This is the best summary I could come up with:

Adding to the problem, irrigation costs more as groundwater levels continue to drop — driving some farmers’ energy bills to pump water into the thousands of dollars every month.

Lindsey Pyle, who farms 950 acres of pumpkins in North Texas about an hour outside Lubbock, has seen her energy bills go up too, alongside the cost of just about everything else, from supplies and chemicals to seed and fuel.

Steven Ness, who grows pinto beans and pumpkins in central New Mexico, said the rising cost of irrigation as groundwater dwindles is an issue across the board for farmers in the region.

That’s a problem that likely won’t go away because aquifers can take hundreds or thousands of years to refill after overuse, and climate change is reducing the very rain and snow needed to recharge them in the arid West.

He hires guest workers through the H-2A program, but Colorado recently instituted a law ensuring farmworkers to be paid overtime — something most states don’t require.

That makes it tough to maintain competitive prices with places where laborers are paid less, and the increasing costs of irrigation and supplies stack onto that, creating what Mazzotti calls a “no-win situation.”

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