Raising chiles or raising questions over Arizona water, Ed Curry has ‘skin in the game’

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PEARCE — By the side of a rural two-lane road, about 50 miles north of the border with Mexico and in the middle of a desert valley where groundwater is fought over, sprout the seeds of the nation's green chile pepper industry.

A wide, dirt parking lot wraps around Curry Seed & Chile Company’s offices, outsized for the few pickup trucks. The front of the shoebox-shaped building is of white Galvalume steel, covered with large vinyl-printed photos of family members, visiting students, and chiles.

A bench and potted flowers offer a welcome on the clean front porch. Left of the main door, Edward Curry’s gray Jeep is parked under the shade.

Curry, who's 68 and over 6 feet tall, sits at one of the benches, crouched over a large yellow notepad with his dog, Louie, at his feet. He wears blue jeans, leather boots and a clean checkered shirt.

After more than three decades of mindful selection and crossbreeding chile varieties in the field, Curry made his mark on the industry when he developed a consistently mild pepper. Today it's 2.5 times higher in yield than traditional varieties. Then he bred a thin-skinned chile pepper, another with chocolate flavor, served over the dinner table to Frank Mars (yes, of the candy bar emporium), a Guinness-record heavy pepper, and a yellow chile with antioxidant levels so high that researchers are testing it for Alzheimer's cures.

In total, he sells about 300 commercial varieties and strives to find “unique” out in the fields, a task that is part art, part science and a whole lot of patience.

Notepad and pen in hand, Curry put his hat down and looked up at Steve Hanson, an entomologist from New Mexico State University, who visited to run an experiment for natural pest control in the chile fields. Curry wanted his advice for a speech he’d give that evening at Valley Union High School, 30 minutes south in Elfrida, the same place he graduated from 50 years ago. He listened attentively and scribbled with big letters all over the page.

Curry gives a lot of speeches. Some have drawn standing ovations, some he delivered in auditoriums and legislative hearings. Yet that day he stopped employees and friends to ask what advice they would give young people, a deference that is unique for a man whose ideas so many people give credence to.

“He is pretty influential,” Hanson said. Of the many chile farms in the region, Curry’s the person to work with because he creates all the varieties farmers adopt and is always ahead when it comes to trying new things on the field. “Everything he does gets filtered down.”

Curry has few greater passions than chiles, specifically chile genetics. Ministry work comes very close. On the office counter, in front of a cabinet with sauce bottles and cans of chili paste, he keeps a stack of black-and-white copies with his policy for life and business in capital letters: “TO SPREAD THE GOSPEL.”

He’s not as proud of the awards he has won — Agriculturalist of the Year from the Future Farmers of America in 2022 and the University of Arizona's Eugene G. Sander Lifetime Achievement Award this year — as the kids and teens he teaches at church on Sunday.

That gospel, he says, is one of love and respect. It is one of the reasons he stands “right in the middle” on an issue as divisive as groundwater regulation in rural Arizona. In his basin, neighbors’ wells are going dry from increased pumping by growers, and he agreed to join Gov. Katie Hobbs’ Water Policy Council last year to help update groundwater law.

“The Lord put me here to think about it,” he said softly about breeding better chile varieties. He stopped and added with a smile: “And now water.”

"It’s not by accident.”

'Small agriculture is what built us' Noel and Anna Curry, a young married couple, were planting rainfed peanuts in Oklahoma in the 1950s, one of the driest periods in the century for the state. They lost their crops for two years in a row and could not get their seed back. So, at 19 and 20 years of age, they followed Anna’s brother to a farm in southeastern Arizona.

The opportunity was worthwhile. Land was cheap, and groundwater was nearly free if you could get to it. Sulphur Springs, as the valley is known, attracted families from across the country, who plotted the land with small and medium-sized farms. Valley soils are deep and well-drained, and grasslands for cattle grazing expanded from one mountain range to another, the foothills of the Dragoons to the west, and the Chiricahuas farther east.

“We were raised by the community, and at the center of it were the farms,” reminisced Curry at a farmers' meeting in March. “Small agriculture is what built us.”

Farmland kept growing. The same way the Currys came, so did bigger growers from Texas, clearing larger pieces of land. Noel and a handful of others pushed for the creation of a “critical groundwater area” in their basin. By the 1980s, no new acres could be farmed. But the new laws didn’t stop water levels from dropping.

At the turn of the century, new, bigger agricultural players showed up, buying the existing ag land and drilling deeper. Many farms disappeared or were sold to larger operations. Wells continued to drop or go dry. A handful of residents organized and got onto the 2022 ballot an initiative to apply the most stringent form of groundwater regulation in the state to the two basins that feed Sulphur Springs. Only the basin south of Ed Curry’s farm got it.

Curry inherited his father’s concern for water. But he voted against the Active Management Area, where he farms in the Willcox basin.

