Can a lack of rain produce jush plants and a bounty of veggies. Surprisingly yes.With the right management an overly dry environment can mean abundance.
Regular contributor Brett Anderson wrote about this in today's New York Times Food section. Arizona is one such state. It has little water resources yet draws in thousands of new residents per year.The sta te is experiencing serious water problems. The Colorado River, Arizoba's main source of water is dangerously low. This does not bode well for the state's farms and home gardens. Climate change is already parching soil and depleting aquifers, bodies of permeable rocks that can contain or transmit water. This is bad fo the states' farm that provide lettuce and even hay , the last being sold to Saudi Arabia.Luckily there are solutions to combat this. Everyone from home gardeners to the larger farms are embracing old techniques and recycling in order to stay alive. There is even a gardening movement in PHoenix that is keeping city backyards verdant. Thanks to a company called Urban Far, Phoenix homeowners can learn to carefully lay out their greenery , Vines cools off fruit and veggies, drip tapes als work as irrigators.
It's not just homeowners that are benefitting, Farms are too,. A primary goal of them is to restore land that has been damaged by synthetic fertilizers and neglect.There is a lot of composting which keeps food waste from rotting in land fills. NIna Sajover, a Slovenian immigrant atarted the Ajo Center in Sustainabie Agriculture on the Ajo reservation.She looks to the indigenous people of the area who have been growing crops in bad conditions for centuriesThey use dry farming techniques which relies on residual water to irrigate the crops instad of artificial means.It has proven successful with a variety of fruits adapting.Even cacti is growing well and is also being used in recipes. This will probably be the default way of farming for not only Arizona but parts of California, Texas <Nevada and Nw Mexico. Doing such means bossting up those states' economies.
Will this type of farming help in the future? It should. This is what Arizona's agri economy will look like as climate change becomes more dire.
Posts
