But Curry said Riverview has gone beyond the agreement’s terms to reduce its water use further, including importing some of its cattle feed from out of state to reduce its water use in the basin.
‘Imperative for making progress’
Overall, the 10% water use cut for farms in the basin is “imperative for making progress towards the (state’s) management goal while providing sufficient water to irrigate crops historically grown,” the new plan says.
ADWR said it commissioned a study that said a 10% cut in farm water use would still allow farmers in the basin to grow the same crops as now without suffering major economic consequences.
But the plan says the ideal solution to groundwater over-pumping — limiting the water pumped to the amount that’s put back into the ground by rainfall and other sources of groundwater recharge — is a long way from being economically feasible. If that ever happened, the basin would be at “safe yield,” in which pumping matches recharge — the 1980 law’s goal for the state’s active management areas, which most of them have never met.
Farmers harvest the rosemary crop at Curry Farms. Fourth-generation farmer Ed Curry grows various other low-water-use herbs, chile seeds and cacti on 2000 acres in the Willcox Basin, near the unincorporated community of Sunsites.
Grace Trejo, Arizona Daily Star
To slash pumping to the same level as groundwater recharge would mean lowering annual pumping in the basin by nearly 4 times to about 43,000 acre-feet a year, the new plan says.
But the basin, whose economy depends almost exclusively on farming, hasn’t used that little water in one year since 1952, ADWR says.
While water use in the basin has boomed and busted over the decades since the 1950s, it today stands at about 207,000 acre-feet a year, the management plan says.
In 2024, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that nearly 75,000 acres of land were irrigated for farming in the entire Willcox Basin. The basin’s 1,911 square miles cover eastern Cochise County and southern Graham County.