Small Farmers

Oatman Flat's Ranch in Gila Bend, Arizona, is the first Regenerative Organic Certified® farm in the American Southwest. According to Oatman Flats Ranch General Manager and strategic advisor for Oatman Farms, Yadi Wang, when Oatman Flats family farm owner J. Dax Hansen decided to transition the farm to regenerative organic about twelve years ago, he felt a duty to steward the land by getting the soil back to a healthy state. 

I meet Wang in front of the farm store. Wang is a tall man, perhaps in his mid-thirties and he often wears a cowboy hat. Wang also feels a call to steward the land and grow food ethically. 

"It's about embracing and honoring our ancestors. The work they have done and taught us. Regenerative is a newer buzzword, but it essentially means to teach us to reconnect with the land and help restore the land and grow land at the same time," says Wang 

Wang graduated from the University of Arizona with a PhD from the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. His research focused on earth science systems and he learned about soil health during his time at the University. 

Wang thinks of sustainable farming as a set of principles that includes minimizing soil disturbance, practicing crop diversity, keeping the soil covered, using agricultural practices that increase and sustain productivity by restoring and enhancing ecosystem processes, and incorporating livestock. These practices can also help improve soil health and water quality, strengthen biodiversity, protect and watersheds. Beyond environmental benefits, sustainable farming can also encourage economic profitability and social equity.

"Once we embrace those principles, we can develop practices based on where we are in the country," says Wang.

Before transitioning, the land at Oatman Flats had been fallow for about 12 years. Because of this pause in planting, there were a lot of built-up organics in the soil. Therefore, shifting to organics was easier since Hansen was starting over essentially with a blank canvas. 

Oatman Flats has a series of small wells on the farm. Therefore, growing thirsty commodity crops like cotton or alfalfa was not sustainable. However, an arid-adapted crop like White Sonora wheat was a valuable investment that has paid off for the farm. They plant the wheat from November through January and harvest it in May and June, and White Sonora wheat is the farm's most revenue-generating crop. 

According to Wang, maintaining conservation cover helps build the water cycle and brings humidity back to the land. The cultivated crops at Oatman Flats are then either mob grazed by sheep or roller crimped down — mechanical crimping which cuts only above-ground groups. Three hundred eighty acres of land are on a flood schedule, the most traditional way to irrigate Arizona.

When I ask Wang about his outlook on sustainable farming and the likelihood of the practice growing and scaling, he hesitates. He thinks that human consumption has created a global supply chain that has outpaced itself. 

"We want things anytime, anywhere, for everything. That's where agriculture is going right now as a whole; it's dedicated to human consumption, human needs, and human desire," says Wang.

Wang says that a lot of farmers are going out of business because of this commodity structure. He sees it as a top-down structure that doesn't benefit consumers or small farmers but makes a profit for big agriculture. This is good information and perspective.

Wang shares that for every food dollar we spend on the market, farmers get 7.6 of that in the United States. He argues that more resources are needed for farmers to do better. 

"We have families, we have lives, we need to sustain," says Wang. "How can you have a long-term sustainable farming solution when the reality of the economics and finances is short-term cash flow which is a farmer’s livelihood?" asks Wang. 

In September 2022, Wang was one of 13 participants in a workshop at Biosphere 2 comprising stakeholders, including Arizona farmers, ranchers, Indian water law experts, farmland preservation advocates, and agricultural policy experts. The candidates were chosen based on a diverse range of professions, viewpoints, and expertise. 

This workshop elicited versatile input for a report commissioned by the Babbitt Center. The center was funding projects that do "scenario planning" to explore what a resilient agricultural system looks like in Arizona and the West and the risks, challenges, opportunities that inform the future of agriculture in the region. 

The University of Arizona, Sustainable Waters, and the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum wrote and produced the report and Gary Nabhan, the project principal investigator on the USDA Climate-SMART grant, put it together. 

To facilitate dialogue about potential adaptations of the scenario planning, the University of Arizona's Southwest Center conducted a farmer-focused questionnaire survey and sent it to the participants  before the retreat. 

One of the questions asked participants in the questionnaire was, "What barriers do we need to address that keep farmers from modifying current operations or adopting new practices and technologies to deal with water scarcity and other challenges?

The themes that arose included misaligned policy incentives, such as a farmer losing the ability to collect crop insurance or disaster relief. These programs typically require documented historical yield data for the insured crop. Without several years of yield history for a new crop, farmers may struggle to qualify for payouts if they experience a bad season. This is a significant concern for farmers who depend on these safety nets to maintain financial stability, as switching crops could mean risking further debt without the buffer of insurance or relief programs.

The high cost of improving water infrastructure, the report states, falls on the responsibility of the farmer leasing land and landowners will not share the cost of installation which farmers often cannot finance.

In addition, some farmers are hesitant to adopt new irrigation technologies due to concerns about future crop viability and compatibility. These technologies may not be suitable for all crops, and farmers are unsure what crops will be most profitable in the coming years.

Participants focused on ways to work towards overcoming barriers with solutions like Colorado River Basin water certainty, holistic agriculture and watershed management, and restoring biocultural value on fallowed farmland.

The workshop was based on a research article written by Desert Museum Conservation Research Scientist Erin Riordan, and collaborators such as US Southwest and Mexico scientists, in 2020. This article builds a conceptual model of what it would look like to grow food that benefits ecosystems, arid landscapes, and rural Arizona communities. 

