After my morning at the OSU Winter Cereals Field Day, I travelled down the road to the OSU Vegetable Research Farm to meet with Lucas Nebert of the Dry Farming Collaborative.
The Dry Farming Collaborative (DFC) is a group of farmers, educators, plant breeders and agricultural professionals partnering to increase knowledge and awareness of dry farming management practices with a hands-on participatory approach. Dry farming is often defined as ‘crop production without irrigation during a dry season, usually in a region that receives at least 50 cm of annual rainfall, and utilises the moisture stored in the soil from the rainy season.’ With water availability already an issue globally, the DFC are collectively looking at low-input, place-based approaches to producing crops within the constraints of local climates. Importantly, the DFC also prioritise flavour in their selections, ensuring that the crops they grow are not only resilient but taste good.
I had heard a lot about the dry farming methods from both Lane and Frank Morton, and also an offshoot of DFC – the Dry Farming Institute - so I was looking forward to seeing some of the crops in the field and getting a better sense of how this approach to farming with limited irrigation works. A common theme in many of my discussions with farmers so far has been the dramatically varying climactic conditions we are now facing, and the challenges this poses. Our seasons are no longer stable, and it seems illogical to think we’ll be able to predict what next winter or spring will bring. What we can do is look to increasing our crops abilities to cope with the diversity of conditions. Dry farming could potentially be another string to our bow in terms of climate resilience.
Lucas has been involved in the DFC for the past 7 years. A sustainable agriculture researcher, he specialises in soil health and plant and soil microbial ecology. Lucas is passionate about dry farming with staple crops. He does not discriminate in terms of what varieties he works with - using commercially available, heirloom and F1 Hybrids in his search for varieties that will best adapt to the dry farming methods.
In his trials he is looking for varieties that can cope with minimal irrigation and adapt readily to the regional conditions. Here in the Pacific Northwest, they are fortunate to get high annual rainfall, so Lucas is looking to capitalise on that to limit the need for further irrigation during the growing season. He has run trials in tomatoes, beans, cow peas and corn, as well as experimenting with other less common crops.
As we wander the research farm, Lucas used the analogy of a battery to describe the soil – rather than storing energy, the soil was storing water, and through dry farming methods they are looking to capitalise on that reserve. A dry-farmed crop is irrigated once or not at all and needs to perform purely on what water is held in the soil profile.
As we looked out over the recently cultivated beds, the elephant in the room was clearly soil management practices. I raised the question of the impact of tillage on this theory. Everything I have learnt about soil health tells me that water holding capacity of soil is directly impacted by soil structure and the quality of aggregation. You need micro and macro aggregates in the soil to create that desired sponge effect, holding onto water but also allowing for gas exchange and porosity. And roots in the ground as much as possible. Lucas agreed and explained that minimising cultivation was something they had been experimenting with at other sites. They are looking at reducing tillage to preserve the moisture in the soil, and this is where the DFC really comes into its own through peer-to-peer information exchange. Lucas explained that people without access to reliable irrigation tend to be smaller and/or underrepresented farmers – people who are often forced into coming up with creative solutions to problems. DFC’s bottom-up approach employs the knowledge and experience of the agricultural community: they are working with a wide range of farmers, some of whom are exploring alternative management strategies such as minimum tillage.
Another topic I really wanted to discuss with Lucas was seed saving. From what I know about plants, the success of the dry farming approach seems to hinge on saving seed – if you are working with crops to adapt them to specific climates, you need to be saving the seed from those plants so that the memory of those conditions is passed onto the next generation – it’s all about epigenetics.
I am not a scientist, so my grasp on epigenetics is somewhat basic, but it feels like a vital piece of the puzzle to understand when working in reciprocity with plants in the breeding process. Epigenetics are the connection between the genetics of an organism and what is happening to it in its environment. They are changes in gene function that do not entail a change in DNA sequence. The epigenomes of organisms are thought to be much more responsive to environmental conditions than genomes. So when we’re considering adaptation and coping strategies to a changing climate, epigenetics seems to have a big role to play.
I like to think of epigenetics as a kind of memory – certain environmental changes can trigger a switch, enabling a plant to quickly adapt to changing conditions. And this can become transgenerational, resulting in heritable phenotypic (observable) traits, such as hairier leaves. These transgenerational changes can help plants respond better to recurring or long-term stresses, such as drought. This makes saving seed essential for the success of initiatives like dry farming. The plants need to remember the conditions that have come before to be able to thrive. And for future adaptation, this also requires genetic diversity within the crops: complex genomes to give the plant options to constantly update.
I wanted to find out whether this was part of the dry farming approach. As we wandered the research fields, I broached this topic with Lucas. As well as trialling commercially available varieties, plant breeding is a big part of his work: mixing up genetics to select for plants that can adapt to the dry conditions. Using the process of recurrent selection, he randomly crosses parent plants in the field then grows out family groups the following year to evaluate their traits. This speeds up the breeding process and has allowed him to home in on varieties that are adapting faster to dry farmed conditions.
Lucas is currently working with a corn population originally sourced via Adaptive Seeds. The Open Oak Party Mix is a flinty dent type corn selected from a freely crossed population of Wapsie Valley Dent, Vermont Flint, Garland Flint, Italian Polenta and several unnamed dent varieties from a University of Wisconsin breeding project for nutrition. It is a diverse population, offering an extensive genome to work from, and he acknowledged the results are extremely promising so far.
As a PhD of plant & soil microbial ecology, we also discussed some of the exciting trials he had been running using drought tolerant endophytes as inoculants. He had been coating seed with a species of Trichoderma and saving seed from the plants that performed better in the field: selecting for those that form an adaptive symbiotic relationship with the endophytes. Lucas described his work as a kind of ‘alchemy’, he clearly gets a lot of joy out experimenting in the field and learning what plants can teach us.
Dry farming has given me lots to think about. I am very much of the mindset that we need complexity to retain food and seed sovereignty, breeding for just one likely outcome doesn’t feel like the solution. It has made me reflect on my conversation with Hank at Avoca Seed, on his wise words on F1 Hybrids – how they are’ breeding for something humans can think of’. Similarly, if we focus on one likely climate outcome, such as drought, are we imposing our own boundaries onto these plants, restricting them to the limits of our own imagination? But methods such as dry farming, when used in collaboration with other farmer led breeding practices, feels like a great strategy. Retaining enough diversity to allow plants to do their thing, making space for feedback, response and adaptation. We need heterogeneity to give us options.
If there is diversity within the field, there might be a chance that some of the plants will survive the next period of drought, or the next ice storm. Exposing these crops to varying conditions in real time, out in the field, selecting year on year through farmer-led breeding feels like one of our best tools for navigating our unpredictable climate. And it’s reassuring to find groups such as the DFC supporting and empowering farmers to carry out this important work.