Agave thirsty thursday #2 - Nate Jones from Sweet Acacia Farm

I was going to ask... did you want to start working with agave based off, you know, seeing the agave that were on your land and trying to expand off of that? Or, you know, how did your interest in agave come up? Right.

Yeah.

I would say it's probably a couple, couple of factors.

So Veronica, my fiance and I, we talked about, Really just wanting to focus on the highest value crops because both of us were doing other stuff for work.

And it was the sort of thing where there were a couple things at play.

One was that we didn't want to have a heavily mechanized system at all.

Yeah.

yeah the thought of maintaining machinery and stuff like

that yeah with all the tractor prices nowadays it's crazy

it's not it costs

more than a house

yeah and i feel for those guys too like just keeping them running too i mean yeah

that's one thing you hear a lot of farmers complain about in consulting uh especially you know i don't want to mention the brand names but some of the brands um the tractors that they sell now you know you have to pay like a yearly subscription for software so anytime you want to repair that machine it's a you know it's a huge pain so a lot of uh you know these farmers are supporting right to repair bills and stuff right because it's so difficult to just put put a hand into their tractors but yeah you know you get to avoid all that with a dollar for sure

Yeah, it was definitely a big part of it was seeing, okay, there's agave thriving here already and recognizing that that was kind of where our area is moving, like in terms of...

in some of the adjacent valleys, they're starting to have issues with groundwater and they're starting to roll out.

Um,

like they, this about two years ago, it was a really big commotion locally.

Um, they passed a active management area, um, and they

limited

new farmers.

Arizona's

heading very, uh, you know, they're, I feel like they're following the same path that California did with regulating groundwater through, uh, Sigma or the sustainable groundwater management act, uh, And, you know, it's a state that a lot of agriculture depends on the aquifers.

So I think it's a smart move, but definitely we'll have to change what type of things we farm, right? So I think that's a wise move.

That's kind of why I got into agave and cactus because I studied so much water policy and I was like, oh, this is going to change so much that, you know, we're going to have to completely change what we farm.

Yeah.