The Farm and the Future

RAW PRODUCTS FROM FARM AND RANGE OFFER UNLIMITED OPPORTUNITIES FOR BUSINESS INVESTMENTS IN THIS STATE The FARM and the FUTURE

BY RICH JOHNSON Associate Editor, Arizona Farmer American business has succeeded because it has charted its course in a spirit of adventure.

The great American Southwest, with Arizona as its focal point, has symbolized the American spirit of adventure.

It is not surprising then that each year thousands of American business men ask what opportunities there are in Arizona for them. They may have lost their childhood dream of becoming cowboys on the open range, but not the essence of that dream, which is to make themselves a part of a new and exciting frontier, where the challenges are bold and chances for success hinge on a man's ability to wrestle with new problems in his own way.

And of all the opportunities for business success in this new land, none probably are brighter than in the field of agriculture. That is not to say that the business man need turn to the growing of farm and range produce himself in order to take advantage of these opportunities. On the contrary, that job is already being done. He has only to consider the many ways in which to take advantage of that production while it is still in its infancy. He can bring his experience with him and find exciting applications for it in Arizona.

To have faith in the future of Arizona agriculture, and its allied industries, it is necessary to understand that the only way America's production of food and fiber can be increased to meet the demands of a growing population and increasing world trade is in the direction of reclamation farming-the opening of new areas to agricultural production through irrigation of raw land.

Then consider the tremendous market in the vastly increased population of the entire West-an increase so swift that it has strained every facility of the country to keep up with it and you have all the requisites for doing business successfully.

Examine the contents of any string of railroad cars moving across the continent from East to West and you will discover that food is one of the main items being carried. Food and the machinery for the production of food.

There is the key to business opportunity in Arizona!

Although our farms and ranches produced close to $200,000,000 worth of food and fiber in 1947, practically none of it was processed within the state. It was shipped as fresh produce or raw material to the Atlantic States, to Chicago,

Herb McLaughlin

Kansas City, to California and Oregon and to many points in between. There it was processed and packaged, and much of it returned to us by rail and truck for local consumption.

Here is a state where $40,000,000 worth of truck crops were grown last year mainly in Maricopa, Pinal and Yuma counties, nothing was quick frozen on a commercial scale, almost nothing was put into tins or dehydrated.

This very fact has limited our truck crops to those things which can be shipped long distances as fresh produce-carrots, lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli-and also limited the acreage that is devoted to them. Profitable production depends almost entirely on railroad cars and shipping schedules as the fresh vegetables are hurried from field to packing sheds in a race against time.

Our truck crop industry can be expanded to meet the demands both in quantity and variety of the largest quick-freeze or canning plants. Furthermore, it can produce those crops twice a year in most cases. But even more than we need one or two plants with large capacity for national distribution, we could use to advantage many smaller plants scattered about in the many irrigated areas where production is established as practical. Such plants, whether freezer or cannery. with a comparatively small investment could grow with the communities in which they are located, with the State and with the West.

In national competition their products would have the advertising advantage that goes with the Sunshine State and its hundreds of thousands of winter visitors from every part of the nation.

But besides Arizona's vegetables there is a great variety of the exotic fruits of the semi-tropics that have yet to be exploited as processed foods. Or if they have been marketed, they have been shipped out of the state for packaging and processing. Such a case is that of the sour orange. Sour orange trees are planted everywhere in Central and Southern Arizona as ornamentals. They line many streets and appear in at least half the yards. Locally the fruit is used mainly by

Robert Markow

Cudahy's in Phoenix is Arizona's largest meat packing plant.

small boys as balls. But Canadian buyers annually purchase tons of the fruit, ship them back to Canada for processing into a fancy marmalade that brings premium prices on the world market.

There is no good reason why sour orange marmalade made in Arizona would not enjoy an even greater advantage on the market.

Then there are the soft Arizona dates. They are a highly perishable item which can be shipped only in limited quantities. Each year many tons of dates that are not perfect enough to be packaged as top quality specialty packs are either destroyed or allowed to get into the hands of unscrupulous dealers who then ruin the market by selling cull fruit at high prices.

Very little has been done to utilize off-grade dates in the manufacture of date products such as pastes and candies. Only a few of the largest groves are equipped to properly process dates, and they are so busy with their own crops that they have no time for customwork. Like sour oranges, date palms by the thousands stand in yards individually or in pairs. Their fruit in most cases goes to waste because there is no facility for care and harvesting and processing. The telephone number of a custom date processor would be very popular indeed in at least three or four Central and Southern Arizona counties.

