exporting our water. This overly simplifies a complex issue and ignores the success of our state’s agriculture, especially our farm and ranch exports. Export markets have always been a key part of the agricultural economy and certainly in Arizona agriculture due to our 300-plus days of sunshine and why the majority of America and Canada’s vegetables are coming from Yuma, Arizona in the winter (we’re growing things during seasonal times when others cannot). Export our wonderful products; import dollars to robustly feed Arizona’s economy.
Arizona’s agricultural fortunes rest on the state’s remarkable soil and sun to grow crops with higher efficiency, quality, and yields than other parts of the world. For an alfalfa example, the Midwest gets an average of three to four tons of alfalfa annually per acre. In Arizona, it’s eight to nine and even as much as 12 tons per acre, per year.