by Tudor Uhlhorn was too busy auctioning agricultural equipment to mourn the “death” of Texas’ last sugar mill.
“I’m as sad as anybody,” said the chairman of the board of the Rio Grande Valley Sugar Growers cooperative, which owns the now-closed mill in Santa Rosa, a small town about 40 miles from Brownsville. “I didn’t have much time to cry.”
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In February, the cooperative announced it would close its 50-year-old sugarcane processing mill, the last remaining in the state, by the end of this spring. It did not even reach the end of the season, and most workers were employed until April 29. The ongoing drought meant there was not enough water to irrigate the cooperative’s 34,000 acres of sugarcane, effectively ending sugarcane farming in the southern reaches of Texas.
The Cooperative’s leadership blames the ongoing shortage on a US water-sharing agreement that divides the Rio Grande River water with Mexico. If only Mexico had released water from its reservoirs to American farmers as prescribed by the 1944 treaty, Uhlhorn told the Guardian, the sugarcane might have been saved. Phone calls and emails to various Mexican consulates were not returned.
But the decline of sugarcane in Texas is a reflection of the water woes of many agricultural areas. Increasingly drier farms compete with other farms, cities, industries and mining operations to deplete resources. In 2022, a Texas cotton drought ravaged California and forced California growers to lay half their rice fields idle. Water disputes are also on the rise as reduced flows in the Colorado River and other critical waterways pit the state against the state, states against indigenous nations and farmers against municipalities.
“That story is playing out across the western US,” said Maurice Hall, senior adviser on climate-resilient water systems at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). And irrigated agriculture, “which uses most of our managed water supply in most of the arid and semi-arid western United States, is right in the middle.” Sugar cane may be the first irrigated crop to go under in the lower Rio Grande. But it probably won’t be the last.
In early March, the mill had harvested the last sugar crops from about 100 area producers, including from the 7,000-acre farm Travis Johnson works with his uncle in Lyford, Texas. His family has been farming this land for 100 years, but sugar – a lucrative crop thanks to government subsidies – was a new addition about 20 years ago.
As the fierce winds of the lower Rio Grande blew through his phone, Johnson resigned himself to the end of his family’s sugar farm era. In the near future, he will be growing more of the cotton, corn and grain that fills the rest of his acreage. “It was nice to have another crop that we could count on,” he said. “Sugarcane was something we could harvest and get money for when we were spending money on our other crops.”
Although sugarcane has been a reliable cash crop, it is also a water hog. In a place like the lower Rio Grande, where the average rainfall is 29 inches or less per year, sugarcane requires up to 50 inches of water per year. It cannot grow here without irrigation. The Cooperative’s sugar mill put out 60,000 tons of molasses and 160,000 tons of raw sugar a year, and that too is a water-heavy business.
“A lot of the steps throughout that process require an enormous amount of water,” starting with washing the cane when it comes in from the field, said journalist Celeste Headlee, whose Big Sugar podcast explored Florida’s exploitative sugar industry. (Most US sugar cane is grown commercially in only two other states, Florida and Louisiana; less water-intensive sugar beets are grown in cooler states like Minnesota and North Dakota).
According to the 1944 Treaty, Mexico is obligated to deliver 1.75m acre-feet of water to the US in any given five-year cycle (the current cycle ends in October 2025).
“This thing worked well until 1992,” Uhlhorn said, when “we got into a situation where Mexico wasn’t delivering their water” because of an unusual drought – a situation that played out again in the early 2000s. 2000s. In 2022, treacherous resources on the Rio Grande reservoir decreased. In the end a storm brought rain mainly on the Mexican side; what fell in Texas was “enough water for irrigation alone, maybe, but you’d have to starve your other crops” to water sugar cane, Uhlhorn said. A publication from the Texas Farm Bureau stated that “736,000 acre-feet of water is currently destined for Mexico”.
A lack of water caused Texas growers to plow under thousands of acres of sugar during the last growing season. “So now [the farmers are] down to 10,000 acres and we are no longer viable,” Uhlhorn explained of the decision to end production. “Even if we had the best production ever, with our fixed costs, the mill would have lost millions of dollars.”
Texas A&M agricultural economist Luis Ribera said: “It’s not that Mexico is withholding water because they’re bad neighbors. They are using it” because drought has affected both sides of the border. As explained by David Michel, senior fellow for water security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the entire Rio Grande. [Valley] address these challenges “from source to sea. Users on both sides of the border will need to define water efficiencies and conservation strategies to mitigate these pressures.” In other words, said Travis Johnson, “the closing of the mill will probably be a wake-up call to farmers in our area, whenever we get water again, to try to conserve it as much as possible.”
In the immediate aftermath of the closing, Uhlhorn and co-op members are selling equipment to settle debt and trying to find replacement jobs for the mill’s staff at places like SpaceX and the Brownsville Ship Channel. The facility employed 100 full-time workers and supported another 300 part-time workers. The cooperative also reportedly shipped all the remaining sugar from its warehouses more than 600 miles away to the Domino refinery in Chalmette, Louisiana, one of the largest sugar processors in the hemisphere.
The Santa Rosa sugar mill was a vital cog in an industry that generated an economic impact of $100m a year from four counties in the lower Rio Grande. The valley’s $200m citrus industry, which is also struggling to meet its water needs and survive, could face significant loss of jobs and community income.
“I wish I could tell you that we had all the answers and that we were geniuses, and that we were going to avoid what happened to the sugar mill. But I can’t,” said Dale Murden, a grapefruit and cattle farmer. “Water going into the spring and summer is at an all time low, and some water districts have already notified customers that they are out. [of water] for the year. Without rain and influx and cooperation from Mexico, we’re in big trouble.”
The Commission on International Boundaries and Water, which is responsible for implementing the 1944 treaty, began negotiations on a new provision for it – known as “minutes” – in 2023, with the aim of “bringing predictability and reliability to deliveries Rio Grande to users in both. countries”, a spokesperson wrote in an email.
Vanessa Puig-Williams, director of EDF’s water program in Texas, said that if the new moment focused on the science of how much water is actually available on both sides of the border, it would be an opportunity to “think more more innovative and creative about how we preserve some of those water rights”.
Either way, Michel said farmers have to adjust to a harsher reality. That could include using recycled water and tools like moisture sensors, finding better irrigation techniques and planting more drought-resistant crop varieties. And they may have to reconcile themselves to the fact that “you will not be able to do it [certain things] any other because there is no water”.
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Chelsea Fisher, a University of South Carolina anthropologist who studies environmental justice conflicts, said lessons related to the current water crisis can be found throughout the history of agriculture. “What you notice across societies that have been successful in sustainable farming for at least hundreds of years is that they are mimicking relationships that already exist in nature – whether that means copying the way the nutrient wetlands are recycled, whether dry land farming is involved. synchronize with the ways that water naturally collects in certain places,” she said.
In fact, Johnson plans to stop growing crops that require irrigation. Instead, he will focus only on those that can be grown with naturally available moisture. “I do not think so [the water situation] but it gets better overnight,” he said.
The Environmental Defense Fund Hall said the water crisis was forcing farmers to ask: “What future do we want? And how do we move towards that future, recognizing with a clear view what real hydrology is? … People want to keep doing what they’re doing. But at some point, undesirable things are going to happen. Things like sugarcane and whole industries and communities disappearing. Farmers who are willing to listen to what the science is telling us is going to happen, and think about how we can do things differently: that’s where the real scale innovation is going to happen.”
Reporting for this piece was supported by a media fellowship from the Nova Health Institute
