Opinion: Regenerative Agriculture Can Save the Southwest
We can end drought by restoring soil and local water cycles
By Elizabeth Heilman, Fri., Dec. 2, 2022
Intense scary global heat waves, drought, and food and water shortages are dominating the news in 2022. National crop production is down about a third. Texas lost 70% of the cotton crop and half the cattle during drought-driven culling. This will not get better without radical changes in how we grow food. Most kids in the plains are required to watch Dust Bowl footage in school. The towering monster dust clouds, thousands of starved and choked cattle, and the decade duration of disaster are a shared curriculum. Learning about year after impossible year of bleak thirsty fields where tears fell more readily than rain was to be a warning and not a foreshadowing. We have apparently learned nothing since the Dirty Thirties. We are still making the same land management mistakes, and if nothing changes, this time it will be far worse.
I have just returned from Eastern New Mexico and the panhandle with my partner, Dale Strickler, the ever-optimistic and renowned agroecologist who knows how to make any God-forsaken ground grow back. We were visiting friends' ranches and gave a workshop on drought resilience. The long vistas of bare and tilled ground, scabby half-dead pastures under the hard hot sun, and churning dust storms were sobering and even terrifying. All around us, we saw arid ground tilled and planted with every expectation of failure just so that farmers could reap a crop insurance check. Often, dead soil blew in the wind among the dead crops as far as the eye could see. When rains finally come, late and hard falling, the rains run off the bare soils as flood.
We know how to fix it. But will we? Is it even ethical to inspire ranchers to stay and fight against the odds to bring their land back to life? I worry because the Southwest faces two cruelties: The local water cycles are broken, and we are subject to the drought and flood whiplash of large-scale climate change. We have to quickly fix our local water cycles because we have little control over macro drought-flood whiplash patterns.
Farmers who are currently tilling and planting shallow-rooted annuals can become ranchers with deep-rooted water preserving perennials. Ranchers can increase annual rainfall by several inches, as Alejandro Carrillo and his neighbors have done in the Chihuahuan Desert of Mexico through rotational grazing, which works like magic. Livestock are moved from one small paddock to another and forced to eat weeds and grass evenly while the rest of the pasture "rests" and grows back increasingly lush. Ranchers can start replenishing their wells, as Chris Grotegut has done on the Texas Panhandle by restoring irrigated cropland back to native grasses. Increasing soil organic matter by just 1% adds 25,000 gallons of water-holding capacity to an acre. If every producer did that, we would also dramatically reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide. Increasing global soil organic matter (humus) on all the world's agricultural land (36% of global land) by just 1 percentage point takes 360 billion tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and that is about 50% more than all of the worrisome carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere since the beginning of the Industrial Age.
The arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the Earth. We can't refreeze glaciers but we can heal our soil, local water cycles, and wells. In a healthy ecosystem, you can save all the rain you get in the soil. Earth with healthy plant cover, deep roots, and rich soil is up to 40 degrees cooler than bare soil, the rain sucks deep into good soil, and the preserved moisture then transpires through leaves in a balanced water cycle making local rain.
While the recent Inflation Reduction Act just budgeted $19.5 billion dollars for regenerative agriculture to replace tillage with cover crops and improve soil health and perennial pastures, this is still not enough. Federal crop insurance and other subsidies should only be offered to producers using drought-preventing carbon-sequestering regenerative methods that create long-term stability. Climate-destructive agriculture practices like tillage and their legacy of dust storms, erosion, flooding, drought, toxic chemicals, and CO2 and methane emissions must stop. It is time for the transition to regenerative agriculture to protect our food security and create a livable Southwest and planet.
Elizabeth Heilman is a Ph.D. science educator at Wichita State University who also works helping farmers and ranchers.
