Where We Should Be Seeking Advice in a Hotter, Drier World

As atmospheric warming and extreme weather events increase, those who grow our food must adapt to their changing farming environments. Today’s hottest and most water-stressed areas of the planet can provide farmers with their experiences to help make the transition.

Today, drylands cover more than 46% of the global land area where three billion people live. Nearly 30% of humans today have no indoor drinking water. The risk of desertification is growing. Farmland is under threat. Adaptation to climate change is the priority with climate change mitigation taking a back step.

In areas that have always been challenged by aridity and heat, collective wisdom and shared experiences are leading to advancements in technology and technique to ensure farms continue to produce enough to meet demand. Not all efforts to live in our hotter and more water-stressed world are producing equal results.

Australia: A Current Dry Farming Failure

For example, take Australia. Second to Antarctica, it is the driest continent on the planet. But unlike Antarctica, people live there.

Almost all Australian agriculture today is dryland without irrigation. The vast majority is designated for grazing. Farm sizes have been doubling for several decades. Where staple crops are grown, most are designated for export.

Australian farms, today, are highly mechanized. In the 1980s, the Landcare movement started to tackle the known problems of degraded soils, and the loss of native vegetation well adapted to the continent’s dry climate. Despite the wide adoption of Landcare methods, the soils of Australia continue to degrade, and since 2020, staple crop dryland farm yields have plateaued.

Meanwhile, Australia is getting warmer with the country having recently added a new isotherm and colours to its weather maps as more places see daytime temperatures above 50+ Celsius (122 Fahrenheit). As the warming increases the interior of the country is getting drier. The few rivers it has often run dry. The soils are bone dry. When it rains (precipitation levels have been dropping throughout the last half century), the soil cannot absorb the water leading to flash floods that wash away more topsoil.

Implemented conservation approaches include zero tillage where crops are planted. Vast amounts of farmland lie fallow to try and restore soil moisture. Finally, Australian farmers are altering their growing seasons to try and match changes in precipitation patterns as they look for ideal periods of low evaporation for planting and dry spells for harvesting.

The Australian farm story is not a success, but rather, a growing challenge.

Eastern Oregon: An Interesting Dry Farming Success

Other places on the planet are getting it right. One is eastern Oregon where dry farming strategies developed at Oregon State University have been adopted. Eastern Oregon is uber-dry and more often associated with cattle grazing. Using novel techniques, however, that encourage deep-root development has farmers growing melons, tomatoes and squash without adding a drop of irrigation water.

The methodology uses compressed soil when seeding or putting in transplants. The topsoil is fluffed to act like a mulch which helps to ensure soil water retention. The plants quickly develop large and deep root systems to tap into underground moisture.

Israel: Climate Adaptation in the Negev is Replicable

Israel’s Negev is its desert south. It is dry and hot and covers 55% of the country. Yet more than 40% of Israel’s crops are grown in the Negev. Today, the country is the largest producer of dairy milk in terms of per-cow yield. It grows 300 tons of tomatoes per hectare compared to the global average of 50. It produces 262 tons of citrus per hectare compared to 243 and 211 tons in the United States and Europe respectively.

Water management has made the above numbers possible. Desalination of seawater serves the majority of domestic and industrial water needs. Israel recycles 90% of its wastewater compared to the U.S. at 10%.

Drip irrigation technology directly feeds individual plants rather than surrounding soil. Greenhouses extend the growing season year-round without adding to water demand.

Israel’s techniques and technology are shared with neighbouring countries in the Middle East and North Africa or MENA where the Agricultural or Neolithic Revolution was born.

MENA History and Initiatives are Shareable

MENA is the home for four of Earth’s five most water-stressed countries. It is also the place from which domesticated animals and plants sprung. This is an area that was named the Fertile Crescent by those studying ancient history. It spans from the Tigris-Euphrates to the Mediterranean and beyond to the Nile River.

The Middle East is the home of the first farms, the first towns, the first cities and the first kingdoms. It is where writing originated, where copper, bronze and iron were smelted and turned into hoes and ploughs. It is referred to as the Cradle of Western Civilization.

Now it is becoming the new cradle of wisdom to sustain humanity in a warming and drier world of the future. No place better serves our needs than the countries of MENA when it comes to agricultural innovation in the face of climate change. Here, temperatures are on the rise. Its deserts are spreading. It suffers from freshwater scarcity.

Yet, human ingenuity is allowing the people of MENA to tackle these challenges by studying the resilient plant and animal species undergoing rapid evolutionary change in their part of the world as they adapt to climate change.

Where domesticated plants breed true, their wild-related species that have been around for ten thousand years are still adapting to environmental changes. These are plants and animals that survive in the increased heat, grow even in deteriorating soil conditions as desertification spreads, and find where the water is when needed.

These are plants with genetic traits we can copy through genetic engineering and selective breeding to insert into the DNA of wheat, barley, and other grains.

In Morocco, the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA) has created a crop gene bank that has led to the release of 880 new crop varieties in the last 40 years. These include 120 climate-resilient cereal and legume crops that today are being grown in more than 20 countries.

MENA countries have created a drought index to monitor the extent and severity of water-stressed areas. They are working with the United States and other countries on the Agriculture Innovation Mission (AIM) for Climate (AIM4C), a project initially focused on food production in the Arabian Peninsula. The goal is to produce successes to be shared across the rest of MENA countries and other global dryland nations. These new dryland innovations are being introduced and scaled to provide:

• Significant water savings and reuse, with resilient and sustainable farms that use renewable energy and are climate smart.
• Reduced food and feed imports through increased local production of strategic staple crops.
• Lucrative local and export markets for high-value crops and value-added desert farming products, helping to boost the small business sector and creating new jobs in MENA countries.