Farming The Land of Little Rain

FARMING THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN

ARTICLE BY JOEL JOHNSON PHOTOS BY AJO SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE, ALEXANDER MEMORIAL FARM AND GABRIEL VEGA

Every ecosystem is ultimately defined by its limits. In the dense understory of tropical rainforests, plants are shaped by their need to shed moisture and compete for light. In the artic tundra, only the most resilient organisms can eke out a living in the presence of permafrost. And in the Desert Southwest, the region Mary Austin famously dubbed “The Land of Little Rain,” life is shaped by the presence—and much more, the absence—of water.

Of course, you might never arrive at this conclusion simply by observing modern life in the Sonoran Desert. An aerial view of Southern Arizona is peppered with green fields, green lawns, and bright swimming pools, even in the heat of summer—a beautiful warning that in the last hundred years, farmers alone have removed more fossil groundwater than had previously been pumped from aquifers over the entirety of human history. News of the recently signed drought contingency plan is perhaps the only reminder many of us receive that desert life as we know it is dependent upon the infrastructure of hundreds of miles of underground pipes that usher the Colorado River to our fingertips.

However, this extravagance wasn’t always the norm. Gabriel Vega, Farm Manager of the San Xavier Co-op Farm south of Tucson, AZ reminds that alongside the now dry banks of the Santa Cruz River, “O’odham from this area, were [once] able to use the river to irrigate their crops. They would build channels and essentially flood irrigate. Other O’odham traditionally would use the rain and they would use dryland agricultural methods for their crops.”

Ethnobiologist Gary Nabhan writes in Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land that he was “both humbled and surprised to learn that as late as the 1970s, desert-dwelling Native Americans such as the San Xavier O’odham of Arizona were using as little as 50 gallons of water a day to meet their basic needs, while residents in nearby Phoenix were consuming as much as 300 gallons a day, including their flood-irrigation of lawns and filling of swimming pools.” The reality is “newcomers to the desert are likely to consume four to six times the water that traditional desert dwellers have historically consumed.” This excessive use of precious water resources, Nabhan argues, “has therefore become an environmental and social justice issue.”

The Tohono O’odham agreed. As Tucson grew and developed in the1960’s, overtaxing both the Santa Cruz River and the undergroundreservoirs, the aquifers grew so dry that the San Xavier communitywas unable to irrigate. “The San Xavier District,” Vega explains,“alongside the federal government, sued the City of Tucson andthere was a settlement agreement titled the Southern Arizona WaterRights Settlement Act.” Passed by congress in 1982, the act utilizedthe Central Arizona Project pipeline to restore water to the San Xaviercommunity.

Though water access has been secured, the resource is not somethingthe San Xavier community takes lightly. In addition to growing alfalfaand hay products, the San Xavier Co-op Farm also cultivates a rangeof traditional, drought-adapted foods such as tepary beans, TohonoO’odham 60-day corn, O’odham yellow-meated watermelon, O’odhampeas, and Tohono O’odham squash, all of which Vega says, havereceived increased interest since Tucson received the UNESCO Cityof Gastronomy designation.

Some of the farm’s most important (and water-wise) work has beenpreserving interest in the wild, native foods the Sonoran Desert hasto offer. “Within our landscape, we incorporate these wild plants that

have been harvested for thousands of years,” Vega explains. “Thisfarm—agriculture in this specific community—has existed for over 2,000years. So this is a traditionally and historically agricultural communitythat extends many generations. That’s why [it is so important] the wateract that was passed was able to bring water back to this communityand irrigation has continued to exist.”

As a means of both education and economic development, theSan Xavier Cooperative Association Wild Foods Community HarvestProgram offers free workshops to members of the Tohono O’odhamNation and sister tribes (non-tribal members can participate for afee). Participants are taught how to harvest, process, and preparecholla buds, mesquite beans, and prickly pear—all of which can thenbe sold to the farm for by-the-pound payment.

In addition to hay crops and traditional foods, the co-op farmalso includes 70 acres of heritage grains, White Sonora and PimaClub wheat, and a fruit orchard containing quinces, pomegranates,grapes, and figs introduced by early Spanish immigrants. The farm’snursery, which uses compost generated on-site in partnership withthe University of Arizona’s Compost Cats, offers desert residents accessto locally adapted plants that yield food, fiber, medicine, and art.

“We’re strong in tradition and culture and we’re here to keep these foods alive and to feed the community with these foods that have sustained them for thousands of years,” Vega says. A diet of desert foods like mesquite flour and cholla buds has been shown to help regulate blood sugar levels, providing a form of relief for those dealing with diabetes. Vega also points out that as little as two tablespoons of cholla buds provide the equivalent calcium content of a full glass of milk. “One of our main goals is to curb the health issues that the community has from not eating the way they used to eat. So [by] reintroducing these foods, cooking these foods for the community…we exist for the community and help the community in that fashion.”

