There used to be a time when Arizona used to be a major date state. It started when Spanish missionaries brought date palms to the Americas in the early years of colonization. At the beginning of the 20th century, these palm trees and their descendants were not producing dates in large quantities, so The U.S Department of Agriculture started importing dates from places like Morocco, selecting favourites from the 3,000 varieties of the world. In the United States, date palms grow only in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert and southern California.