In Southern Arizona water is everything. And for one family farm, the future of that water hangs in the balance as Colorado River negotiations continue.
Brian Wong is a fourth generation farmer and president of BKW Farms. The farm is located in Marana and harvests several kinds of wheat and grains as well as blue oyster mushrooms.
Wong’s great-grandfather came to the United States from China in the late 1800s to start working on Arizona’s early railroad system. In the 1920s he decided to settle down and open up a grocery store in downtown Tucson. The rest of the Wong family immigrated to the U.S. including Brian’s grandfather, who worked in the grocery store, saving up enough money to buy his first cropland in 1935 in Red Rocks, just north of Marana. In 1939, he planted his first crop.
“In 1941 he decided to gamble on cotton…he heard about it. It was mainly grown in California, Wong said. “Generally, you plant cotton about, probably April time, he didn’t get it in the ground till June.”
A few months later, Pearl Harbor was bombed, leading the U.S. to enter the Second World War. By sheer luck, the Wong farm was one of the few that still had cotton in the ground. Overnight, the price of cotton jumped from eight cents to more than one dollar a pound as a wartime commodity.
Wong says his grandfather took that money and reinvested it back into the farm. It peaked in the 1970s he said, farming on about 25,000 acres in the Red Rock area, Marana, Casa Grande, Wilcox and even into California. In the 1990s, the Wong family took a pivot and decided to re-centralized in Marana and lease their land to other farmers in the area.
“We would take care of all the water rights, all the land leases, all the regulatory parts so that allowed the farmer to actually focus on growing the crop rather than have to do all the paperwork pushing, Wong said, adding that water availability is one of the biggest challenges for irrigated agriculture.
“Where is it going to come from in the future? And you can always just try to do your best with planning and projecting out into the future but things are always going to be volatile that you could never plan on,” Wong said.
Part of BKW sits next to the Central Arizona Project – the 336 mile long canal system that feeds Colorado River water to 80% of Arizona’s population. The farm has about 12 pumps that sit on the canal and feed into their irrigation system.
Each pump is a Chevy 454 engine that’s been converted to natural gas and that’s capable of delivering about 9-10,000 gallons per minute,” Wong said.
The farm is a groundwater savings facility which means it has agreed to stop pumping groundwater, and in exchange, the Arizona Department of Water Resources gives them water from the CAP.
“Our entire farm is 100% GSF. We actually converted to that in the late 90s and we actually haven’t pumped any groundwater since then,” Wong said.
The farm partners with municipalities like Tucson Water, Metro Water and Marana Water to use their allocations of CAP water, however, it is uncertain what those allocations will look like in the coming year.
“Until we kind of get more firm or hard numbers, we can’t determine how much irrigation water we are going to have going into the future,” Wong said. “Personally I really don’t want to return back to groundwater if we don’t have to.”
The Colorado River irrigates more than 5 million acres of farmland in the U.S. but the Basin is in crisis as it continues to experience a decades-long drought and hotter and drier conditions. For farmers like Wong, that means planning for a future that’s still unclear.