Interview with Grady Gammage - Central Arizona Project

I tell people when I got on the CAP Board, I’m a city boy. I don’t have any
particular farming background or affinity at all. I grew up in Tempe and Metro
Phoenix and primarily I represent developers, so urbanization is how I make a
living. When I ended up on the CAP Board I assumed that agriculture would
whither and die in Arizona. In fact, I was even inclined to think that agriculture
had never made sense in Arizona anyway. Why are we growing crops in a place
where it rains five inches a year I changed my mind in the time on the CAP
Board. For a couple of reasons it seems to me there is some real benefit for
preserving agricultural in central Arizona. One reason is the heat island effect. It
mitigates this heat island effect where the average night time temperatures go up
by ten degrees a decade or so and irrigated farming brings it back down a little
bit. A second reason is it’s sort of historically important. It’s the only reason
people live here. This is not a probable place for a lot of people to live and
they’re here because of farming. But the most important reason I think is a
water management reason and that is in times of drought you can take water
back from the farmers and deliver it to people in their houses. It’s a safety valve.
You can’t do that when people are using the water at their houses. And so Los
Angeles which doesn’t have any agriculture left, San Diego, Las Vegas which
never had much agricultural, have in fact been much worse hit by the drought
over the last ten years than Phoenix has. People are shocked when I tell them
that we’ve never had to ration water in Phoenix in this drought. I was with a
woman from Fort Worth last week who just could not believe that we weren’t
Interview with Grady Gammage
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