Arizona Daily Independent
Shane Burgess has an answer for those who say it’s time to drop cotton from Arizona’s “five C’s” for the demands it places on water resources.
Not so fast.
Although farmers planted more than 161,000 acres of cotton in Arizona in 2013 — the second-highest total for any crop in the state — irrigated farmland actually has decreased in recent decades with improvements in technology and crop engineering.
That’s not to say that the state’s cotton farmers aren’t concerned. Burgess, dean of the University of Arizona’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, was the keynote speaker at a recent conference of the Arizona Cotton Growers Association in Flagstaff and picked up on the farmers’ anxiety in the meeting’s one-word theme: “Survival.”
