By Michael J. Coren,Michael J. Coren

Before we thought the water supply would last forever (or at least several political cycles), we had dry farming. As the worst drought in decades grips the U.S., dry farming is getting a second look.

Farmers see the horizon, and there's not much water on it (The "global water shortage is now 'chronic'" according to a UN report). In the U.S., the federal government has added at least 218 more counties to the list of natural disaster areas, now more than half of the total counties in the U.S. are low on water.

Dry farming, while not designed to counter the worst droughts, "evokes the image of a wet sponge covered with cellophane," writes Brie Mazurek, the online education manager at the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture (CUESA).

By tapping the moisture stored in soil to grow crops, rather than using irrigation or rainfall during the wet season, dry-land farming was a staple of agriculture for millennia in places like the Mediterranean, and much of the American West, before the rise of dams and aquifer pumping.

During the rainy season, farmers break up soil then saturated with water. Using a roller, the first few inches of the soil are compacted and later form a dry crust, or dust mulch, that seals in the moisture against evaporation.

In places like California, where the expensive (and fast evaporating) irrigation systems of the Central Valley are seen to be running on borrowed time, dry farming has begun to spread among a small cadre of farmers along the coast where dry farming was once standard practice since the undeveloped coast line would support little else.

Farmers like David Little of Little Organic Farm, reports Mazurek, are rescuing old ways for modern applications. "In the beginning, I searched out people who were known dry-farmers," says Little, who started farming in 1995, in the report. "It seemed like no one had done it for 30 years or so." Little now grows potatoes on 30 acres in Marin and Petaluma counties in California.

Yet dry farming is unlikely to win over farmers who still have abundant access to water, fertilizer, and big markets. "Dry farming is not a yield maximization strategy," says the California Agricultural Water Stewardship Initiative. "Rather it allows nature to dictate the true sustainability of agricultural production in a region."

In place of huge yields and produce (fruit and vegetables may grow twice the size of their dry-land counterparts), farmers get smaller, hardier crops with several times the flavor (the water stress concentrates sugars and nutrients), but the yield penalty in bad years is steep: 12 tons per acre for apples, compared to 30 to 40 tons produced by large apple farms in the Central Valley, reports CUESA, and even worse results for drought-ravaged grains in places such as Idaho, reports NPR.

But dry-land farming is not about using as much resources as possible to optimize a year's yield. It's about making do with less without jeopardizing the future's harvest. "The coast of California used to be our main source of food in the state, until they started developing farms in the Central Valley because of all the water," Little said to CUESA. "Now they're running out of water."

2 Comments

1. 1. GeorgeK 09:08 AM 9/3/12

   There's more to successful dry land farming.
   First to have to park your disk, when you disk a field you simply stir the weed seeds around allowing a new crop of weeds to grown. Instead of a disk you use a harrow, many modern farmers have never seen, much less used a harrow. You make a pass over the field fluffing up about 1 to 2 inches of soil. The weed seeds will germinate, however because the soil is fluffed up the weed seeds do not have access to the soil moisture below, so they die off.
   When you plant your crop you use a seed drill that will reach the moist ground below the lose soil, this is called "planting to moisture". The crop seed will germinate and push through the dry soil above.
   The lose soil is also called a dust mulch, in that it keeps the soil moisture from evaporating.
   Dry land farming works but it's a lost art.

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2. 2. orangeed 06:15 PM 9/3/12

   According to Wikipedia, there are four types of harrows.
   Which one or ones are you suggesting ?

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