________________Monsoons and Cotton Crops in the Desert_______________
 
[A letter written to the folks back home and published in the newspaper some time back]
 
Howdy folks.
 
This is your Occasional Arizona Correspondent with that promised information on the Arizona cotton crop.
 
But first, you may be interested to know that the summer monsoon season arrived with a vengeance here in the desert last evening.  Yes, he did say summer monsoon – there is a winter monsoon also in January and February, but it plays second fiddle to its summer cousin.
 
Anyway, imagine a solid wall of dust a mile high stretching from horizon to horizon driven by 40 to 60 mile per hour winds rolling toward you.  Very often this massive speeding wall of earth precedes a summer monsoon storm like a tidal wave.  It is a sight to behold.  Think blizzard, but a dry blizzard.  Very dry!
 
Sometimes it rains.  Sometimes it doesn’t.  When it does, it is often just enough to make mud on cars, cats and dogs left outside.  Occasionally the heavens open up and the water pours fourth in a truly phenomenal deluge.  This time the wall of dirt was followed by one of Arizona’s legendary eighteen-inch rains.  Eighteen inches between drops, that is.   It’s rain, but it’s a dry rain.
 
It took about an hour for the wind to subside and for the dust to decide on its final resting place, which was everywhere.  Then the lightning bolts proceeded to march across the Valley of the Sun (that’s what they call the Phoenix area) until midnight.  Thor is often very active here in the summer monsoon season.  In fact, the Mogollon rim (Rodeo-Chediski fire, remember?) sports the reputation as the area with the greatest number of lightning strikes annually in the United States.
 
One nice thing, though, was that the storm cooled things off.  It had been one hundred and thirteen degrees as the storm moved in.  By the time the lightning commenced, the temperature had plummeted to one hundred and two degrees.  What a relief!
 
But I digress.  I know you are impatient to know about the cotton crops in the desert.  Normally one thinks of cotton farming in terms the Southeastern United States where the rainfall and heat are enormous in the summer.   The farmers there cannot control either element in the cotton crop equation.
 
Arizona has the heat, but not the rainfall.  That turns out to be an advantage.  It has been found that if the cotton is denied water at a particular stage of its development, it becomes stressed.  I don’t blame it.  But, if water is then supplied at a critical time, the cotton takes advantage of it and produces cotton boles prolifically.  I would to, wouldn’t you?  By controlling the water to the crop, Arizona farmers get a super crop of cotton.  This is called stressing the cotton, strangely enough.
 
Of course getting water from the canals to the cotton is up to the farmer.  You guessed it – irrigation is big around here.  But, to make that work, the fields and furrows have to be just about perfectly level for uniform water flow.  That is solved using laser controlled field equipment.  The plow monitors a level laser beam set up at the edge of the field and moves itself up or down to compensate for the down or up movement of its wheels on the surface of the field.  Thus the furrows for the water are about as level as one can make them.
 
Next time I’ll tell you about the dairy farms around us.  There are some respectable herd sizes, but nary a barn or silo to be seen.  And scenes of cattle grazing in a field, a hallmark back home, are real hard to come by in Arizona.  So how do they do it?  Tune in next time to find out.
 
Your Occasional Arizona Correspondent.
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