About a dozen people stood at the edge of the field at Tres Hermanas Ranch in Cornville.
They were at the top of the hill close to an irrigation ditch, an offshoot of Oak Creek that separated from the main channel a few miles away. The irrigation ditch met with a pump, which filtered the water and pushed some of it into the Tres Hermanas Ranch system, letting it flow down the hills to the sprinkler system, wetting the fields where the cows raised by the ranchers roamed.
The people looking at the irrigation ditch were not themselves farmers or ranchers. They came representing various corporate partners such as Intel and Coca-Cola who have gotten involved in water conservation all over the country, including the Verde River watershed, through the Business for Water Stewardship, a program through the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, which aims at getting businesses involved in the efforts of protecting waterways and natural habitats from overuse and climate change.
“Increasingly, those risks are real, and once those risks are real it’s no longer a luxury for a company to support that work,” BFWS CEO Todd Reeve said. “Companies are increasingly feeling pressure for what they should do about water and water risk.”
Coca-Cola of North America has been involved in water conservation since 2012, with a goal of returning the amount of water that the company uses back into natural water systems through offset credits and funding conservation. According to Reeve, the various companies that have gotten involved in water conservation do not directly profit from their efforts, but are kept involved through the shared necessity for future business and life in the area to keep the water flowing healthily, as well as the brand value of being responsible stewards of the environment.
“To be a good corporate citizen, a good employee, you need to take care,” Rob Myers of Waste Management in Phoenix, who attended the Verde River field trip, said. “Mother Earth can’t speak for herself. As an environ- mental company, Waste Management wants to do our part to do the right thing, whether it’s educate folks on how to recycle right, composting or water conservation.”
The field trip started out at Sinagua Malt in Camp Verde, before visiting Hauser & Hauser Farms, Tres Hermanas Ranch, and finishing out the day at Page Springs Cellars.
At each location, the visiting troupe were educated on how the business uses and maintains the water resources in the area, by local business owners and representatives, as well as by Kim Schonek of the Verde River Conservancy.
“I don’t know if we could do it without corporate partners,” Zach Hauser of Hauser & Hauser Farms said of their irrigation efforts. He also brought up how the assurances of corporate funding allowed for the farm to seek legal rights for the land that prevent it from being divided up into separate parcels for development inthe future.
“It protects it long-term. It’s not going to be developed and that’s the greatest feeling in the world.”
With many of the visitors coming from the Phoenix area, a large focus of the trip was on how the water from the Verde River eventually flows into the Gila, providing much of the water used by the Valley of the Sun.
“If water is being saved in one place, it can be used in another, so it does help businesses,” Warren Gorowitz of Hunter Industries, which manufactures irrigation equipment, said. “If we don’t have the water to grow the food we need that hurts businesses.”
In addition to business representatives, Sharon Carpenter, Senior Policy Advisor to Speaker Russell Bowers of the Arizona House of Representatives, came along, hoping to learn about the Verde River in order to aid the state government’s efforts to protect the water supply.
“I’m glad that stakeholders got an opportunity to see firsthand the water challenges that residents and businesses in the Verde River Watershed are facing,” Bowers wrote in an email. “The insight that they gained from today’s tour will be valuable as our state continues to consider policies to secure our water future.”
“The magnitude of what’s been accomplished, it really stands out from anywhere in the West,” Reeve said of the Verde River area. “In most places, you’ll find one little pilot project — one farm or one opportunity, very piecemeal. Here, we’ve seen a decade of scaling up this work. What is unique for me is the combination of all these projects.”
