Growth forces farmers to look to Mexico

[Judi Lynn]

February 15, 2007
Growth forces farmers to look to Mexico
Cronkite News Service

PHOENIX - Urban growth into Arizona’s farmland will push farmers to take part of the state’s $6.3 billion-a-year agriculture industry into Mexico, the state’s agriculture director said Thursday.

“The growers are going to go to Mexico. They’re looking there now,” Donald Butler, director of the Arizona Department of Agriculture, said in an interview with Cronkite News Service.

“You keep pushing and pretty soon you’re going to have a situation like you do with oil. It’s going to be imported,” Butler said. “The growers here are going to go to Mexico and produce the crops and send them back up.”

Butler said he doesn’t see a balance developing between agriculture and the population influx that has made Arizona the fastest-growing state in the nation.
“They’re going to come, and they have to be housed someplace, whether it’s prime farmland or not,” he said. “I think agriculture is going to get the short end.”

Butler said that’s because the land is more valuable to a developer than to the farmer.
(snip/...)

http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/84180

[OneBlueSky]

1. without honey bees, there may not BE any farmers . . . n/t

[Doondoo]

2. And the big-money developers go laughing all the way to the bank

[fed-up]

3. Birth control is a Good thing nt