An Arizona town competing for basic access to clean water has sunk more than 18 feet over the past eight decades — with no signs of stopping — as locals struggle to make headway against area megafarms reportedly sucking the land dry.
Residents of Wenden, an unincorporated community roughly 60 miles east of the Colorado River Reservation, have had to pivot to digging thousands of feet underground just to reach groundwater.
For many towns, this wouldn’t be an issue. But along the Colorado River, communities and companies are locked in battles over its water supply.
Wenden draws roughly 38% of its entire water supply from the Colorado River, as do major cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix — but take more.
As groundwater trickles further out of reach in Wenden, the rest of the community’s water supply is up in the air, leaving many high and dry.
“It’s a train wreck waiting to happen,” Gary Saiter, head of the Wenden Water Improvement District, told NBC News.
“In the last 15 years, Wenden itself has sunk into a subsidence bowl. We’ve sunk over 3.5 feet. We sink it another 2.2 inches per year. It’s absolutely out of balance. It’s not sustainable.”
Farmers keep digging deeper and deeper wells year after year — but major megafarms flushed with cash are sapping the resources and reinforcing an unforgiving cycle that could end the community.
A recent study from Arizona State University revealed that the sinkage is caused by the rapid acceleration of groundwater use in the Colorado River Basin.
“Just the way air keeps the tire pumped up, water keeps the land pumped up,” Jay Famiglietti, a professor at ASU who led the study, told ABC 15.
“Clay minerals are flat, and so when the water that’s between them disappears, gets pumped out, then the flat minerals stack up, kind of like dishes in a sink, and that has the impact of lowering the ground surface,” he elaborated.
To make matters worse, the ASU study noted that nearly 80% of Arizona has no regulations for groundwater, meaning that corporate farms don’t have to report how much they consume.
It also creates an opening for companies to buy water and land usage rights in communities like Wenden and pump the water to a completely different location, Saiter added.
Matters have spiraled so out of control that Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes filed a nuisance lawsuit against megafarm company Fondomonte for inflicting harm on Wenden with its excessive digging.
The company is owned by Almarai, Saudi Arabia’s largest dairy company, which grows water-guzzling alfalfa in the US.
“The water has disappeared for them because the Saudis are sucking it out of the ground. Fondomonte told the network its water use is reasonable and it makes a ‘conscious effort to manage water use’,” Mayes told NBC News.
Mayes’ office estimates the company chews up a staggering 81% of all groundwater in the area.
During the 2010s, foreign-owned megafarms expanded from 1.25 million acres to nearly 3 million, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
Arizona’s legislative body has tried, and failed, to impose regulations on groundwater pumping in rural parts of the state.
Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, proposed the creation of rural groundwater management areas during the 2025 session.
Both sides of the aisle clashed over how to regulate. Each camp proposed its own ideals on how much groundwater pumping from aquifers should be reduced by, but struggled to reach a middle ground number they could agree on.
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