By Gary
Polakovic
The
Press-Enterprise
By Gary
Polakovic
The
Press-Enterprise
Lloyd Heger is a farmer and a self-described environmentalist.
A DDT salesman when he was younger, he no longer uses herbicides or pesticides on his 440-acre organic ranch tucked near the foot of the Superstition Hills in Imperial County. Doves, mallards and largemouth bass thrive in ponds he built. And he farms in a part of the desert where water-saving irrigation is preached like religion.
Like most growers, Heger, 67, believes he has a special relationship with the soil, water and seasons that makes love for the environment as natural as the squash and melons he produces.
Farmer Lloyd Heger is framed by plants on one of his fields
Steve Medd / The Press Enterprise
Stephen
Sedam-Stone/The Press
Enterprise But mention Salton Sea
pollution, and the affable red-headed farmer tightens his
posture and fixes his pale blue eyes into a sharp stare from
beneath the shadow of his straw hat. "The pollution we're putting
into the Salton Sea is minimal," he declared. Most farmers
in the Imperial and Coachella valleys are of the same mind.
They doubt their waste water has much to do with the
contamination that is overwhelming the Salton Sea. Instead,
they blame politicians, upstream Colorado river users and
Mexico, which dumps waste water in the New River that has
its terminus in the sea. Agricultural wastes have
been dumped into the Salton Sea for almost a century. Yet if
a cleanup is ever required, farmers do not think they should
pay. "That would be a hard sell,"
said Don Cox, a veteran alfalfa grower in Imperial County
and member of the state Colorado River Basin regional Water
Quality Control Board, the agency charged with protecting
water quality in the Salton Sea area. Pollution in the Salton Sea
is among the least of farmers' concerns. "I used to have a list of 25
top priorities I'd tackle each day," Cox said, "Things like
whiteflies, pesticide regulations, insurance, workers' comp
and wondering why tomatoes sold for 10 cents a pound this
year when it was 20 cents last year and they cost 880 cents
a pound in the grocery store. "...It's (Salton Sea) not on
his (farmer's) worry list right now...we're in a survival
mode down here right now and they have more problems to deal
with than they know how," Cox said. In the culture of
agriculture, the very thought that something as wholesome as
farming could be harmful to the environment borders on
blasphemy.
"In this valley, agriculture is big business and you're not going to
get anyone to admit there may be a problem with it," said Tracy
Warner of El Centro, who slipped into Su Casa restaurant in Brawley
on a muggy August night for an enchilada dinner with his wife.
Farmers see themselves as saviors, not destroyers, of the sea. Farm drains are a significant source of life-giving freshwater for the saline sea. Without agricultural runoff, the sea itself would dry up and fish and birds would perish.
Eliminating farm waste water entering the sea could halt farming on 600,000 acres -- more than 10 times the acreage idled when drains feeding tainted water to the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge in the San Joaquin Valley were closed a decade ago.
"You can't shut off the drains or you'll kill the farming. You may as well say you're going to buy the Imperial Valley and turn it back to desert," said John Benson, whose family has farmed 4,000 acres near Westmorland since the 1960s.