Making Rain

EXCEPT FOR MILITARY SUBJUGATION, drought is probably the most common Biblical indication of God’s judgment toward Israel’s disobedience. When God’s special people departed from divine instruction, He withdrew government protection and rain.

While God could, and did occasionally, orchestrate these judgments, I submit that most occurred by natural principle. In other words, specific practices precipitated military weakness and drought (famine).

Some of God’s blessings were unconditional, like the Genesis 12 Abrahamic covenant. Most were conditional, meaning that to receive them the people needed to adhere to rules. The Pentateuch is full of rules, including religious, farming, money, and civil justice.

The hydrologic cycle is foundational to agriculture. Life requires water. Indeed, Christ’s plea “I thirst” on the cross is in stark contrast to His previously sitting by a well on a hot, dusty afternoon in Samaria and telling a woman He had water that eliminates thirst forever.

If physical water is an object lesson of spiritual provision, surely Christians should be figuring out how to bring more water to our environment. In a day of increasing deserts and depleting aquifers, shouldn’t God’s servants be demonstrating to the world a protocol to increase hydration? In doing so, we lead people toward the ultimate spiritual thirst-quencher.

To most farmers, though, water and rainfall are not something people can affect. While I’m not ready to propose a rain dance, I do believe a farmer’s mandate is to stimulate abundance, including water. In general, historical agriculture depletes water. That needs to change; agriculture should increase water.

The Ogallala Aquifer underlying seven states (Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas) supplies thousands of irrigated farms. But farmers are pumping out of it far faster than it’s being replenished. According to The Wall Street Journal , since 1950 the aquifer has dropped an average of 100 feet. This massive underground bathtub of sand and water is dropping a couple of feet per year and is expected to be 70 percent depleted by 2063 at current use rates. Interestingly, it’s only recharging less than one inch per year.

Why? Consider how the land’s protective clothing has changed in the last 200 years. It was never plowed until recently. The University of Nebraska at Lincoln maintains a 2-acre plot of tall grass prairie. The grass is 8 feet tall and thick as the hair on a dog’s back. To imagine millions of acres of that vegetation clothing the soil and feeding bison is to realize why North America grew more food 500 years ago than it does today.

That vegetative cover did two things. First, it shattered raindrops into mist by the time the moisture got to the ground. Rather than pelting like bombs on exposed soil, the rain would literally wick into the soil. That means almost none ran off; it percolated into the groundwater and kept the aquifer full. The biomass created high organic matter in the soil, which sponged the water and kept it from running off. One of the reasons the aquifer no longer recharges like it did is because modern mono-crop farming keeps the soil naked, depleting both organic matter and vegetative protection.

The second element is just being discovered by scientists and meteorologists who don’t hew to the mainstream climate change narrative concerning greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Leading the pack is an Australian named Walter Jhene, and his thesis is that the hydration cycle depends on bacteria wafting off vegetation. Water vapor needs a particle on which to condense. It can’t condense in air alone; it needs to attach to something. That something is primarily bacteria given off from vegetation.

As a climatologist, Jhene promotes the notion that what most call climate change is not driven primarily by GHGs, but by lack of vegetation that denies the atmosphere its bacterial particles to enable evaporated water vapor to condense. He likens the process to a radiator that regulates the earth’s engine heat. Condensing water from vapor to liquid takes a tremendous amount of energy. That change in status is what regulates the earth’s temperature.

The point is that the hydration cycle is healthy only when enough vegetative cover exudes the bacterial particulate to leverage evapotranspiration into cloud formation and thence to timely rain cycles. Note that the devastating flooding and snowfall in California this winter follows historic wildfire seasons. Those fires pumped particles into the atmosphere that attracted condensation and a wet cycle commensurate with the particulate discharge.

