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Saudi Arabia Banned Growing Alfalfa at Home in 2018 to Save Its Groundwater. It Grows the Alfalfa in Arizona Now, Where a State Lease Let It Pump as Much Water as It Wanted.

The Complaints Department

The Complaints Department

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Saudi Arabia Banned Growing Alfalfa at Home in 2018 to Save Its Groundwater. It Grows the Alfalfa in Arizona Now, Where a State Lease Let It Pump as Much Water as It Wanted.
Photo by Eelco Böhtlingk / Unsplash

On 5 November 2018, Saudi Arabia banned the cultivation of green fodder within the kingdom. Growing alfalfa and similar forage crops in a desert had been consuming roughly seventeen billion cubic metres of water a year, of which about nine billion would be saved by no longer doing it. Domestic production fell by around 65 percent. The cows remained, and still needed feeding, so the fodder would be imported instead.

Alfalfa is not a difficult crop. It requires only a great deal of water and somewhere to put it. Almarai, the Saudi dairy company, acquired nearly ten thousand acres near Vicksburg, Arizona, for $47.5 million, and grows it there through a subsidiary called Fondomonte. The hay is shipped to Saudi Arabia to feed Saudi cows.

The Terms of the Lease

Alongside the private land, Fondomonte leased state trust land in Butler Valley, in La Paz County. The lease permitted the company to pump groundwater without limit. There was no cap, no metering requirement of consequence, and no charge for the water itself — the rent was for the land.

Butler Valley is not an ordinary basin. It has long been identified as a reserve intended to supply the Phoenix metropolitan area at some future point when it is needed. The state had leased unmetered access to that reserve to a foreign agricultural company for the purpose of growing a crop its own government had prohibited growing at home, on water conservation grounds.

The Neighbours

Groundwater in rural Arizona is largely unregulated. Outside the designated active management areas, a landowner may pump as much as they can reach, and the practical limit is the depth of the well and the size of the pump. Industrial-scale irrigation adjacent to domestic wells produces the outcome that arrangement implies: neighbouring residential wells in the area have gone dry.

Holly Irwin, a Republican county supervisor in La Paz, spent roughly eight years raising this. The objection was not ideological. It was that a finite shared resource beneath the county was being exported, at no cost, to a buyer with no stake in the aquifer's future.

The Cancellation

In October 2023, Governor Katie Hobbs cancelled the Butler Valley lease and announced that three further leases would not be renewed. The stated grounds were not the water. An investigation by the governor's office found the company in default of its lease terms over the storage of hazardous materials — violations of which it had been notified in 2016, and which an inspection in August 2023 found had not been corrected in the intervening seven years.

The water was the reason. The hazardous materials were the mechanism, because the lease as written did not prohibit the pumping, and a lease cannot be terminated for a thing it expressly permits.

What Changed

Fondomonte lost its state land. It did not lose its private land, which is in La Paz County, where groundwater extraction remains unregulated, and where the company continues to pump. The alfalfa continues to grow. The hay continues to leave.

The cancellation removed the state's name from the arrangement. It did not remove any water from the arrangement, because the state never controlled the water — it controlled the lease, and the lease was the only part of the transaction Arizona had the legal authority to end.

Saudi Arabia looked at what growing alfalfa in a desert was doing to its aquifers and stopped. Arizona has not reached that stage, and in La Paz County it has not yet acquired the power to.

Filed from public reporting:

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