He had committed to save water years before. He invested in drip and central pivots, prioritized what chile varieties he would grow in a year, and planted hundreds of acres and later half of his whole farm under exceptionally low water-use crops like rosemary and cacti.

Under the AMA, growers' water rights would be based on their average water use for the past five years. That means that Curry would be allowed some of the lowest use, while farms using the highest amount of water would be rewarded for doing so.

Curry also believed regulation wouldn’t be necessary. Crop markets fluctuated, and whenever the price of corn, cotton, or alfalfa dropped, so did acres. The aquifer would recover again.

“I’ve seen it three times in my life,” he said.

What he didn’t see was that “investors would come,” along with low interest rates, and buy up farmland for high returns. Pecan farms and a dairy farm from Minnesota-based Riverview LLP are some of the biggest water users in a basin that used to be farmed by many.

The growth and increased water use concerns Curry, who is rooted to the land and wants to leave his farm to his son, and later his grandson.

“Looking back, it's so easy to see. Looking forward, I didn't see it.”

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Breeding the perfect chile When the Currys arrived in Sulphur Springs in 1952, Arizona was at the peak of its cotton production. But there was a cap to how much you could plant, and Noel Curry knew he had to search for alternatives. Chile was an opportunity crop for a desert valley with good soils, high elevation and cooler weather.

Curry grew up surrounded by it. As a high school freshman, he was already farming his first seven acres of chile.

Noel leased the tractor to his son, so he’d learn to budget, recalls George Zamora, a long-time friend of Curry’s who studied with him since second grade in Elfrida Elementary.

“THINK! THINK!” Curry remembers his father yelling when he and his sister “weren’t doing good.” Right then it didn’t get him going faster. But later it did, Curry said. “I did my boys that way.”

Curry built his own farm, first with 400 acres, which grew to about 2,200 acres around Pearce and 800 in Mexico. He learned the art of chile breeding not in school but following, since the eighth grade, a well-known breeder from California who worked with his father: Philip Llamas Villa.

Villa liked to say Curry was a “fresh slate,” and taught him common-sense breeding out in the field. They worked together for decades to develop “Arizona 20” which is now the standard for green and red chile in the country. Curry also worked to build and patent his own machinery, used to process, pack and ship millions of sacks of high-quality seed to growers everywhere.

“Next to my father (Villa was) the most influential man in my life,” Curry said with reverence, hunched over his kitchen table. His voice dropped only slightly.

He recalled being next to Villa on his dying bed, some 11 years back. Villa was so weak he couldn’t open his eyes, and with a sliver of voice, he said: “Go-out-in-the-greenhouse. A, B, C or D?” Four selections, a chile cross, they were working on together.

“I come back and I said: ‘Phil: B.’

"And he grinned a little smile. He goes: ‘Yeah.’”

Curry also lives for his work. He keeps a worn-out notebook in Villa’s handwriting on 1990s trials, and he spent so many years tasting peppers on the field that it damaged his esophagus. One of his two cell phone rings at least every 30 minutes, sometimes a provider, an employee working on a ditch, other times a good friend.

"Ed's biggest problem is that he loves what he does too much” and hardly sleeps, says Curry’s childhood friend, Zamora.

He has known Curry now for almost 60 years. Curry likes to call himself the 13th sibling of his family. Many of the Zamoras, a family of Mexican and New Mexican heritage, worked with Curry and his father. At 19, Curry started farming next door to them and would often come over to eat homemade tortillas from Zamora’s mom, Emilia, the “driving force” in the family, who taught Curry Spanish.

After Zamora moved out of Elfrida for college and then built his engineering career with IBM, Curry kept working with his siblings. Over the years, they used each other as “a sounding board,” Zamora said, especially when raising their children, both birth and adopted. Curry is still invited to family parties.

“My job in the last several years is how can I slow him down?” said Zamora, his light eyes grew deeper under thick dark eyebrows.

“And I'm being very serious."

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Water is for 'coming together' One night before Curry drove to his first meeting with the governor’s council, he called someone to ask for advice on his introductory speech: a student from Elfrida’s Future Farmers of America chapter, named Buck.

“We need youth,” Curry told the rural groundwater committee in Phoenix on Nov. 16, 2023, after sharing Buck’s words. Then he quoted Mother Theresa and shared family anecdotes and parables of his dog, Louie. Eventually, he revealed why he jumped at the opportunity of being part of the council to find an alternative to the current groundwater laws:

“I got real skin in the game, an Active Management Area will hurt us,” he told the “fine people” in the committee.

Curry's ideas on water are on a scale — just like his identity: A religious man who believes many of Donald Trump's followers make Christians look bad, and a successful businessman, a rural resident, with a closet full of cartoon ties.

He grows mostly organic crops and is a technology innovator who is close to both small specialty-crop farmers and to people from huge dairy and poultry farms. He meters his water use and believes farmers should curtail their pumping — enough to make a difference but not too much as to go broke. He differs from many of the Farm Bureau’s views on water but also supports local control.

