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The water level behind the Hoover Dam on March 2, 2022.

Water authorities in the Western U.S. don’t have a crystal ball, but two decades of drought and poor planning have caused the river’s biggest reservoirs to drop to their lowest collective volume since they were filled and give a clear view of the hard choices ahead. Read more»

Caywood Farms near Casa Grande Arizona closed this cotton gin in 2019. Nancy Caywood called the abandoned gin a victim of the drought.

Seven states from Utah to California share the Colorado River’s roughly 15 million acre-feet of water annually, but in the 100 years since the states agreed how to share the water, it has become clear that the river is over-allocated. Read more»

El Jefe, one of the few wild jaguars in the United States.

In 2014, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designated 764,207 acres of land in Arizona and the southwest corner of New Mexico as critical habitat for a jaguar population concentrated 130 miles south in Mexico, but the New Mexico Farm and Livestock Bureau argued before the 10th Circuit last Wednesday that land designated in the state for the predators isn’t essential to their conservation. Read more»

Pima County Supervisor Richard Elias told a Senate committee that problems with water pollution in his county have him looking to the federal government for more protection, under measures like the previous Waters of the United States rule, not less.

Pima County Supervisor Richard Elias told federal lawmakers that a plan to limit the so-called Waters of the United States rule would end up eliminating clean-water protections for “rivers like the Santa Cruz, the Salt, the Gila.” Read more»

Supporters of the North American Free Trade Agreement have credited it with much of the success of Arizona’s trade with Mexico and Canada, which bought $8.3 billion and $2 billion in goods from the state, respectively, in 2016. Here, trucks carry goods across the U.S.-Mexico border at the crossing at Otay Mesa, California.

One day after President Donald Trump’s prediction that the U.S. could “end up terminating NAFTA at some point,” business and political leaders expressed hope Wednesday that negotiations on a new deal will still be allowed to play out. Read more»

A sow and one of her piglets. Porcine epidemic diarrhea virus can infect any age pig, but has only proven fatal to piglets, who have a mortality rate of at least 50 percent once infected.

A swine virus that has already caused a nationwide hog shortage has turned up in Arizona, where one farm official worries it could have “catastrophic effects on the pork buying and producing industry.” The virus is harmless to humans, but the mortality rate for infected piglets has been at least 50 percent. Read more»

A study released earlier this week by the American Farm Bureau Federation on the impact of various types of immigration reform on the agricultural sector wants the reader to conclude that an enforcement-only approach to immigration would mean economic disaster. But the agricultural industry only survives in its current form thanks to massive (albeit invisible) subsidy from a work force that cannot be described as free, Read more»

Milk prices could double if Congress does not pass the new farm bill by January 1. Read more»