On a clear day, Alan Mazzotti can see the Rocky Mountains about 30 miles west of his pumpkin farm in northeast Colorado. He could tell the snow was plentiful last winter because he floated through fresh powder with his wife and three sons at the famed Winter Park Resort. However, one season of above-average snowfall was insufficient to replenish the depleting reservoir he relies on to irrigate his pumpkins. He learned this spring that his water delivery would be around half of what it had been the previous season, so he planted only half of his usual pumpkin crop. Then, in May and June, torrential rains delivered lots of water and turned fields into a muddy mess, preventing many farmers from doing any additional planting.
“By the time it started raining and the rain started to affect our reservoir supplies and everything else, it was just too late for this year,” Mazzotti said. This year’s pumpkin crop reminded several pumpkin growers in Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado of the water issues facing agriculture across the Southwest and West as human-caused climate change exacerbates drought and heat extremes. Some farmers lost 20% or more of their expected harvests, while others, such as Mazzotti, left some land fallow. Labor expenses and inflation also reduce margins, making it difficult for farmers to profit from what they sell to garden centers and pumpkin patches.
“It’s one of the worst years we’ve had in several years.” A pumpkin farmer
This year’s thirsty gourds are a symbol of the reality that farmers who rely on irrigation must continue to face season after season: they must choose which acres to plant and which crops to gamble on to make it through hotter and drier summers, based on water allotments and the cost of electricity to pump it out of the ground. To some extent, pumpkins can withstand hot, dry weather, but this summer’s heat, which broke world records and brought temperatures well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) to agricultural fields across the country, was too much, according to Mark Carroll, a Texas A&M extension agent for Floyd County, which he refers to as the “pumpkin capital” of the state.
“It’s one of the worst years we’ve had in several years,” Carroll said. Not only did the hot, dry weather surpass what irrigation could make up for, but pumpkins also needed cooler weather to be harvested, or they’d start to decompose during the shipping process, sometimes disintegrating before they even arrived at stores. According to the Illinois Farm Bureau, America’s pumpkin superpower, Illinois, had a successful harvest comparable to the previous two years. However, this year’s harvest season in Texas was so hot that farmers had to choose whether to risk cutting pumpkins off the vines at the customary time or wait and miss the start of the fall pumpkin rush. In addition, as groundwater levels continue to fall, irrigation costs more, pushing some farmers’ monthly energy expenditures to the hundreds of dollars.
Lindsey Pyle, who farms 950 acres of pumpkins in North Texas, about an hour outside Lubbock, has watched her energy expenditures rise, as have the costs of nearly everything else, from supplies and chemicals to seed and fuel. She lost approximately 20% of her yield. She also mentioned that pumpkins might be difficult to forecast earlier in the growing season because the vines may appear lush and green, but they will not bloom and produce fruit if they don’t get enough water. Steven Ness, who farms pinto beans and pumpkins in central New Mexico, says the increased expense of irrigation as groundwater runs out is a problem for farmers throughout the region. That can inform what farmers choose to grow because if corn and pumpkins use about the same amount of water, they might get more money per acre for selling pumpkins, a more lucrative crop.
“Our real problem is groundwater.”
But, at the end of the day, “our real problem is groundwater… the lack of deep moisture and water in the aquifer,” according to Ness. That’s an issue that’s unlikely to go away because aquifers can take hundreds or thousands of years to replenish after being depleted, and climate change is limiting the rain and snow needed to recharge them in the arid West. Jill Graves, who added a pumpkin patch to her blueberry farm about an hour east of Dallas three years ago, said this year they had to give up on producing their own pumpkins and buy them from a wholesaler. Graves said the pumpkins she bought deteriorated faster than in previous years, but it was better than nothing.
Still, she thinks they’ll try again next year. “They worked perfectly the first two years,” she said. “We didn’t have any problems.” Mazzotti, for his part, says that with not enough water, you “might as well not farm,” but even so, he sees labor as the bigger issue. Farmers in Colorado have been dealing with water cutbacks for a long time, and they’re used to it. However, pumpkins can’t be harvested by machines like corn cans, so they require lots of people to determine if they’re ripe, cut them off the vines, and prepare them for shipping.
He hires guest workers through the H-2A program, but Colorado recently instituted a law ensuring farmworkers are paid overtime—something most states don’t require. That makes it tough to maintain competitive prices in places where laborers are paid less, and the increasing costs of irrigation and supplies stack onto that, creating what Mazzotti calls a “no-win situation.” He’ll keep farming pumpkins for a bit longer, but “there’s no future after me,” he said. “My boys won’t farm.”
