A growing water controversy in western Arizona has residents working to prevent what they see as a foreign-owned company from depleting groundwater supplies.
A Saudi Arabian company is growing alfalfa on farms in the drought-prone southwestern United States and sending it overseas to feed cows. Some of the farms are foreign-owned and growing and cultivating these crops to ship back to Saudi Arabia to feed grazing animals like cows.
In March 2014, Fondomonte Arizona, a subsidiary of the Saudi Arabian dairy company Almarai, purchased 9,834 acres of farmland in Vicksburg, a town in La Paz County about 100 miles west of Phoenix, for a whopping $47.5 million.
