New Dryland Farming Strategies for The Pacific Northwest

As a farmer of nearly 30 years, I have been intrigued with the various ideas around adapting agriculture to my bioregion and its changing climate. This curiosity has led me to try a wide variety of experiments over the years. I have tried planting traditional vegetable crops with a variety of plant spacings, different mulches, no-till strategies, and non-irrigated dryland approaches. The primary data and subsequent conclusions that I have come away with are that the common crop species that many of us may grow have traveled a long pathway from wild crop relative to the domesticated, refined variety that exists today. As agriculture evolved it became more sophisticated with more careful planting, spacing, fertilization, irrigation, trellising, mulching, and so on. In our modern agrarian civilization, we have generally tried to optimize the growing conditions as much as possible whenever possible. This has led to a sometimes pathological obsession with achieving higher yields above all else and resultant overuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

There’s an old saying, “you can’t work on an empty stomach”.

In my experimentation on my small farm in SW Oregon with various no-till and dryland approaches for growing crops such as corn, beans, squash, tomatoes, and melons, while I may have achieved success in growing the crop, the yields were always significantly less than growing the same crops under ideal circumstances and conditions. Many of our summer garden favorites are crops that…