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

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1:22Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal. And I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy, do you remember the episode we did with Chase Emerson? I do, about land development in Arizona. 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. 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. 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.

2:08Right. And so there's this question about like, OK, Arizona is like this boom state, right? Tons of population growth, tons of land, people moving there. It's been booming for years. It's booming from an industrial standpoint, too. There's all these new semiconductor fabs. Arizona touches everything for us. It does. And also Arizona water seems to touch everything. And I mean, this came up in the Chase Emerson episode, but I remember I asked someone from the Biden administration about it as well. But, you know, why are we building these big factories, semiconductor factories that use a lot of water in the desert?

2:44Why are we developing lots of land in the desert? Why are we farming a bunch of water intensive stuff in the desert? Yeah, right. This is how it goes in people's head. They're booming in Arizona. There's water scarcity. And then they discover that Arizona, despite being the desert, 75 % of the water used in Arizona is agriculture. And they go, what? That's crazy. Why are we growing food or growing grains or crops in the desert? And then people say, oh, well, that's the problem. We just need to stop growing in the desert. And the conversation ends there. But obviously, all of these things are like way more complicated than like the five seconds it takes you to reach that conclusion.

3:24I'm very curious how this became a thing. Like how did agriculture become a big part of the Arizona economy? And why in particular does it seem like we are farming water intensive crops in an area where water nowadays seems to be a concern? And maybe that's the key. It didn't used to be as much of a concern and now it is. But I am very interested in hearing this side of the story. I think they've always sort of wondered, like, what's the deal with agriculture in the middle of the desert? Anyway, we literally have the perfect guest because, as you mentioned, it's been going on for a long time. We have the perfect guest.

3:59We're going to be speaking with Trevor Bales. He is a sixth generation farmer in Arizona. He runs Bales Hay Farm and Ranch, which grows alfalfa. He's based in Buckeye, Arizona, in the southwest part of the state. We're going to talk all about the history, the operations, the water usage, all of these things about growing alfalfa in the desert. So Trevor, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. Hi, guys. Great to be here. Can I ask you a really obnoxious question? Yeah. Just to start. Bales? Like some people are going to like this. Your guest is made up. Nominative determinism. The alfalfa farmer in Arizona's last name is Bales.

4:37Like you might you cannot be real. No, we did not change her name. It's been Bales. before it was bales of alfalfa it was bales of cotton so still a bale that is a very incredible so sixth generation farmer in arizona talk to us about like the beginning of your family's history i guess as a farming family in my family that homestead in arizona their last name was actually bloat b-e-l-o-a-t the bloat family okay and they came out here as cattle ranchers and the cattle ranching turned into farming and cattle and then it turned into a feedlot and farming the farm supplied the feedlot and then it transitioned into only farming now that's over a span of 120 plus years but that's in a nutshell so they came over here man my great great great great grandpa I think he had 14 kids or something so we currently farm a thousand acres which if you think about it we're very lucky to have that many acres when it's been split so many different times between children and family.

5:39We're lucky to have that. But they came in the 1820s, but they homestead in 1891. So before Arizona was even a state, my great, great, great grandpa was integral in building the canal district that we currently use for irrigating our crops. So we have an extremely long history. One of our cattle brands is actually in the top, one of the first, I think it's like a 450th or 440 something cattle brand. So we've been here a very long time, have a deep history in the state. And then along the way, my great grandpa, Wallace Bales, married Alberta Belote. Him and his son, my grandpa Steve, purchased the farm from the in-laws and became the Bales farm.

6:24Let me ask a super basic question, which is, A lot of people, I think they hear alfalfa, and if they're not out in the country, they're thinking about those little alfalfa sprouts that you might get on your salads or as a garnish or something like that. But talk to us about what alfalfa actually is and the role that it plays in agriculture. So alfalfa is a very, very unique plant. It's a forage. It has great relative feed value properties or protein properties. It's very good for making high-quality milk. It's very good for making high quality beef. What makes it so unique is its hardiness, especially for what we do now.