Is it the freezing of cantaloupes, the canning of Thompson Seedless grapes, the canning or freezing of fruit cocktail mixtures or citrus fruits of all kinds, peaches from Yavapai County, plums from Maricopa, berries from almost every locality, exotic jams, jellies or preserves in which you are interested? They are here, waiting for your processing plant whether it is the small kitchen variety or a large commercialsize plant.

And just before we leave this particular field of business opportunity, how about an orange and grapefruit juice route run the same as a home delivery milk route? It has been done in a very small way, but it could be done many more times

in many more cities and towns across the state.

One such plant put into operation at Tucson two years ago has boosted production in that area, but Phoenix, Yuma, Flagstaff and other population and production centers still have no such plants. Arizona's poultry industry-potentially great, especially in production of turkeys-is chaotic. It badly needs at least several large processing plants if it is to grow.

But what about the second type of merchandise found in such quantity on those transcontinental trains and trucks moving westward to Arizona from the East? The farm machines, tools and equipment?

Yes, Arizona farmers buy millions of dollars worth of tractors, bulldozers, hoes, shovels, plows, rakes, and all the multitude of tools required for big farming operations. They buy them from manufacturers located at least 2,000 miles away for the most part.

No one will advocate locating a big tractor plant in Arizona. Heavy industry is not for us, but there is a world of opportunity for many small farm equipment fabrication shops.

It is no joke when the editor of Arizona Farmer refers to his invention editor as the busiest man on the staff. Practically every farm in Arizona has at least one or two practical and novel pieces of farm equipment in use, invented by the farmer and made up by the local blacksmith. This irrigation farming is a constant challenge to the ingenuity of man. Its needs are not satisfactorily served by the type of tools used in the East and Midwest.

Just to mention a few tools invented locally during the past year: there is a floating reel rake, and a machine which lines ditches with concrete at the rate of a mile per hour; an attachment for turning melon and cucumber vines out of irrigation furrows mechanically; a broadcast seeder and a tractor attachment for digging tile and pipeline trenches; an attachment for furrowing out and cultivating in one operation; a huge knife blade that is replacing the plow as a method of tiling the soil.

In most cases no attempt at all has been made to make these and a hundred other such tools available on a commercial scale. One small-scale plant operator, John Morgan of Phoenix, says that he could have at least two or three of these new tools in the building process all the time if he had capacity for it.

Fortunately most of these inventions of farm tools are adaptable to the farming methods used throughout the entire irrigated West. They have a potentially large market, though not on a scale to interest the big machinery manufacturers of the East.

The need is for comparatively small fabricating plants set up to switch swiftly from one item to another, to alter plans and specifications rapidly to meet an ever-developing demand. Elasticity should be the keynote of such plants. But there is also room for the production of standard items such as chopping hoes and irrigation shovels.

We have not as yet mentioned the possibilities for business enterprise in utilizing the by-products of Arizona's largest industry-agriculture. But they are here. For instance, the manufacturer of dog foods will find all the cereals needed and the meat scraps. The citrus groves offer grapefruit and orange peel and culls for the production of fertilizers and livestock feeds. Celery waste when dehydrated is as good as alfalfa for poultry rations.

The hides of Arizona cattle are not tanned and made into leather within the state, where almost every winter visitor. not to mention real cowboys, wear boots and there are more saddles and tooled leather belts per capita than anywhere else in the world. There are many custom boot shops, but no shoe manufacturer in the state.

Our once-considerable mohair goat herds have largely disappeared, but they would come back quickly should a local market for the product appear on the scene. For that matter, why not a cotton spinning and weaving plant in Arizona to turn out the quantities of rough cotton fabric needed for cotton picker's bags and locally produced feeds?

Here then, is some indication of the type of supporting and allied industry Arizona's agriculture needs and could support. It is a wide open field for the adventuring business man who wants space and ideal climate in which to live fully, unlimited opportunity for initiative and growth in a youthful land.

