On a clear day, Alan Mazzotti can see the Rocky Mountains about 30 miles west of his pumpkin patch in northeastern Colorado. He could tell there was a lot of snow last winter, which he confirmed up close as he floated in the fresh powder at the popular Winter Park Resort with his wife and three sons.
But a season of above-average snowfall wasn’t enough to replenish the dwindling reservoirs he uses to irrigate his pumpkins. This spring, he received word that his water supply would be about half what it was last season, so he only planted half of his typical pumpkin crop. Then heavy rains in May and June brought enough water that the fields became muddy, preventing many farmers from carrying out additional planting.
“By the time it starts raining and starts affecting our reservoir supplies and everything else, it’s too late in the year,” Mazzotti said.
For some pumpkin growers in states such as Texas, New Mexico and Colorado, this year’s crop is a reminder of the challenges facing agriculture in the Southwest and West as human-caused climate change exacerbates droughts and extreme heat. facing water resource challenges. Some farmers lost 20% or more of their expected yields; others, like Mazzotti, left some land behind. Labor costs and inflation have also narrowed margins, hitting farmers’ ability to profit from products sold to garden centers and pumpkin patches.
This year’s “thirsty gourd” symbolizes a reality that irrigation-dependent farmers must continue to face season after season: They must make choices about how many acres to plant based on water allocation and the cost of electricity to pump water from the fields. What crops to plant, and what crops they can bet on to survive hotter, drier summers.
Pumpkins can tolerate hot, dry weather to a certain extent, but this summer’s heat, broke the world record Mark Carroll, Texas A&M Extension agent in Floyd County, which he calls the state’s “pumpkin capital,” said temperatures in farm fields across the country are well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius). , it’s really too much.
“This is the worst year we’ve had in several years,” Carroll said. Not only are the hot, dry weather more than irrigation can compensate for, but pumpkins also need cooler weather to harvest, otherwise they will start to break down during shipping, sometimes even before they get to the store.
The harvest in Illinois, the U.S. pumpkin powerhouse, is on par with the past two years, according to the Illinois Farm Bureau. But this year’s Texas harvest season is so hot that farmers must decide whether to risk cutting pumpkins off the vine at the usual time or wait and miss the start of fall’s pumpkin rush. To make matters worse, as water tables continue to decline, irrigation costs are getting higher, leaving some farmers with monthly power bills running into thousands of dollars.
Lindsey Pyle grows 950 acres of pumpkins in north Texas about an hour’s drive from Lubbock, and her energy bills have risen, along with everything from supplies to chemicals. The cost of just about everything else, from seeds to fuel, has also risen. She lost about 20% of her production. She adds that pumpkins can be difficult to predict early in the growing season because the vines may look lush and green, but if they don’t get enough water, they won’t bloom and produce fruit.
Steven Ness, who grows pinto beans and squash in central New Mexico, said rising irrigation costs as groundwater dwindles is an across-the-board problem for farmers in the region. This can inform what farmers choose to grow, because if corn and pumpkins use the same amount of water, they may get more money per acre selling pumpkins, which is a more profitable crop.
But at the end of the day, “our real problem is groundwater … lack of deep moisture and lack of water in the aquifer,” Ness said. The problem likely won’t go away because aquifers can take hundreds or thousands of years to refill after overuse, and climate change is reducing the rain and snow needed to replenish them in the arid West.
Jill Graves, who added a pumpkin patch to her blueberry farm about an hour east of Dallas about three years ago, said this year they had to give up growing their own pumpkins and instead purchase them from wholesalers. . Graves said the pumpkins she bought are rotting faster than in past years, but that’s better than the smaller pumpkins they grew themselves.
However, she thinks they’ll try again next year. “They did really well the first two years,” she said. “We haven’t had any problems.”
Mazzotti, for his part, says that if you don’t have enough water, you “might as well not farm” — but even so, he thinks labor is the bigger problem. Colorado farmers have long dealt with reduced water use, and they’re used to it. However, pumpkins cannot be harvested by machines like corn, so many people are needed to determine if they are ripe, cut them off the vine and prepare them for shipping.
He hires guest workers through the H-2A program, but Colorado recently enacted a law ensuring farm workers receive overtime pay — something most states don’t require. This makes it difficult to maintain competitive prices in places where labor wages are low, but also increases in irrigation and supply costs, creating what Mazzotti calls a “win-win situation.”
He will continue growing pumpkins for a while, but “I have no future after that,” he said. “My children can’t farm.”
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Wallin reported from Chicago.
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