In February, Attorney General Kris Mayes visited his community and announced she was looking at a public nuisance lawsuit against Riverview.

"We don't need that!” Curry said sharply about the litigation attempt. He is on the board of a diverse local alliance aimed at developing water solutions in his basin.

“We'll handle it ourselves and we'll control it," he said. "We'll solve it. That's the kind of people we are."

Curry is the only farmer in the council, and one of two agriculture stakeholders after Arizona Farm Bureau President Stephanie Smallhouse and Sen. Sine Kerr resigned from it, saying farmers’ interests were being ignored and the council was being pushed by a “radical agenda.”

Both women worked on a different proposal for local groundwater control and introduced it in the Legislature in Senate Bill 1221. They visited farmers across the state and negotiated for months with the Governor’s staff. The bill moved to a final vote but was held at the House.

But just like an AMA would hurt farmers in Sulphur Springs, so would SB 1221, Curry said. Some of the clauses in the first version of the bill “would suck this (basin) dry like that,” he said. He snapped his fingers when he said it.

The bill established a dozen steps to create a “basin management area,” including a local election, an unanimous vote from the county, or counties, board of supervisors and a cost-benefit analysis. Mandates to meter groundwater use would be prohibited, and confidential water use reporting would be a requirement.

In mid-March, the Arizona Legislature held a hearing when the bill was still in its early stages. Curry was the first in line to walk up to the podium, hatless, to testify. Less than a minute in, he looked at Rep. Gail Griffin directly, the 89-year-old gatekeeper of groundwater legislation in the state and a “dear friend.”

“I personally want to apologize to you, Gail. I got too ugly, and you know it and I know it,” he told Griffin in front of the committee, regretting a discussion they had. “We can’t work that way.”

The final version of SB 1221 was starkly different from the first. The designation of basin management areas would be streamlined, with mandatory water cuts of up to 10% spread across 10 years, and a permanent, five-member appointed council would represent the basin, with no local election process. That last change was “a giant concession" among many, said Smallhouse at a study committee after the bill died in the House in late June.

“We’re willing to keep working but there is very little left to give."

A bipartisan agreement is close, said Rep. Chris Mathis, D-Tucson, who sponsored a bill based on the water policy council recommendations and was in the negotiating table for SB 1221. Even if Kerr and Smallhouse left the council, "they're still at the table and very much major players," he said.

From experience, Mathis knows collegiality is key because you must build trust and agreement: "The personality piece can sometimes be the most important aspect."

Curry's appointment was an addition, he suggests. An important one, nonetheless, as he is "savvy," a representative of generational family growers, and "a kind and personable guy."

"He's almost from a different era," Mathis said, "out of a Frank Capra movie."

Water is important, getting along more so Curry stands in the middle of the rosemary field, the stacks knee-high blooming purple. He explains how allergic reactions to pesticides made him turn most of his production organic some 12 years back, the chile, the few acres of cotton he plants every year, and the rosemary.

Just like his father, Curry became a versatile grower. He helped raise livestock and at some point grew squash, beans, lettuce, watermelon, grasses and grains. He is now considering oregano, Mormon tea, and other desert-adapted crops.

His rosemary is grown and sold under contract for a company that extracts carnosic acid from the plant, a source of antioxidants and a natural food preservative. It's almost like an orchard, he said. With nearly no returns for the first three years but a good investment after, which can be harvested multiple times.

About half of Curry's farm requires 5 inches of water per acre, a tenth of what is needed to grow alfalfa.

He is well aware the valley changed when the dairy moved in. For a while, he’d farmed large plots with a few inches of water. Two wells, which he was not pumping from, continued to drop “FAST,” he said, and his eyes went big. But he trusts the efforts of Riverview to start fallowing some land, to sit at the table with Sulphur Springs stakeholders, and commit to make a plan. Coming together with his “neighbor,” even if he has hurt him before, is part of his gospel after all.

“Water is important,” he told the governor’s water policy council in his first meeting.

Away from the noise of the capitol he still judges FFA contests, learns Spanish from his employees, and officiates eulogies in town and ranches far away.

“But more important is how we get along, how we connect.”

A tractor disks the bare field nearby, preparing to install the drip irrigation lines for the next chile crop. Workers move across the rosemary field to go back home. There are more questions about the market for this new low-water crop, but Curry is seemingly gone; staring at the horizon and taking in the desert landscape with the sun falling hard at 12 o’clock.

"I love catching pictures with the mountains behind," he says in a dreamy voice, pointing his phone camera toward the Dragoons.

Clara Migoya covers agriculture and water issues for The Arizona Republic and azcentral. Send tips or questions to clara.migoya@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Ed Curry, the chile grower, keeps an eye on farms and groundwater

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