"Movie Set" by Herb McLaughlin The discovery in Arizona of a colorful, photogenic landscape by movie makers has resulted in new business for state. Here is make-believe town near Sedona. FRONTIER

First there was the desert, the eternal, beautiful, forbidding desert. Then came the little brown men, building dwellings in high cliffs, tilling the fields along the water courses. Scholars who study these ruins estimate that the prehistoric population of Arizona was even larger than it is today. Then these people disappeared, leaving only empty ruins haunted by the wind, arrows and bowls from lonely graves, as reminders of their existence. It is believed a terrible drought came to the land, so terrible the Ancient Ones moved on or perished. It is believed, too, that the fierce Apaches came into the land and completed the devastation begun by the drought. The Spaniards did little to settle the wilderness that was Arizona. The might of Spain was not enough to subdue the cunning Apache; nor was the industry of the few settlers who came to the country following the conquest sufficient to do anything in the land where there was no water. A young nation, pushing into the frontiers of the west, finally began to pay some attention to Arizona-but merely as a convenient way to get to California. Isolated colonies were settled in the state by the Mormons, some mineral wealth was uncovered but growth was slow. As eastern traveler described Arizona as "the land that God forgot." Apparently man choose to forget it, too. When Arizona became a state in 1912, census takers estimated the population at a trifle over one hundred thousand. Arizona had all the qualities of a promising frontier except one-water. The building of Roosevelt Dam was the beginning of a new era for America and Arizona. Reclamation became a thrilling, magic word. Water was stored and by sure, orderly process of irrigation was caused to flow into useless desert land. The eternal, beautiful, forbidding desert was turned into a fabulous garden. Water from the Colorado was turned into the parched land around Yuma, and more land was reclaimed to serve our nation. The success of reclamation in Arizona is one of the illustrious chapters in the epic that is America. All this has happened in three decades.

CENTER PANEL

"Portrait of the Weather" by Josef Muench Picket Post Mountain near Superior frowns down on a desert garden, famed Arboretum. The scene speaks of a warm sun, cloudless days, opportunity for out-door recreation.

"The Broad Highway" by Jerry McLain The highway engineer with modern roads has helped conquer distance. Arizona is served east and west by superb arteries of transportation. Scene: on U. S. 89,

"Logging Train" by Herb McLaughlin

Extensive lumbering activities are taking place in the vast Ponderosa Pine Forest of Arizona. Flagstaff, McNary, Williams are centers of a large lumber industry.

Arizona has come a long way with little water. The Verde, the Salt and the Gila have been put to capacity use. Arizona now looks to the Colorado. The Bureau of Reclamation has drawn up the Central Arizona Project, which will be considered by Congress next year. If this Project is approved this is what will happen: A dam 315 feet high on the San Juan River at Bluff, to control stream flow and keep back silt; a concrete dam 205 feet high at Cameron to control the Little Colorado; a dam 673 feet high on the Colorado at Bridge Canyon, to impound water, control stream flow, allow greater storage capacity at Lake Mead, and to allow a more constant and greater development of power at Boulder (Hoover) Dam; four pumping plants at Lake Havasu operated with one-third of the electric energy developed at Bridge Canyon, to lift water 985 feet over a small range of hills; Granite Reef Aqueduct to carry water 241 miles from Lake Havasu to Salt River Valley; McDowell Dam, 125 feet high, to impound 578,000 acre-feet of overflow water from Ganite Reef Aqueduct; Horseshoe Dam, on the Verde, to be made larger with storage capacity increased from 68,000 to 298,000 acre-feet; the Salt-Gila Aqueduct, 74 miles long, to carry water into the Pinal unit of the project; Buttes Dam on the San Pedro fourteen miles from Florence to control stream flow, store water, and develop power; a dam on the San Pedro near Charleston in Cochise County to control stream flow and store water for the City of Tucson; a steel pipe aqueduct 70 miles long to carry water from Charleston Dam to Tucson; improvement of 71 miles of canals in the Safford area; a dam on the Gila seven miles from Cliff, N. M., for silt and flood control; construction of irrigation, drainage and power systems for the greater utilization of this water and power.This project will cost $738,408,000. It will pay for itself in not too many years and will assure for all time a sufficient supply of water for land now under cultivation. It will provide needed power for factories here and on the Pacific Coast and will provide opportunities of livelihood for many people. It will dispell the terror of drought in a land of little water, it will create a bright frontier of promise for the young and courageous of the decades to come. Arizona is part of America's frontier of today; it will be the brightest part of the frontier of tomorrow.-R. C.

"The Land Reclaimed" by Herb McLaughlin

Just a few years ago this ranch in the Salt River Valley was desert land. With irrigation, the land was reclaimed and thousands of acres put to useful work.