7:03This changes across the country because Arizona is much like a greenhouse effect. I kind of compare it to because of our temperature. We are in the field eight to 12 times a year. We're in there cutting that alfalfa. Now there is no other crop other than grass. And even grass does not have the feed qualities that alfalfa has that you can go in there and cut multiple times. in a year and then for several years after that we can keep an alfalfa stand in for four to five years where other states where they're only in there cutting their crop two or three times they can leave it in six seven eight years but because of that because that alfalfa stays in for so long it gets a bad reputation as to what you were talking about earlier is water people call it a very high intensive water use crop.

7:52Well, a lot is being left out. That crop stays in. It's a very efficient crop. When you look at all the work that goes into it, we plant it and we leave it in for four to five years. So it is producing great feed quality for cattle, horses, milk cows, beef cows for five years. No other crop can do that. Corn, you plant it once, it takes a massive amount of water and then you harvest it once that's it uh silage it's basically a perennial right like it keeps coming back yes yes you're absolutely correct yes uh but it does go down in value to where we do take it out the yields aren't as good so after about the fourth fifth year we'll see the yields will go down and we will take the field out we'll apply manure to it for uh the fertilizer and go through the whole process and and usually we'll try to have a rotation crop in between it as well.

8:45But just this gets to the key question, and I feel like we sort of jumped right to it. So people look at it. No, no, no, no. But this is really, I think, sort of the key of the argument, which is that you can grow alfalfa elsewhere outside of Arizona. But the point that you're trying to make is that there's something about the uniqueness of the Arizona climate. So setting aside the water issue, there's something about the Arizona climate specifically that gets you several turns in a year. Do you know the five C's of Arizona? No, but I can't wait to learn them. So, right. So, and that back to like the history of why are they farming in Arizona?

9:25Water and agriculture were never a hot topic in Arizona until Phoenix got to be fourth, fifth, sixth largest city in the country. Right. We've been farming here for, like I just said, my family's here in the 1820s doing it. So the water was never a problem until humans came in, cities came in, manufacturing came in. Farming actually paid for a lot of the water that is here in Phoenix, Salt River Project, SRP. The city couldn't afford it, so the farmers came in and they paid for the water system, and now the city is using it. But anyways, back to the five C's. Yeah, one of the five C's. Climate, copper, cattle, citrus, and cotton.

10:05Arizona makes some of the best cotton in the world. We make the best alfalfa in the world. We make some of the best wheat and barley, and we make some of the best corn in the world. It's because of our climate. And so, like you said, alfalfa can be grown other places, but the quality is nowhere near the same. And it can't be grown everywhere. Not all the climates can grow alfalfa.

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12:21So one thing I read, and again, I'm not a farmer, so I'm just trying to read various things on this topic. But one thing I read was that farmers in Arizona like alfalfa because it's reliable and because it grows well in that environment, provided there's enough water around. Is that the right way of thinking about it? Yeah, but that's, I mean, that's any crop, right? We're just like the industry. Farming is industry. And what is supply and what is demand, right? Well, cotton used to be the demand. Citrus used to be the demand. and unfortunately the demand with the mills in china and china's rules about importing cotton cotton's no longer the demand so they go to what is the big demand which right now there are a lot of dairies around and dairies need a lot of protein to make high quality milk which we actually ship all over the world from this area and alfalfa is the most efficient way to make high quality milk if they think water is a problem now if every farmer grew corn for the dairies holy smokes there wouldn't cotton, not corn, corn, man, corn uses a lot of water.

13:27So yes, yes and no, what you said, yes and no. Yes, we like it. But for those same reasons, any other crop is the same thing. Right. So in the end, whether we're growing alfalfa, whether we're growing corn, I guess, whether we're growing soy, other things like there's like a certain math, right? There's a certain amount of water. There's a certain amount of human labor. You get a certain amount of feed at the end, those go to feed cows and then the cows either become beef or they become for milk. Can you talk a little bit further about like, okay, you say like corn, that would be much worse if we switched to replacing alfalfa with corn.

