Tudor Uhlhorn has been too busy auctioning off farm equipment to lament the “death” of Texas’ last sugar mill.
“I’m as sad as anyone else,” said the chairman of the board of directors of the Rio Grande Valley Sugar Growers cooperative, which owns the now-closed plant in Santa Rosa, a small town about 40 miles from Brownsville. “I just haven’t had that much time to grieve.”
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In February, the cooperative announced it would close its 50-year-old sugar cane processing plant, the last remaining in the state, by the end of this spring. It didn’t even make it to the end of the season, as most employees were employed until April 29. The ongoing drought meant there wasn’t enough water to irrigate the co-op members’ 34,000 acres of sugar cane, effectively putting an end to sugar cane growing in the South Texas border region.
Cooperative leadership blamed this on ongoing shortages related to a U.S. water-sharing agreement splitting Rio Grande River water with Mexico. If only Mexico had released water from its reservoirs to American farmers, as stipulated in a 1944 treaty, Uhlhorn told the Guardian, the sugar cane might have been saved. Phone calls and emails to several Mexican consulates were not returned.
But the decline of sugarcane in Texas is indicative of the water problems in many agricultural areas. More and more dry farms must compete with other farms, cities, industries and mining operations for dwindling resources. In 2022, drought decimated Texas cotton and forced California growers to shut down half of their rice fields. Water conflicts are also on the rise as water flows in the Colorado River and other vital waterways decline, pitting states against states, between states against indigenous nations, and farmers against municipalities.
“That story is happening across the western U.S.,” said Maurice Hall, senior advisor on climate-resilient water systems at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). And irrigated agriculture, “which uses the dominant portion of our managed water supply in most of the arid and semiarid western U.S., is right in the middle.” Sugarcane may be the first irrigated crop to die in the lower Rio Grande. But it probably won’t be the last.
By early March, the plant had harvested the last of the sugar cane crops from about 100 producers in the region, including the 7,000-acre farm where Travis Johnson works with his uncle in Lyford, Texas. His family has farmed this land for 100 years, but sugar cane – a lucrative crop thanks to government subsidies – was a new addition about 20 years ago.
As the notoriously fierce winds of the lower Rio Grande pounded through his phone, Johnson sounded resigned to the end of his family farm’s cane era. In the near future, he will grow more cotton, corn and grains that will take up the rest of his acreage. “It was nice to have another crop we could rely on,” he said. “Sugarcane was something we could harvest and get money for at a time when we were spending money on our other crops.”
Although sugarcane was a reliable cash crop, it is also a water hog. In a place like the lower Rio Grande, where average rainfall is 9 inches or less per year, sugar cane requires up to 20 inches of water per year. Without irrigation it cannot grow here. The cooperative’s sugar factory produced 60,000 tons of molasses and 160,000 tons of raw sugar annually, which is also a water-heavy operation.
“So many steps in that process require an enormous amount of water,” starting with washing sugar cane as it comes out of the field, said journalist Celeste Headlee, whose Big Sugar podcast explored Florida’s exploitative sugar industry. (Most of America’s sugar cane is sold commercially in only two other states, Florida and Louisiana; less water-intensive sugar beets are grown in cooler states like Minnesota and North Dakota).
Under the 1944 treaty, Mexico is obligated to supply 1.75 million hectares of water to the US in a five-year cycle (the current cycle ends in October 2025).
“This thing worked pretty well until 1992,” Uhlhorn said, when “we got into a situation where Mexico couldn’t deliver their water” due to an extraordinary drought — a scenario that played out again in the early 2000s. In 2022, Rio Grande reservoirs fell to treacherously low capacities. A storm eventually dumped the rain mainly on the Mexican side; what fell in Texas “was enough water for maybe one irrigation, but you would have to starve your other crops” to water sugarcane, Uhlhorn said. A Texas Farm Bureau release stated that Mexico currently “owes 736,000 acre-feet of water.”
Due to a lack of water, Texas growers plowed under thousands of acres of sugar cane last growing season. “So now [the farmers are] We have been reduced to 10,000 hectares and we are no longer viable,” Uhlhorn explains about the decision to end production. “Even if we had had the best yields ever, the factory would have lost millions of dollars with our fixed costs.”
Texas A&M agricultural economist Luis Ribera said, “It’s not that Mexico is holding onto water because they are bad neighbors. They use it because drought has ravaged both sides of the border. As David Michel, senior fellow for water security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, explained throughout the Rio Grande [Valley] faces these challenges “from source to sea”. Users on both sides of the border will need to define water efficiency and conservation strategies to alleviate these pressures.” In other words, says Travis Johnson, the plant’s closure “will probably be a wake-up call for farmers in our area, when we get water again, to try to preserve it as much as possible.”
In the period immediately following the shutdown, Uhlhorn and the co-op members are selling equipment to pay off debts and trying to find replacement jobs for factory workers at places like SpaceX and the Brownsville Ship Channel. The facility employed 100 full-time workers and supported an additional 300 part-time workers. The cooperative also reportedly shipped all 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 estimated $100 million in economic impact annually from four counties in the lower Rio Grande. The loss of jobs and community income could well extend to the valley’s $200 million citrus industry, which is also struggling to meet its water needs and survive.
“I wish I could tell you that we had all the answers and that we were geniuses, and that we would avoid what happened to the sugar mill. But I can’t do that,” said Dale Murden, a grapefruit and cattle farmer. “Water levels heading into the spring and summer are as low as they have ever been, and some water districts have already notified their customers that they are gone [of water] for the year. Without rain, inflow and cooperation from Mexico, we are in serious trouble.”
The International Boundary and Water Commission, which is responsible for implementing the 1944 treaty, began negotiating a new provision — called a “minute” — in 2023 that aims to “bring predictability and reliability to Rio Grande supplies to users in both countries,” a spokesperson wrote in an email.
Vanessa Puig-Williams, director of the EDF water program in Texas, said that if the new minute focuses on the science of how much water is actually available on both sides of the border, it would be an opportunity “to think more innovatively and creatively to think about how we can preserve some of those water rights.”
Regardless, Michel said farmers must adapt to a thirstier reality. That could include using recycled water and tools like moisture sensors, finding better irrigation techniques and planting more drought-resistant crop varieties. And maybe they have to come to terms with the fact that ‘you can’t do that.’ [certain things] more just because there is no water.”
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Chelsea Fisher, a University of South Carolina anthropologist who studies environmental justice conflicts, said lessons relevant to the current water crisis can be found in agricultural history. “Something you notice in societies that manage to farm sustainably for at least several centuries is that they mimic relationships that already exist in nature – whether that means copying the way wetlands recycle nutrients, or Now it concerns dry agriculture, which is very much on the rise. in sync with the ways in which water naturally collects in certain places,” she said.
Johnson even plans to stop growing crops that require irrigation. Instead, he will only focus on those that can be grown with naturally occurring moisture. ‘I do not think so [the water situation] It just gets amazingly better overnight,” he said.
The Hall of the Environmental Defense Fund said the water crisis prompted growers to ask: “What is the future we want? And how do we approach that future, while clearly recognizing what real hydrology is? … People want to continue doing what they’ve always done. But at some point, unwanted things will happen. Things like sugar cane, industries and entire communities disappear. Farmers who are willing to listen to what science tells us is going to happen, and think about how we can do things differently: that’s where the real innovation will happen at scale.”
Reporting for this piece was supported by a media grant from the Nova Institute for Health