Frank Schuster’s three-thousand-acre farm lies on the edge of the Rio Grande, punctuated by the rust-colored border wall that cuts through his cropland. Schuster has been tending his land near Pharr, Texas, since 1977, when his father’s early death left him in charge of the family farm at age 24. Now 71, he still pumps the waters of the river into the furrows of his crop rows of cabbages, onions, and turnips.Like the majority of the farms in the semiarid Lower Rio Grande Valley, Schuster’s Val Verde Vegetable Co. depends on the river to sustain crops in the state’s most productive region for vegetables. Without the Rio Grande, farmers would be forced to survive on the area’s sporadic rainfall. “Irrigation from the river built the…
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