The co-op farm is not alone in seeking to restore traditional desert foods to southwestern fields and tables. Just over 25 years ago, Terrol Johnson co-founded Tohono O’odham Community Action (TOCA) to promote and preserve traditional desert foods and farming practices. “When we first started, we couldn’t get a lot of the traditional foods, so we wanted to start a garden,” Johnson explains. “But the idea was also because a lot of people on the reservation were dealing with diabetes—getting diabetes, and then dying as a result of complications from diabetes. We also realized that a lot of young people were being affected with diabetes.”

Though there were support programs available, they didn’t incorporate traditional foods. They “weren’t culturally relevant to [our] area.” Johnson says. “So we thought, well, we got to start educating people about our own culture and our own foods. And that’s how we started the farming.”

At its peak, TOCA operated a 100-acre farm using traditional O’odham dry farming techniques. Though TOCA recently dissolved to allow Terrol and others to focus on other forms of art, education, and activism, Terrol’s brother, Noland Johnson, still manages the 14-acre Alexander Pancho Memorial Farm that TOCA helped start on the Johnson’s traditional family land. The site “was actually my grandfather’s and his grandfather’s and father’s traditional farming land. So we basically just revitalized it,” Johnson says.

Amazingly the 14-acre farm, which yields Tohono O’odham varieties of peas, corn, and squash, requires no supplemental irrigation. Every drop of water is supplied by monsoons and winter rains—some of it directly, in-season, and the rest stored in three catchments, huge holes in the ground which capture and store runoff (natural clay in the soil prevents the catchment supply from draining).

Though to modern agriculturalists, farming without supplemental irrigation might seem extraordinary, for Johnson “this is a method that our ancestors had done for hundreds and hundreds of years and it was just a matter of learning from the elders and watching other farming experts do that—which were our grandfathers and our greatgrandfathers.”

Observing the desert and getting to know its tendencies is the first step when employing traditional dry farming methods. It’s all about “learning how to walk up the streams and finding which way the water flows, when a certain amount of water comes down or rain comes down and channeling with natural dams and foliage to get it to flow to our direction,” Johnson says. “It’s just a matter of really watching the environment, the landscape, and knowing which way the water will flow and how to get it to divert to our fields.”

Gary Nabhan points out that in addition to capturing free water, floodwater and runoff farming also delivers organic material in the form of composted, nitrogen-rich leaf litter from mesquites and palo verdes, as well as beneficial microorganisms which can inoculate crop fields. “Depending on the size and condition of your property and its surrounding watershed,” Nabhan writes, “imagine how waterharvesting designs—from one-tenth acre rain gardens to 50-acre floodwater fields—can heal wounded places, and nourish them back to a condition where they are capable of producing food from both wild and cultivated plants.” Restoring and supporting the ecological connections of southwestern landscapes yields a host of interconnected benefits.

Terrol Johnson and his colleagues at TOCA and the Alexander Memorial Farm have seen similar benefits from reviving cultural andcommunity connections to the land. Farmers who were trained at TOCAhave gone on to work at the San Xavier Co-op Farm, start their ownnonprofits, and make careers out of cooking and preparing traditionalfoods.

“When we started this over 25 years ago, we were the only onesdoing it, starting with young kids and working in the schools,” Johnsonreflects. “Working with the schools at a very young age we got peopleinterested in it, and then over the years, the kids we worked with 25years ago are now adults and some of them are still continuing toharvest on their own [and] also teach.”

One of the most exciting outcomes is that “a lot of the schools nowtry to incorporate traditional foods into their lunch programs, but alsoother programs on the reservation, like Meals on Wheels and otherprograms that provide food for their clients really try to incorporate alot of traditional foods into their menus,” Johnson says. “So the results[from what] we’ve been doing, this kind of work for the 25 years, havereally paid off and really have been beneficial to the community.”

Following the 1887 General Allotment Act, the San Xavier District ofthe O’odham Nation was the only district to be divided by the federalgovernment into individual allotments. Roughly a century later, theformation of the San Xavier Co-op farm was a rejection of imposed,divisive individuality (an independence that cannot be sustained withinthe limits of the desert ecosystem) and a step towards restoring bothecological and communal relationships.

Community has always been the key to desert life. The physical andecological diversity on display at San Xavier Co-op and the AlexanderMemorial Farm reminds us that no organism has ever been able tothrive here in isolation. As plant guilds and nurse plants shield theiryoung from the summer heat, as water and microbial life flood fromthe mountains onto eager fields, and as communities restore theirconnections to each other, their food, and the earth they call home,life is revitalized in the Land of Little Rain.