Plowing and mono-cropping, especially without cover-cropping between cycles, has denied ecology the vegetation that existed for millennia and built that massive Ogallala Aquifer. The double whammy of tillage plus massive irrigation destroys this magnificent bank of water wealth underlying America’s midsection. To be sure, overgrazing insults vegetative cover too.

Experiments in the Middle East by Jeff Lawton, a permaculture teacher, prove that rain cycles can change even within a relatively small area. Some fifty years ago, University of Wisconsin weather scientists fenced out a couple of square miles in a desert in India to stop overgrazing. Vegetation started to grow and shortly clouds formed, changing the hydration cycle over that acreage.

Just like our activity in the spiritual realm affects the watering of our soul, so the activity on the landscape affects the watering of the soil. The notion that weather is what it is without regard to human activity is simply not true. While—arguably—what I do on my farm may not create a noticeable effect on weather, banding together and changing landscape stewardship on a larger scale absolutely does change hydration cycles.

On our farm, management-intensive grazing maintains taller and thicker vegetation. Strategic tree harvesting takes out old trees and rejuvenates the forest with younger trees. Sawmills and local lumber should be the go-to provenance for construction, not imported material from thousands of miles away.

Perennial vegetative cover builds organic matter in the soil, which increases water-holding capacity. Everything conceivable to slow surface runoff needs to be done. One of our first farm apprentices was from Sonora, Mexico. His grandmother, in about 1920, attended an elite boarding school in British Columbia. The family took her once a year to school and brought her home. She remembered not being able to see the countryside due to the tall vegetation growing alongside the road—she said it was like driving through a tunnel.

Today, that entire area is desert with scarcely any vegetation. Overgrazing for a hundred years changes everything. In Mexican arid regions, families who practice controlled grazing have revegetated their landscapes and increased herbivore carrying capacity severalfold. It can be done, and it is being done all over the world.

When he returned home, this Mexican apprentice duplicated something our family did here in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in the early 1960s. With deep gullies slicing across our acreage, we put big rocks and even wood in the bottom to slow down water runoff. Within a year these permeable dams created terraces of silt by slowing down the water and making it drop debris to pass through these barriers. When our family visited the former apprentice in Mexico, he took us out to some of his gullies and showed us what looked like golf greens in a desert—the immediate result of throwing some rocks in the bottom of a gully to slow down the runoff. The rainfall hadn’t changed—yet—but he enjoyed much more benefit from the sparse rain that did fall. That’s like making water.

In Australia, one of the biggest problems is incised creeks. The Aborigines strategically placed fallen trees and debris, called weirs, in the creeks to slow down the water. At flood stage, the water flowed over the banks gently, depositing silt on the nearby land. Over the years, this procedure lifted the landscape. When Europeans came, they cut the trees along the banks, took out the weirs, and now these creeks have cut deep incisions. The creek speed keeps the water from slowing down enough to drop silt on the adjoining land.

Catching roof runoff is a great way to build resilience into your farmstead. Buried cisterns are a wonderful safety valve to make sure we have water when all systems fail. In a 30-inch rainfall area, a roof generates 20 gallons of water per year per square foot. That’s a lot of water. Before modern well-drilling technology, every barn had a cistern. Today, they’re crumpled in and the water comes from a well. Meanwhile, all that roof water runs off and is lost to the farmer.

On our farm, we’ve built many ponds in valleys to hold surface runoff during snow melts and major rain events. In a 30-inch rainfall area, every acre on average generates about 300,000 gallons of surface runoff per year. In my view, trapping and holding surface runoff is not hoarding because, by definition, surface runoff means the cup of the commons is full. It’s either saturated or the rain is coming too fast to soak into the soil. In either case, holding flood waters for later use blesses downstream neighbors by reducing floods. Strategic use for irrigation or livestock watering feeds the hydration cycle during droughts. The bottom line is that, individually and collectively, land managers can increase water volume and efficiency. If the time farmers spend complaining about the weather was invested in developing water abundance, we could re-create the hydration our lands enjoyed prior to modern agriculture. //