January 4, 2000
By MARK SHAFFER
The Arizona Republic
WILLCOX, Ariz. (AP) -- It's enough to make the old Texas cowboys and farmers who settled these parts turn over in their graves.
Here, in once stolid cattle and cotton country, folks are harvesting cucumbers, tomatoes and whatnot in mass quantities, all grown indoors.
Outside, organic orchards have sprung up everywhere with talk of holistic experiences and concerns more about pesticides than the pest insects themselves.
Here and there, city slickers come and pick vegetables on farms on the weekends or take in a trail ride at a bed and breakfast on once-working ranches.
And what of the ranchers? They've been raising all kinds of weirdness, from ostriches to rabbits to chinchillas. One couple has been herding chickens around their spread while another has been digging up creosote bushes to sell to nurseries in the big cities.
Northern Cochise County expects to stay rural well into the new millennium, but there's little left of traditional farming and ranching.
Innovation and change have transformed these southeastern Arizona parts. Indeed, notes University of Arizona horticulturist Rob Call, the area illustrates how rural America is fitting into the high-tech, modern world economy. He says high crop yields are a good indicator of the new regime.
"The truth is that we are already reaching our yield potentials here unless there are advances in biotechnology," Call said.
Many of those yield figures have raised people's eyebrows. Like at the 100-acre, indoor Eurofresh hydroponic tomato greenhouse north of Willcox, where more than 500 people work and about 800,000 tomatoes are produced daily.
Dutch entrepreneurs liked all the sunshine for winter growing so much they set up shop with a 10-acre greenhouse seven years ago. Using a controlled growing environment, only a trifle of soil and liberal amounts of liquid fertilizer, the greenhouses produce 10-foot high vines and tons of tomatoes free of pesticides.
Despite a recent round of labor woes over pay and working conditions with its largely Mexican workforce, Eurofresh Ltd. plans to double its acreage over the next few years. The University of Arizona also has gotten in on the act with courses on the use of hydroponic techniques.
Tomatoes aren't the only new crop. Other greenhouses around Willcox produce cucumbers and houseplants, tapping into the area's plentiful pool of clean groundwater.
Then there are all the new apple orchards, which have sprung up in vacated farm fields during the past two decades.
"Our apples found their market niche in the three weeks every year before the Washington apple industry begins production," said Norman Brown, vice mayor of Willcox.
Another major niche was found in the production of organic apples, said Nancy Dudney, marketing director of Valley Farms, which has 500 acres of apple trees using natural growing methods. Most of the orchards in the area have gone organic in the past five years.
"It's been a humongous growth industry for us and our production is up about 20 percent since we went organic," Dudney said. "Our apples are being sold in almost every state now and we are on the verge of exporting to Europe."
For the more traditional farmers who have remained in the area, decidedly untraditional marketing techniques have been used.
The "You Pick It" industry now attracts about 120,000 people annually, largely from Tucson, from July 4 to Halloween, said Chamber of Commerce Director Eddie Browning. They pick from fields of corn, squash, peas, chilis and tomatoes and from orchards of apples and pears.
Call said the days of heavy irrigation down farm rows for thirsty crops like cotton are coming to an end. The area once had six cotton gins and 160,000 acres under cultivation 20 years ago. It now has one gin and 60,000 acres in cotton.
"What I see is more development of high-yield field crops, like corn, which use more water-efficient things like sprinklers that use a central pivot," Call said.
Ranching is not on the same growth curve.
Sonny Shores, co-owner of the Willcox Livestock Auction, can only wish that there were an alternative that produces more money in the cattle industry these days.
"Twenty years ago, my dad sold 82,000 head of cattle through these gates" each year, said Shores, looking out on a vacant holding pen. "Now, we're down to between 20,000 and 30,000 a year."
Where the livestock industry is heading is anyone's guess. The area has been plagued by droughts, which have wreaked havoc with foliage. Cattle prices have remained stagnant and feed prices have increased.
Earlier this decade, ostrich ranches were all the rage. Producers billed the bird's meat as a lean, healthy alternative to beef. But the industry failed to find a market and died virtually overnight.
Others in the area flirted with rabbit and chinchilla production with similar results.
Many longtime ranchers in the area are reducing herds and going into selling the "ranch experience" to tourists, including trail rides and bed and breakfast lodging.
Despite fewer livestock being sold locally, they are anything but an endangered species in northern Cochise County. In fact, the extension service put out a brochure recently about proper range management because so many people who were buying subdivided, 40-acre tracts were overgrazing their land with cattle.