14:01Like how does the math work out? What are we talking about? Well, loss with that replacement. And I've never grown corn myself. My dad used to grow quite a bit. My grandfather would for our own feedlot. By the time I came along we don't grow as much but the corn crop in a short like 120 day corn uses approximately the same amount of water as my whole year uh my whole year of the crop of alfalfa which is around seven seven acre foot as we like to measure with by acre feet six to seven acre feet but now where i don't know because you would have to get a um a nutritionist is in that same acre of ground of soil, that one harvest of corn, what energy does it produce versus alfalfa?

14:47And that, I don't know that part. I'm just not in the dairy market at all. I'm not in the cattle market. It gets a little out of my realm. Let me ask you another question then that's sort of related. So you say like Arizona alfalfa is better than alfalfa elsewhere. Talk us through that a little bit more. What is better about growing it in Arizona versus other parts of this country? Because it is growing elsewhere in this country. So is it the quality of the product or is it the yield or the amount of turns that you can get in a year from the same amount of land? And then like, talk us through the differences.

15:24It's most of the quality. So a lot of other states. So we average about nine tons per acre for the year. Depending on the soil type, we can get nine to 10 tons per year. But that's with 10 to 12 cuttings. A lot of other states, they can get seven to eight tons per year, but that's on half the cuttings. And so each cutting is making a massive amount of hay each time. Well, the bigger the stand gets, the lower the quality gets. It gets real big. It gets real kind of tough. The stems get real big. And with that size, what's extremely important about alfalfa for a few reasons. One, if you bale it with too much moisture, the bale, it will start to mold.

16:09It'll go bad. It can also, I don't know if you've ever heard of a hay fire, but if it has too much moisture and all the pressure in that baler, when they're packing the bale and you store it, creates heat from the moisture inside and the whatever's inside the bale and it'll catch on fire so the dry down process the curing process is extremely important in a lot of the country they they don't have the climate we have so they're fighting uh a lot more weather than we than we fight and so the fact that we're able to get it dried down and to cure and then also not have these massive two two or three ton cuttings like when you cut alfalfa that's two tons or more it's so big and thick and it's hard to get it to cure out.

16:51Well, we go in there every 30 days or less, 25 to 30 days. We cut it. It's nice. It's small and it's thinned out and it dries and it cures very pretty and it keeps a lot of color and it keeps the leaf. The leaf is the important part of that plant. That's where all the nutrition is. And a lot of these other places have to flip it two or three times. Oh, it's not dried enough. Let's flip it over. You just got to get the bottom to dry out because when you cut it, it's laying there on the ground. Well, the part that's up against the ground or the alfalfa stand, it's not seeing the sun ever. It's down there underneath this super thick alfalfa.

17:25So then they flip it over. All right, now you dried out that side. Well, darn it, and then a rainstorm came. We got to flip it back over again because now that side's wet. And so they just don't produce the quality that we produce or the tonnage too. And with the rest of the country, a lot of the country does rely on, we call it dry land farming, where they do rely on rain. When there's a drought across the country, Arizona fills that gap. And when there's too much rain, like there's been years where Idaho or Texas, and Texas is a huge market, they have so much rain, they cannot get in their fields and they cannot harvest it.

18:03So guess what? It's almost the same problem as having the drought, right? You still can't, you don't get anything out of your fields. And so Arizona fills in that gap. So I take the point about, you know, it's easier to cure given the drier weather and, you know, maybe it's producing more higher quality alfalfa. But how much does the quality actually matter? Because doesn't most of this go to cows for feed? Like, do the cows care about the color of the alfalfa hay that they're eating? My specific market is the horse market. So people with horses that have anywhere from, I mean, we've fed horses that have been in the Kentucky Derby.

