A miller’s daughter spun gold thread from hay. Stone soup fed an entire town. A farmer grew tons of juicy melons in one of the harshest desert climates in the Americas. In each story, something is created from nothing.
Of the three, only the story of the Chihuahuan melon farmer is neither fairy tale nor parable. Centuries-old technology known as olla irrigation breathes life into acres of melon vines, enabling them to thrive in
an otherwise inhospitable environment. The paltry 9 inches of annual rainfall is harnessed to support a robust agricultural business. Judicious water use and resource conservation are the main tenets of desert farming worldwide, transforming arid scrubland and desert margins into flourishing and resilient farmsteads. Gary Nabhan is a conservation scientist, ecologist, and farmer; he is intimately familiar
with the challenges faced by traditional
desert agricultural communities. He visits
with farmers in Saharan oases and the
margins of the Gobi Desert, as well as other
desert regions, learning the techniques and
adaptations that have sustained life in extreme
environments for thousands of years.
A full third of the land on our planet is desert
or semi-desert, receiving on average less
than 20 inches of rainfall per year ( 1). Over
the tens of thousands of years of human migration
and agricultural evolution, societies
have found elegant and simple solutions to
living in water-compromised environments.
These solutions are increasingly relevant
as countries experience progressively hotter
average temperatures and face dwindling
water resources. Dramatic changes are already
being witnessed by ecologists and
experienced by farmers. Pests such as bark
beetles have been able to spread without a
cold-weather check, damaging and killing
thousands of trees in U.S. and European
forests. Severe drought conditions in the
United States this year have left 385,000
acres of farmland fallow in California alone
( 2). Desert vegetation has adapted to its
environment over millennia. Each
native species contains a wealth of
evolutionarily derived resiliencies
in form and function. Scientists and
traditional farmers have drawn on
these botanical success stories to
shape physical farmland, advance
water harvesting, and create hardy
agricultural ecosystems. Biomimicry
of living desert systems in particular
has been a noted success,
especially the use of nurse trees to
create microenvironments in which
crops can blossom.
Each chapter contains a Planning and
Practice section with practical step-by-step
advice on how to create desert-adapted
and ecoconscious garden and agricultural
landscapes. Lessons range from reducing
summer heat loads on houses to creating
effective rain irrigation, inspired by traditional
farming on the floodplains of the
Sonoran Desert. These solutions are both
ingenious and effective, drawing on our
global heritage to solve today’s problems as
well as prepare for those of the future.
By learning from agricultural desert experiences,
farmers, scientists, and ecologically
conscious citizens will be prepared
for the challenges created by future climate
change.