More Words, Deeper Hole

Beets do badly with heat way up here in the frozen north, so I'm a bit surprised you could get them to sprout!

So, poking around on Google, my supposition from that crop list that it's all irrigated is true. (It also looks like consistent productivity has been driving up both water use and the price of agricultural land.)

New Mexico as a whole gets more than half its irrigation water from "surface flow"; that's dependent on annual rainfall. (So's the aquifer, eventually.) If they've got enough water, transpiration can keep the plant cooler than the air temperature; if they don't, and that's in significant part a guessing game about how much water to apply based on how hot you think it's going to be for the next week (assuming you've got no worries about water supply...), you get reduced yields or crop kills.

It's certainly good that this isn't _usual_ but I don't see where the argument that this isn't a worry arises.

We're not actually arguing that heat _can_ kill plants here, are we? Everybody's seen a tree that's had an idling truck parked under it or next to it, and the foliage gone all brown and crinkled where the exhaust plume made the leaves too hot?