18:42We sent a hay to Florida where there's horses that fly on private jets back and forth from other countries for breeding purposes and racing. I don't know what they do. I'm not much of a horse person, but yes, to them, it is extremely important. And even back to the cattle side, yes, it's important because that feed value changes. and that feed value is extremely important. The older the hay gets, the lower the feed value goes down. That feed value is in direct connection to the quality of milk that the cow produces. So visual quality for horse people is extremely important. Then test quality for cattle, for milk cows is extremely important.

19:25And beef, not so much for beef. I mean, you can, lower quality hay is fine. But once it's laying in the field and it gets rained on, that does take the quality away for both milk cows and or um horses and back to the even that feed quality for specifically horses that are race horses ropers barrel racing horses like they need that high protein to be able to compete with whether they're doing so quality is quality is very important and there's a lot of people that have horses just as pets they never ride them they just like having a horse and that situation it's not it's not important um let me ask another basic how it works question, which is how do you actually water the alfalfa?

20:08So we talked about harvesting and curing, but what does the watering process actually look like? And you mentioned that I think one of your grandparents had built canals on your farm that you presumably use for irrigation. Is that what you're doing? So it's crazy with all this water stuff. Arizona has less acres than it's ever had, and we're more efficient than we've ever been. But so the Hila river we farm right off the hila river now the hila river they used to call it the grand or the mightier fruit they called it something hila river and there was always water so they started this canal that was up river and then the water would come in on this canal and it would and they kind of followed the man it's amazing the way they did it back then and how they were able to find without gps the high points of this little valley we're in and they kind of followed the spine of this little valley and so there's that main canal that feeds water to all the farmers that are within the district so we're very closely measured on how much water we use people like to imagine we're just using as much water as we can we are not at all we get we get cut off if we if we use too much like you you can't just do whatever you want so the district manages that water that water goes along uh farmers like myself i i will order water a specific amount for a time and then it'll go down a lateral ditch that feeds off the canal.

21:29And that lateral ditch will then either will then carry water to the ditch that connects to my fields. Now, all of our fields are laser leveled. So they're flat side to side with a end fall. So there's a little bit of geometry involved with the farming. So when you open the water in that designated area of the field, which might be 120 foot wide, quarter mile long, it flows very evenly from side to side. So you're covering the whole thing and that makes it very efficient work versus if you didn't have it flat, the water would just go all different areas. And like I said, it's section, you know, a hundred acre field is sectioned off in 120 foot sections.

22:10So we're using a gradual decline in the land or fall to measure that specific area efficiently and that's specifically how i irrigate but what has become a very efficient way of irrigation is subsurface drip which is becoming pretty popular in arizona cystic i'd like to do it it's just expensive what is that do it that's where everything is underground and so you are uh you're you're saving on evaporation but you are getting that water directly to the root i mean you were just hitting that root with water so there's no evaporation it's um which evaporation is not as much as people like to argue oh evaporation we've done studies it's it's it's like two percent or less it's it's very very low this is um but uh this is my dream for my garden is a sister a system of underwater irrigation instead of yeah amateur gardeners do that yeah oh yeah you can't i mean like it would take a lot but for instance we at the moment we have a bunch of underground like hoses and pipelines going through two and a half acres and they're all leaking.

23:12So that's fun. So maybe I actually already have subterranean irrigation in a way. You anticipated, Trevor, a question I was going to ask, which is about advances in water use technology over time. And I have to imagine maybe there are some similarities, but as you mentioned, it's gotten more efficient, probably relative to when your ancestors were on the same land. How does it look differently? What are some of the advances that have been made since some of your ancestors were farming on the same land to get better output with less water? That laser system has been huge. What they used to do is everything was in furrows, which a furrow is.

