Home Grown: Viewer questions – asking an ag. expert

Many people in the Yuma community take pride in having such a heavy agricultural presence around town.

However, the ag industry has so much to it, you might often find yourself always asking questions and wanting to know more.

I asked you to send in your questions and for this week’s Home Grown, I had an ag expert answer them!

1. Why are there still people doing the jobs machines can do?

” So, first of all, you have to think about what can’t a machine do. A lot of farming has gotten automated, but there’s a lot that’s really difficult for a machine to do. When you harvest lettuce, that’s actually a very skilled position. You have to know based on the color, based on the size, based on the firmness, which head do you want to pick and which ones you leave in the field. So there’s a lot to it that can’t yet be automated. Having said that, there’s a huge push for mechanizing and figuring out how can machines do it because farm labor is getting harder and harder to have available, ” said Paul Brierly , an agriculture expert at the University of Arizona’s Yuma Center of Excellence for Desert Agriculture.

2. Why do tractors drive so slow and cause traffic?

” First of all, tractors are made for the fields, and they are made for field speeds. They are big, huge, heavy, wide equipment as well. So it really wouldn’t be safe for them to drive 60 miles an hour down the road. I guess all I would ask is that the public knows that they are being as safe as they can. They do have to move between fields to keep the tractors running. Give them a little room and a bit of patience, ” said Brierly .

3. Can I drive a tractor?

” Probably the closest to that is when there is some kind of farm show like we have the Southwest Ag. Summit on display out at Arizona Western College. You can certainly climb in the cab, but as far as out in the fields and doing it, that’s not really possible. They’re pretty complex, they are several hundred thousand dollars each, so they’re very expensive and very complex and take a lot of training, ” said Brierly .

4. Can farmers post a sign at the end of the field, so we can see what is growing?

” There’s a lot of logistical problems with that. Some people don’t realize these crops are only 45-60 acre crops. So some of these farmers are growing several thousand acres in fields that are the size of 10 or 20 acres. If you do the math, they have got a lot of fields out there, and they are rotating them pretty fast. The logistics of getting the right sign in the right field during the right time, there’s cost behind that and there’s the cost of keeping it up-to-date, ” said Brierly .

5. What would a desalination plan look like in using ocean water for agriculture?

” We are at the bottom of the Colorado River. The water that we get is already pretty salty and then by the time it evaporates and goes through the soil and is ready to return to the river, it can be very salty and what we called brackish water. There was really no reason that you would desalinate ocean water number one because we’re not located by an ocean if we were located by an ocean, that might make sense but also this brackish water is not nearly as salty as the ocean, so it’s easier to desalinate, ” said Brierly .

If you didn’t hear your question get answered don’t worry!

I will be doing several more of these segments where I will continue to ask different experts your questions.

If you have a question you would like answered, you can send it over to our KSWT Facebook page.