Arizona Tribal Agriculture Generates Over $750 Million in Total Economic Output, New Analysis Finds
The University of Arizona News
Tribal agriculture contributed $753.3 million in total economic output and directly supported more than 2,300 jobs statewide in 2022, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis examining the economic footprint of Arizona's 22 federally recognized tribes using data from the most recent agricultural census.
The report, "Tribal Agriculture in Arizona: An Economic Contribution Analysis" was conducted by Cooperative Extension economic analysts in the University of Arizona College of Agriculture, Life, and Environmental Sciences and was supported by the Indian Land Tenure Foundation and the Native American Agriculture Fund.
Arizona's Indigenous communities have practiced agriculture for thousands of years, developing farming systems grounded in traditional ecological knowledge, water management and biodiversity. These practices remain central to tribal economies, cultural identity and food sovereignty today, yet the overall economic contribution of tribal agriculture across the state has received little study.
Estimating tribal agricultural activity is difficult because federal datasets often do not align with tribal boundaries, many reservations span multiple states, and privacy protections limit detailed reporting in sparsely populated areas, according to Dari Duval, corresponding author on the report and an Extension economist in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment.
"We have always known that tribal agriculture is a huge share of Arizona agriculture in terms of the number of producers, the amount of land that these operations manage, and it has sort of an outsized effect on the state-level numbers," Duval said.
Tribal agricultural activity was estimated by the research team using the USDA Census of Agriculture, Reservation Census, and Navajo Nation Census, supplemented with USDA CropScape satellite data and supporting Extension and institutional reports. These sources provide a baseline estimate and the report is meant to provide a starting point for future analyses in partnership with tribal communities.
Key economic findings
The analysis revealed American Indians operate 62% of all farms in Arizona and manage 20 million acres, or 81% of the state's total agricultural land.
While numerous, many operations are categorized as "small-scale," with 67% of American Indian farms falling in between 1 and 9 acres in size.
Despite that, on-farm sales from tribal agriculture totaled $434 million in 2022, with crop production accounting for $410 million and livestock production contributing $23.9 million.
American Indian farms also account for 95% of all sheep and goat farms and 71% of vegetable and melon farms in the state.
"People don't always connect the dots and there's this perception that tribal communities aren't impacting our economic bottom line in the state," said Michael Kotutwa Johnson, a coauthor on the study and assistant professor and Cooperative Extension specialist of Indigenous resilience. "But this report, for the first time, can really point to that bottom line."
The report debunks the idea that tribal agriculture is an isolated sector. It found that 85% of economic multiplier effects generated by tribal agriculture actually "spill over" into non-tribal areas of the state.
Maricopa County was the largest beneficiary, receiving $203 million in economic output from tribal agricultural activities in 2022, followed by Yuma County with $31 million and Pima County at $18 million.
This activity supported 1,670 jobs outside of tribal lands in sectors such as wholesale nondurables – like food distributors, fuel, and farm supplies – and agriculture support services, according to the report.