KINGMAN – Newly elected Arizona Attorney General Chris Mays has said he wants to end Saudi Arabia’s farm operations along the Colorado River within six months.

Mayes told News 12 that he believes the Saudi government’s lease of farmland constitutes an illegal gift under the state’s constitution, and has paid $38 million for water used by the company that manages La Paz County’s Alfalfa farms. He said he was planning to seek his return.

“I’ve never seen anything this bad in my life by a state government,” Mays told the station. “Every day counts,” Mays said. “That water springs up from the ground every day.”

The Saudi government has leased 10,000 acres of land near Vicksburg from the Arizona Land Department and paid $100,000 a year to allow all the groundwater needed for alfalfa farming to be pumped and shipped back to the Middle East. .

Groundwater in the area is outside of active management areas, so there are few laws in the way.

“Arizonas are rightfully outraged that Arizona allowed a Saudi-owned company to stick straws in the ground and suck up water for free,” Mays said in a News 12 article. Quoted.

Mays campaigned in part on a promise to address the issue. Mays, who calls agricultural leases “lover’s water grabs,” toured the Vicksburg area in September and met with La Paz County Supervisor Holly Irwin, a vocal critic of leases.

“It’s totally unfair,” Holly Irwin told the station. “In my opinion, it’s a crime.”

Saudi Arabia’s farms back in 2018, when the arid kingdom banned the cultivation of water-intensive alfalfa, prompting its farmers to grow alfalfa elsewhere in the world to be shipped as feed for dairy cows.