Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land: Lessons from Desert Farmers on Adapting to Climate Uncertainty

by Gary Paul Nabhan

"How to harvest water and nutrients, select drought-tolerant plants, and create natural diversity

Because climatic uncertainty has now become ""the new normal,"" many farmers, gardeners and orchard-keepers in North America are desperately seeking ways to adapt their food production to become more resilient in the face of such ""global weirding."" This book draws upon the wisdom and technical knowledge from desert farming traditions all around the world to offer time-tried strategies

•Building greater moisture-holding capacity and nutrients in soils
•Protecting fields from damaging winds, drought, and floods
•Harvesting water from uplands to use in rain gardens and terraces filled with perennial crops
•Delecting fruits, nuts, succulents, and herbaceous perennials that are best suited to warmer, drier climates

Gary Paul Nabhan is one of the world's experts on the agricultural traditions of arid lands. For this book he has visited indigenous and traditional farmers in the Gobi Desert, the Arabian Peninsula, the Sahara Desert, and Andalusia, as well as the Sonoran, Chihuahuan, and Painted deserts of North America, to learn firsthand their techniques and designs aimed at reducing heat and drought stress on orchards, fields, and dooryard gardens. This practical book also includes colorful ""parables from the field"" that exemplify how desert farmers think about increasing the carrying capacity and resilience of the lands and waters they steward. It is replete with detailed descriptions and diagrams of how to implement these desert-adapted practices in your own backyard, orchard, or farm.

This unique book is useful not only for farmers and permaculturists in the arid reaches of the Southwest or other desert regions. Its techniques and prophetic vision for achieving food security in the face of climate change may well need to be implemented across most of North America over the next half-century, and are already applicable in most of the semiarid West, Great Plains, and the U.S. Southwest and adjacent regions of Mexico."

Genres: Gardening, Nonfiction, Agriculture, Plants, Food, Science, Environment

362 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 14, 2013

About the author

Gary Paul Nabhan is an internationally-celebrated nature writer, seed saver, conservation biologist and sustainable agriculture activist who has been called "the father of the local food movement" by Utne Reader, Mother Earth News, Carleton College and Unity College. Gary is also an orchard-keeper, wild forager and Ecumenical Franciscan brother in his hometown of Patagonia, Arizona near the Mexican border. For his writing and collaborative conservation work, he has been honored with a MacArthur "genius" award, a Southwest Book Award, the John Burroughs Medal for nature writing, the Vavilov Medal, and lifetime achievement awards from the Quivira Coalition and Society for Ethnobiology.

--from the author's website

Reviews

[Sixwing · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want a copy of this for my own shelf.

Tons of information about desert gardening, combined with anecdotes and parables from people who've been doing it in a cultural context of centuries of life in the hot and dry. There's no room for despair between these covers; only a wide assortment of techniques and the means to test them out.

[Tomek · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had high hopes for this book. Highly regarded author, interesting exploration of traditional ecological knowledge, it had lots going for it. However, I was let down. Unfortunately it spends most of its time discussing abstract agroecological principles, which is fine, but it never delivers in terms of practical steps, at least enough to warrant its price tag.

[Ethan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some parts of this book I skimmed because they were a little over my head—meant for food producers, etc. but holy crap is it inspiring and scary. I suspect I’ll be returning to this as a resource for a while.

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this book up for a couple of reasons: one, I've had the pleasure of meeting and working with the author in a sustainable agriculture workshop down in Patagonia, AZ. He is widely respected in his locale and academically in the field of sustainability and local/native food production. Secondly, many times I have wondered whether going to the effort to grow food in my desert community of Phoenix Arizona is futile, wasteful, unsustainable and just plain stupid. Water is still available (for a price) but how long before we see rations/restrictions on it? Thirdly, with climate change and the catastrophic droughts the Midwest experienced in the last few years, water and food security is/will be a pressing topic and challenge that eventually we may all confront directly in the marketplace and at the table. For example, here in Phoenix, our summers will likely become hotter and our winters even milder, resulting in a lower number of "chill hours" required by many fruit and nut trees before they break dormancy and flower in the spring. Certain varieties of apples, peaches, plums and apricots historically have grown quite well here, but with expected fewer chill hours each winter, they may not produce as prolifically, if at all. Not to mention that the pollinators of these species and other food crops need to be active with the flowering times of each crop, and growers are already seeing evidence that synchronization is getting out of whack.
While Nabhan doesn't have a solution to this dire predicament wrought by climate change (other than planting pollinator-attracting plants on one's land to increase their populations), he excels at providing other solutions by sharing the stories and practices of successful desert farmers who have grown food in some of the hottest, driest and most unpredictable settings across the globe. It should be noted these are non-industrial, zero-carbon output solutions. While industrial agriculture pumps and depletes groundwater and scientists devise bigger and better "solutions," many via genetic modification of species, these traditional farmers observe their natural environment in a consistent, thoughtful manner to learn, for instance, how and where rainwater flows, and how it and any nutrients (flood detritus) it contains is or may be captured and distributed to their fields. Or how the water retention and microbial diversity of soils are improved by interplanting various species together, a place-based polycultural model versus the soil-eroding monocultural model practiced in industrialized agriculture.
Overall, Nabhan's latest book deserves to be in the hands of serious growers everywhere, even in moister climes, as temperature and annual precipitation levels continue to fluctuate. Rainwater-harvesting for crop production reduces carbon footprints (as water is on-site rather than pumped or "provided" by one's municipality); rainwater is virtually salt-free as compared to "city water," improving soil and yields; it costs nothing but the initial catchment equipment and labor costs (rain gutters, barrels or cisterns, and the human labor to dig basins, berms and other channeling earthworks).

