Arizona Farmers and Rancher Practice Conservation Work Ethic

Many people work for the environment under the radar. They don’t lobby Congress to kill oil-drilling projects in Alaska. They aren’t scientists tracking global warming. They are everyday people with a conservation work ethic.

They prosecute wildlife crimes. They farm and ranch in ways that conserve the soil and water.

Robert Boyle, 28, is one of them. He owns and manages a farm near Coolidge. At first blush, Mr. Boyle’s contribution to conservation seems modest. He has leveled off plots of land and installed new irrigation ditches.

On closer inspection, the modifications are not so simple and have cut his water usage significantly — although it’s almost like running in place.

“As the water costs keeping getting higher and higher, we’re getting our efficiencies higher, so we’re not using as much water,” Mr. Boyle says.

He farms 1,000 acres of corn and alfalfa. Before he made improvements, Mr. Boyle was spending about $170 an acre for water annually. That’s a $170,000 water bill, payable to the Hohokam Irrigation and Drainage District, which delivers Central Arizona Project water to Mr. Boyle and other farmers in the region.

With more efficient water delivery, Mr. Boyle expects to save $20,000 a year. That’s not only money saved, but water conserved — some 162.9 million gallons annually.

To date, Mr. Boyle has leveled and provided new irrigation ditches for about 350 acres, partly with help from a federal farm and ranch conservation subsidy known as the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, offered by the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service. The program goes by the acronym EQIP.

Mr. Boyle shows a visitor one of two fields — 55 acres total — leveled with EQIP funding. He applied under a provision for new or small-scale farmers, in which the federal government pays 90 per cent of the cost — up to $35,000 per project. For most EQIP cost-share programs, the government picks up half the cost.

Nationally, EQIP paid out more than $900 million for cost-share farm and ranch projects in 2004. That figure increased to $1.5 billion for 2005. Arizona’s 2005 share was $21 million, according to the NRCS public affairs office.

Through EQIP, Mr. Boyle received nearly $30,000 for leveling and improved irrigation. He parks his truck on the farm road fronting a field of newly sprouted corn. He explains that it has been leveled by laser-guided equipment. A lot of dirt has been moved to make it almost perfectly flat.

The field runs 1,200 feet from the top — where the irrigation water pours in — to the bottom. It is slightly sloped so the water will reach the far end. Too much slope, however, and the water would run off the top end too fast, favoring the corn at the bottom. Before the field was leveled, Mr. Boyle jokes: “If you go and turn on the water and drive to the bottom end, the water would beat you.”

Now the flow will cover the crop more evenly. From top to bottom, the field has a fall of only 3 inches. From side to side, he adds, the field is a 100 feet wide and “perfectly level.”

Some farmers have gone to what is known as zero-to-zero leveling, says Rick Bader, who works a 1,000-acre farm near Picacho, about halfway between Phoenix and Tucson. Zero-to-zero means the field is dead level from top to bottom as well as side to side, says Mr. Bader, who works for V7 Dobson Ranch LLC. This type of leveling has to be done on smaller plots — in this case, 10 acres each.

So far, Mr. Bader says, about 150 acres have been leveled zero-to-zero, with EQIP subsidizing half the cost. The Dobson farm is hoping to save about 30 per cent on water use. For Mr. Bader, EQIP is federal money well spent.

“Sir, I think if all government programs were as effective as what EQIP is, we’d all be better off,” Mr. Bader says. “You actually have to accomplish something. They don’t pay you before it’s done.”

Mr. Boyle, facing a chilly March wind in a short-sleeve shirt, points to an irrigation ditch across the farm road. The new leak-proof lining is white as snow. It’s an EQIP-funded improvement, though Mr. Boyle would rather talk about the new gates along the canal bank. They can be opened to let water flow into the field through 12-inch pipes. Slightly below ground, the pipes distribute the water more evenly and cause less erosion than the rubber siphon tubes still in use on some fields.

Preventing soil erosion is part of EQIP’s mission, says Eddie Foster, NRCS soil conservationist at the agency’s Casa Grande field office.

Mr. Foster works closely with Mr. Boyle and other farmers on EQIP-funded projects. NRCS officers inspect the fields and provide engineering assistance in making improvements.

“We look at the slope of the ground, the type of soil that they have, the type of water delivery system,” Mr. Foster says. “We can measure the irrigation. We can measure how much water will be saved.”

Participation in EQIP, Mr. Foster adds, is strictly voluntary. But Mr. Boyle says there is a strong incentive to save water, and it’s not just the enticement of federal subsidies or the rising cost of irrigation. Farmers are expected to do more with less, he says.

“They curtail our water allotment every year,” Mr. Boyle says. “You’ve got to be more efficient as time goes by in order to keep up with that.”

EQIPing A Ranch

Doug Ruppel, 43, runs some 1,500 head of yearlings across the 30,000-acre Babocomari cattle ranch in southeastern Arizona. For him, conservation means ensuring a healthy growth of vegetation throughout the rangeland, particularly near streams.

In this case, the stream is the Babocomari River, a tributary of the San Pedro.

Mr. Ruppel says the ranch’s conservation plan has been to move herds toward higher ground during warmer wetter months. This allows recovery of native grasses in riparian areas. Fencing plays a big role in guiding the movement of cows. Other conservation methods involve clearing overgrowth of trees like mesquite, which can kill grasses.

EQIP funding helped to put the ranch’s conservation plans on the fast track, Mr. Ruppel says.

“We were going at a much slower pace, because we were paying for it out of pocket, so obviously there was a limit to what we could afford to do in any given year,” Mr. Ruppel says. EQIP, he adds, “turned what would have been a 15- to 20-year effort into about five years.”

NRCS is providing some $173,000 over a five-year period for the improvements, half the overall cost. As with farmers, the money for ranchers is not paid up front, Mr. Ruppel says. Each year he pays expenses out of pocket, before seeking reimbursement in the fall.

“I have a file that I keep and, at the end of the season, I will submit those receipts to the NRCS,” Mr. Ruppel says.

If the job doesn’t live up to NRCS specifications, payment could be withheld.

Since the NRCS gets involved early on in planning, that’s unlikely. At the ranch, owned by the Brophy family, NRCS officers set up stakes to document recovery of grasses from the fencing and the brush clearing.

Without added fencing, the cows stay mainly where the grazing is easiest, along the streams.

“What we do by changing some of these fence patterns is we force them to use those upland grasses and keep them from over-utilizing the riparian grasses,” Mr. Ruppel says.

The riparian areas are still grazed, but get enough downtime to recover.

As a result, native sedge grasses have made a dramatic comeback, Mr. Ruppel says. This has helped keep topsoil intact, which — in turn — makes for healthier grasses. In addition, the river water has less sediment and runs cooler, providing a better environment for native fish.

For today’s rancher, Mr. Ruppel says, conservation is good for business.

“I don’t really raise cattle,” he says. “I raise healthy grass. I raise a healthy functioning ecosystem, and a byproduct of that is a profitable cattle operation.”

Story by Bill Coates, Arizona Capitol Times.