Take the money now or try to survive for the future. That is the choice for farmers like Jerry Rovey whose family moved to the Buckeye Valley in 1912, according to an Axios story.
The area is about 35 miles west of Phoenix, Arizona. The Phoenix metropolitan area has been a fast-growing expansion as it gained nearly 200,000 residents between 2020 and 2023, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Rovey has farmed for more than 60 years and grows cotton with his wife, Diana. They have watched how their farming community has transformed to almost no separation between the sprawling Phoenix urban development.
Farmland Value
Nearby development tempts farm families with the promise of immediate payment rather than the frequent annual struggles to earn an income that many family farmers endure.
Rovey earned the annual High Cotton Award from FarmProgress for his longtime commitment to sustainable farming practices. He explained how he tries to use a minimal amount of chemicals to control pests to manage costs and to manage air quality and dust control issues due to nearby homes and schools. Read the FarmProgress story here.
Changing Farm Focus from Cotton to Solar Grazing
Chad Raines didn’t plant any cotton last year. That broke a streak of planting cotton seed for four generations. He didn’t get out of farming. He just changed the farm’s focus.
Instead of tending to cotton, he has become an Uber driver for his sheep. Raines takes them to solar farms, where they landscape the vegetation. Raines said that doing this for five solar companies is more lucrative than growing cotton.
Raines is not alone in recognizing this emerging alternative. Reuters pointed out that the U.S. sheep herd grew for the first time in nearly a decade. Cotton prices these days struggle to climb higher than they were five years ago and aren’t half as high compared to the price surges of 2011.
He laid out his finances:
Had he raised cotton last year: Projected loss of $200,000.
Switching to solar grazing instead: Profit of $300,000.
Disappearing Farmland
Rainey’s farm focus conversion makes his family business financially sustainable and holds onto the property. But nearly 2,000 acres of farmland and ranchland was lost to other uses or compromised, according to research by American Farmland Trust.
AFT warned of what would happen if that trend continued for the next few decades. “…another 18.4 million acres will be converted between 2016 and 2040—an area nearly the size of South Carolina.”
The non-profit organization, which was founded in 1980 to promote environmentally-sound farming practices and a mission to keep farmers on their land, broke down the use for those 18.4 million lost farming acres.
“Of this total, 6.2 million acres will be converted to urban and highly developed land uses such as commercial buildings, industrial sites, and moderate to-high-density residential development. The remainder, 12.2 million acres, will be converted to low-density residential areas, which range from large-lot subdivisions to rural areas with a proliferation of scattered houses.”
