I am responding to D. Lilia’s letter to the editor (“Stop beating up Sun City golf courses,” Sun City Independent, Sept. 14, 2022) advocating for a “ban on the agricultural usage of water to grow crops that are totally unsuitable for the Sonoran Desert…and stop beating up on golf courses and Sun City homeowners.”
As someone who worked for the largest water district in California and now live in Sun City, I found this letter full of uninformed clichés that could end up with Sun City golf courses becoming brown or returned to barren desert.
First, it is a cliché to say agriculture uses 76% of available water in Arizona. Rather, people who eat food consume 76% of the water. We, the end-users, consume most of the water, not farmers per se.
Second, when there is a dry year, farmers are told to switch from using water from the Salt River and Central Arizona Project to using local groundwater instead when possible. Some 40% of Arizona’s water comes from groundwater. Thus, Sun City golf courses rely on farmers shifting to groundwater in dry years. Said differently, Sun City depends on farmers having surplus water for its golf courses in dry years. That surplus water is often used to grow exported crops in wet years, such as cotton, sorghum and alfalfa. Surplus water for exported alfalfa is also water to export to golf courses.
A religious parable describes how a famous religious prophet faced a division problem — how to divide up enough loaves of bread to feed 5,000. With water along the Colorado River system, we face a division problem in reverse. We must learn to reject the false division of labor between farmers and urban water users, often exploited by politicians. Water policy is not solely ruled by vested interests of agribusiness as much as it is by politicized vested ideas of urban politicians we should not swallow.