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Okay, here's the thing - I didn't like this book, if by "like" one means enjoy. This book is way too gritty for enjoyment. It *is* empowering, however, and jam packed with solid information, even for the most experienced gardener. Definitely deserving of five stars.

[Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

REVOLUTIONARY. A comprehensive overview of arid and semi-arid farming practices for the permaculture farmer. Full of helpful tips and tricks and terminology to get by. I learned SO much and now have a springboard for more permaculture sub-fields.

[Mason · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent resource for anyone looking to integrate semi-arid stewardship into their garden practice.

[Bill Marston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just enough of its biology-geology was something I knew about, so I got a good education in what plants can do for people who apply such understanding. Of particular note to me were the many pages of specific information as discreet as sizes, tables of varieties of plant species for different applications, and the like.
This book is rich with illustrations and photographs, helpful in the field of accurately exploring the nature of dryland farming. Unfortunately, I found some lacking in sufficiently illustrating spatial arrangements – mostly due to inexpert lighting, time of day, camera angles. The hand-drawn illustrations were helpful.
The author's repetition of the same anecdote or guidance or description more than once or twice I found distracting rather than reinforcing, as it was probably intended to have been. I know that in my non-professional writing I am always using too many words in my inner thoughts of improving my communication, when what is apparent to others is that they understood it better when I left out easily 5-10% or more of the words, and thus made the sentences more succinctly informational.
Anyway, it is NOT a book to be read once and set on a shelf. It truly is a reference and an inspirational book. I will be lending it to the Philadelphia Orchard Project, to some urban farm managers, and to the Philadelphia Urban Farm Network for their work with high school students and a thousand more people in every part of this big low density city of rowhouses.

[Theresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unlike the Enduring Seeds book by this author, this book gives a feeling of careful optimism. Mr. Nabhan does a very thorough job of explaining the time honored techniques used by desert dwellers around the world to grow food in their unpredictable environment. He cites examples of evidence from the more extreme parts of the world of existing climate change and how the peoples in these areas are already successfully addressing it. While the book title has hotter, drier land in it, the truth given by Nabhan is that there will be more extreme weather events and the things we have grown before and the times they have been grown are changing. Mr. Nabhan states the many challenges we face in this uncertain future, but he also gives the reader ideas, techniques, and plant varieties to help them face this uncertainty. A must read if you grow your own food, or plan to, and have noticed the changes of what, when, and where to plant. This book would be a great addition to your existing and evolving garden resource library.

[Stephen Hicks · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did enjoy this book...at times. There were many golden nuggets of advice and practices from ancient desert farmers that I am excited to implement in my future urban garden. However, the almost continuous injection of global warming statistic after global warming statistic made it an arduous and even slightly annoying read regardless of your position on global warming. Regardless, I did thoroughly enjoy the wisdom that is within select pages of this work. Recommended for the patient reader...or highly recommended for the extremely concerned environmentalist.

[Allison Jones-Lo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good book for anyone who is new to understanding climate change and its effects on our global food supply. I am not new to any of this. I got bored with the repeated justifications for the author's book. However there were some great charts in the back of the book for gardeners who want to plant foods that do not use a lot of water. I think the more modern versions of this book are more useful.

[Joseph Gendron · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a well researched book which may be ahead of its time. It also will be limited to those already living in desert or near desert conditions and those who want to reduce their foodprint even more by attempting to implement the techniques presented. A good reference but not sure how practical unless………..

[Monica · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very important book, particularly for anyone growing food or interested in growing food or food security. As a bonus, Gary Paul Nabhan is also a Cornell alum. This is the first book of his that I've read, but I'm definitely ready for more. Many practical suggestions for growing food in the face of climate change and just so much inspiration and food for thought generally.

[Carrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Detailed recommendations for plant varieties to use and strategies for water harvesting.

[Cyndi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is more practical than others I've read by the author. Things are getting warmer and drier here in the PNW, but I hope it will be some time before I need all the suggestions in the book...

[Jen Watkins]

A little scary...