Adaptive Agriculture
Creating a Resilient Farming Culture
Farmers in Arizona—particularly those that grow cotton, alfalfa, and other water-intensive crops—are facing the need to adapt their operations in order to continue growing crops in a desert landscape. As water becomes increasingly more scarce and expensive, significant adaptation will be needed to ensure an adequate supply and efficient use of what is a diminishing resource. This reduction in the supply of water will affect agriculture and will require a change in approach from increasing productivity of land (yield per acre) to increasing productivity per unit of water consumed.
Read more about water issues here
#1 Focusing on Soil Health:
It’s often said that a drought shows how healthy the soil is (or is not) because it’s not just about how much water falls, it’s about how much is absorbed and retained. Healthy soil infiltrates and holds water.
Every one percent increase in soil organic matter can retain an inch of water (est 16,000-20,000 gallons of water) per acre so if we want to retain what little water we receive, soil needs to be built up through careful observation (context) and regenerative practices such as protecting the surface of soil (cover crops, mulch, decomposing crops), minimizing soil disturbance (reduced or no-tillage or fertilizer/pesticide use), plant diversity (crop rotation, managed grazing), and livestock integration and adaptive grazing practices. Healthy soil plays an important role in the water cycle through evaporation, transpiration, soil retention, and “rainmaking” microbes, which drives much of the function of the soil ecosystem and the creation of precipitation. Regenerating soil health is crucial to fixing a broken water cycle.
Agriculture with healthy soil interspersed in urban environments and in the environment at large is crucial to establishing and maintaining a healthy water cycle. Proposing “solutions” to our water scarcity issue that omit agriculture or reduce it to a fringe activity ignores the crucial role that it plays in the water cycle and can worsen the water challenges before us.
#2 Crop Switching:
An adaptive strategy that agriculture can employ to address water challenges (and other climate-related issues) is crop-switching. Crop switching entails 1) beginning the adoption of a new crop for the first time and 2) ending the production of existing crops.
Global modeling has proposed that two-thirds of the potential damage from climate change in the agricultural sector can be avoided by effective crop switching.
Crop-switching experiments like growing barley, instead of more water-intensive crops like alfalfa and field corn, have proven successful for farmers in Camp Verde and even led to a large collaborative project between local businesses and an environmental organization.
Other crop-switching research projects show the great potential for growing less-water intensive crops and emerging new markets such as guayule — a shrub that tire manufacturer Bridgestone has been paying some farmers to grow while researching the crop as a new source of natural rubber— or growing agave for livestock feed (when fermented it is consumed by livestock and can be grow in urban, arid environments).
To make these alternative crops viable, federal subsidies and crop insurance programs that support and subsidize water-intensive crops, like cotton, need to invest in adaptive and climate-smart alternative crops. If government is serious about assisting desert farmers adapt to drought, it should focus on investing as much in adaptation as it does in subsidizing the status quo.
#3 Planting Native Crops:
A return to planting low-water-use, drought-tolerant native crops—as was done by indigenous cultures for thousands of years and still done by some Native Americans—is another approach to adapting Arizona agriculture to water and climate challenges. Planting desert-adapted native crops (and native grasses) that are less water-intensive, such as tepary beans, okra, amaranth, hibiscus, moringa, nopalito cactus, and squash, can diversify a farm's food production and reduce its water input requirements. The markets for these specialty crops are also increasing.
Planting native varieties is not without challenges. These types of crops can be slow-growing compared to more commercial crops (although they can also be grown year-round), and farmers unfamiliar with native varieties can be hesitant to risk growing an unfamiliar crop with already tight margins. Incentives, government investment, and communal support for growing drought-tolerant crops can play important roles in helping to mitigate some of that risk.
#4 Water-Conserving Systems:
The future of agriculture in Arizona will require farmers to implement innovative water-conservation irrigation techniques. Agriculture currently employs water-conservation measures and best practices, but mandatory Colorado River cuts, increased demand, and prolonged drought conditions necessitate modernizing flood irrigation techniques, switching to drip irrigation, and incorporating technology and climate-adaptive agriculture systems.
Inventive ways to conserve water like using automatic solar-powered head gates that monitor and adjust the flow of river water into irrigation ditches, or the simultaneous use of land for agriculture and solar power generation through agrivoltaics, show how a holistic, integrated approach to the water–energy–food nexus can solve both resiliency and sustainable agriculture challenges.