MAC Farm Desert Ag-Ventures

We recently spent a day at the Maricopa Agricultural Center (MAC), a 2100 acre research and educational center operated by the University of Arizona. We watched videos and listened to lectures about desert agriculture, had a question & answer session with one of the faculty members, and toured a couple areas of the complex, including the cotton gin, vegetable garden, and siphon irrigation field.
     MAC research focuses on plants currently grown in this area, including cotton, small grains, and alfalfa, plus potential new specialty crops for arid land including guayule, hesperaloe, jojoba, and lesquerella.  Quayale is a desert native shrub which can be used for rubber production; it has less protein than natural rubber and makes a latex rubber that can better tolerated by persons with latex allergies.  Hesperaloe is a long-lived perennial plant native to Mexico; it produces long thin fibers useful in paper production and is being studied as a new crop for the desert southwest. Jojoba is a native evergreen plant whose seeds contain a liquid wax used in cosmetics and for industries that require heat resistant lubricants. Lesquerella is being studied as a potential oilseed crop, similar to castor beans; it grows with very little water use.
    The irrigation program at MAC deals with all facets of agricultural irrigation from water delivery to how crops use that water.  The research acres have both ground water wells and irrigation canals, so they can replicate most any method used by local farmers.  MAC maintains a weather station that records temperature, wind speed & direction, rainfall, etc. on an hourly basis, then stores that information for historical uses.
    One researcher described how important GPS is to farming...from crop yield reports generated row-by-row as the farmer harvests a crop they can determine which parts of a field need more or less moisture, pesticides, or fertilizer.  Sensors on equipment can then accurately deliver those based on the GPS locations of the areas identified.  GPS also allows accurate planting and weed control...machines can get closer to the plants during cultivation to remove weeds, so less spraying is needed.
    Besides entertaining "snowbirds", the facility hosts visitors and researchers from across the nation, and internationally.