23:51It's like a washboard, like an old washboard. Okay. You know what a washboard is? Yeah. But then it runs. The water would run down there. But by having all those furrows, I mean, if you can imagine if you've got like a relatively flat area and you just open the water up, the water is going to follow the way of least resistance. So you're just going to have this water go right down that one area and then all the, everything else is dry. So what they did back then is they would do these furrows and then, and then they'd see how all these, these low, like a washboard, the water would stay in the low spots.

24:21And then, but then everything would get watered, but it was just not very efficient. it was rough it was hard on equipment and the planter or the furrow maker man they're they're heavy they're just how they're they're and then before gps so you still weren't very straight man and the fact that they thought of that was it was great right like that man back then that they that they saw that insight like hey let's make these yeah washboards if you will and the water is hitting all areas which is impressive and then they came up with the laser system and now they use a gps system but what we have what is very foreign to pretty much every state except california and arizona there's a few other places is we call them borders it's a dirt ridge that runs from the top of the field to the bottom of the field and that's that's earlier i was talking about sectioning off your field to irrigate you run a border from top to bottom and it's to about two feet tall and then you go over it depends because every field does have natural sidefall But the goal is to, between those two borders, get rid of that because you want that water to float evenly, you know, two inches deep across that hole, 100 or however many feet, you know, 160 feet.

25:31If it's a steep field, then you have a bunch of 60 feet borders. If it's a steep field, you have fewer, 120 plus borders. But that laser leveling has been an amazing tool for running irrigation, extremely efficient. Like I said, we open up the area on that little section, 120 foot by quarter mile, and that water runs, like I said, two inches deep or less, just the length of that. And I mean, you imagine, it looks like it's like 120 foot, that water just going just even with itself all the way and gets down to the bottom of the field. You shut it off and it just kind of drains itself right there.

26:06It just kind of stops right there. I mean, if you have irrigators that aren't paying attention and they'll fall asleep, then they'll mess up. But when everything's going correctly, man, it's just so efficient and so smooth. So that laser system has been probably the best, most efficient way. Okay, I should say the best. It's probably the most efficient way just because what it costs to do versus the subsurface drip is definitely the most efficient way. But, oh, it costs, depending on like with oil prices where they are and like PVC, everything is petroleum-based. So right now it's probably$3 ,000 or more per acre to put all that in.

26:44When petroleum-based things are cheaper,$2 ,000 an acre used to be kind of the number. Well, when you're looking at bigger farms, 4 ,000-acre farm, oh my gosh, that adds up real quick. So let me ask you a question that kind of cuts to the heart of a lot of this discussion. But how real or salient are concerns over water for you right now? Like, have you witnessed water shortages during your time as a farmer? Has it affected your business? Are you getting perhaps more pressures from, you know, external sources to reduce your water use? How is it actually playing out for you? So for us, it's kind of unique, right?

27:28Where we farm, we're in an area they call a waterlogged area with extremely, extremely salty water. and a lot of the water that we specifically use for the past 100 years has come from phoenix water treatment plant where i farm we're not allowed to grow produce because it comes from water treatment we don't get water from the colorado river i don't get water from the salt river project our water comes from eastern arizona as the rains come down and it trickles down the salt river and it comes into the gila river and it keeps our aquifer very full of water rather but our water is so salty and then then taking the water from the paying the city for their water back before phoenix was was a big city they loved that we took their water and so we've never really had a right where i farm specifically anyways we've never had a fear of losing our water until um with technology the water treatment plants have gotten really good at cleaning water and desalimization plants they look are no one ever wanted our water they're like no no we don't want your water.

28:31It's disgusting. It's super salty. We can't use it for anything. Like we're glad you guys are actually using it because if you weren't, this place would be almost like a swamp down here. Like there are areas if you, if you can drive where the ground is always slightly muddy and that's because that water's like three or four feet underground. It's just right down there. And so they love that we're farming it, pumping it out of the ground and using it because they don't want to deal with, with the swamp, I guess. I mean, not a literal swamp, But what's also changed a lot years ago, they brought in a tree called a salt cedar tree.