Who owns our aquifers?

by | Oct 17, 2023

by Dan Martin

Water. That word can mean no more to anyone on the planet than desert dwellers. We are incredibly fortunate to sit on a very large aquifer that has served New Mexicans for decades.

The Mimbres Basin aquifer system has fed millions by the sweat of our ranchers and farmers. Tons of pecans, chiles, pumpkins, onions, pintos, the finest free range beef and even more staples make their homes in pantries around the world.

Our ranchers have generations of experience that has instilled a great stewardship of the land.

Another dust bowl such as that of the 1930s is only avoided by proper utilization of our limited resources. Our ranchers love our land as few others can comprehend. The want their legacy to continue feeding the world for generations to come.

But our water is still running out.

The United States, through our fervent embrace of freedom, has enacted laws meant to provide a level of anonymity to the extremely wealthy, who for reasons of their own wish to obfuscate their identity.

The shell company model is now being utilized by foreign nations to drain the elemental ingredient of life from the very ground we walk on.

Farmland that has lain dormant for half a century is now being plowed and irrigated by corporations you would need a Ouija board to identify. Arizona is now enacting measures to restrict water usage to Saudi corporations, which are farming thousands of acres of high-water- demand alfalfa to be shipped back to Saudi Arabia to feed their cattle. If that sounds to you like they’d rather drain our aquifer than their own… well, you aren’t alone.

When you run out of rainforest you have to farm somewhere.

According to the USDA, 37.6 million acres of U.S. agricultural land was foreign-owned overall by the end of 2020. That is more land than Maryland, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island combined!

Do you trust corporate farms to care about the health of the land? Do they have family that they trust to keep the land alive for the next generation? Or will corporate profits and other allegiances entice them to drain our aquifers and leave us in the dust?

Click here to watch an interview with Dan Martin.