In the paper, Riordan and her fellow researchers, including Gary Paul Nabhan and Greg A. Barron-Gafford, both involved in the USDA grant, describe Arizona's arid conditions as "laboratories for the future."  Arizona specifically is an ideal environment to test the future balance of energy, water and agriculture. 

By building a conceptual framework on how agricultural practices might change because of drought, the researchers model what crops and materials could help increase production and mitigate food and economic insecurities. The article explored selecting resilient wild crops such as legume trees, agaves, and fruits and nuts already adapted to extreme conditions. These crops could be strategically interplanted to create a mutually beneficial ecosystem. This innovative approach reduces stress on the plants and the farmer’s dependence on their yields. 

Riordan also discusses the examination of policy in the article. "There are a lot of policy pieces at the state and federal levels we could look at. We talked about the farm bill for US policy and how we are not supporting farmers and different practices at the state level," says Riordan.

Riordan and her co-authors propose a regenerative arid-adapted agriculture model that combines high- and low-tech designs to introduce  or (re) introduce sustainable farming practices into rural and farming communities. 

At the Desert Museum, Riordan examines wild crop relatives, little wild native plants like the cousins of our domesticated rather than semi-domesticated crops, including peppers, wheat, squash. She examines their importance in our food system, especially in the context of climate change. 

“Because wild crop relatives have traits that are adapted to hardiness, drought, and heat, there's a lot of interest in plant breeders in bringing that hardiness back into our crops that have been bred for yields or transportability, " says Riorden. 

To Riorden, the current Southwest landscape and the weather conditions that the region is experiencing is becoming the national model for agriculture. “We can look to these regions to see what practices, crops, and materials we can strengthen to help increase production and support farmers."

Riordan prioritizes thinking outside the box rather than just increasing irrigation efficiency. She's exploring practices like strip cropping or intercropping annual crops with desert perennials or agave or something else. Another example is an agroforestry system where trees provide shade and also food. 

“So a good example of an agroforestry system is Mesquite tree, and pairing that with a diversified crop or perennial polyculture, you might have something like the wild chili or prickly pear," Riordan. 

Riordan states, "Probably the single biggest thing you can do for climate change and greenhouse gas emissions in Arizona and the arid West is reduce your groundwater pumping. And you know, this call came out amid this kind of negative drought that's now ongoing for 23 years and the crisis of the Colorado River," explains Riordan. 

According to the President at BKW Farms Inc. Brian Wong, the farming operation has significantly shifted since Wong's grandfather planted his first crop in 1939. Wong describes BKW mainly as an irrigation district in which the farm provides water to the farmland they lease to other farmers and to the organic crops and mushrooms the family grows.  

Wong explains that this is due to his grandfather buying cheap land sight unseen, so at the height of their farm in the 1970s, they were growing on about 20k acres across Marana, Casa Grande, Wilcox, and even into California. It ended up being more land than the family could manage, and BKW went bankrupt in the early 1990s. At that point, they decided to get out of farming and move more into land leasing and irrigation districts. The family sold most of the excess land and concentrated a majority of their efforts in the Marana area. 

They decided to focus more on the administrative side, such as water contracts, negotiating with the Land Department and the state of Arizona, and let farmers focus on farming on BKW's land. As a result, Wong says yields have gone up in the area since they started these relationships with farmers in the 1990s. 

The farmers that lease the land from BKW don’t have to adhere to specific sustainable farming practices. However, Wong argues that a farmer must practice sustainability or efficiency regardless, in order to not "throw away money." BKW's 294 acres of sustainable crops are south of Marana near Saguaro National Park West. Wong says they initially tried planting their organic harvest on-site in Marana, but preventing the commingling of organic and non-organic crops proved difficult.

The family decided to get into sustainable farming to diversify their growing efforts and grow and sell locally to cut out the middleman. They decided to grow heritage grains such as White Sonora wheat, Khorasan wheat, and Red Fife wheat, which were local or locally-adapted to the area hundreds of years ago. They also grow Durum Wheat and Hard Red Wheat, which have been bred and adapted for sustainability. 

Like Oatman Flats, BKW first farmed their organic crops on a piece of land that hadn't been farmed for around five to ten years. 

"As far as organic harvest yields were concerned, it was very successful," says Wong. “But once we harvested all these crops, we asked ourselves, why aren't people coming to buy them?"

Wong explained that consumers were familiar with milled flour but unfamiliar with raw wheat products. So BKW pivoted and started working with breweries that started using their wheat berry in their malting and brewing process.

Wong says they developed their milling operation around 2015, which allowed them to enter a new market of customers, including bakeries, home bakers, and restaurants.

Wong says that BKW relies a lot on trial and error from what they grow, how they grow it and to how they process and market it. 

“Every year, we're trying to tackle a different challenge. The early years were spent marketing, processing, and getting people used to something different than they had in the past. Before we started growing the White Sonora Wheat, it was something that was almost never heard of in this area just because it hadn't been grown for about 100 years," says Wong.

Through trial and error, BKW also learned that they didn’t want to rely on funding from grants or other organizations like the USDA.

BKW has partnered with multiple municipalities in this area, including Tucson Water, Metro Water, and Marana Water, and its entire farm is classified as a groundwater savings facility.

"So what that means is that we take the unit of water these municipalities have and apply it to our ground as irrigation water. In turn, that municipality has the right to pump that unit of water we did not pump as groundwater to use in the future. So that allows us to partner with these municipalities that have a higher priority of water," says Wong.

Arizona water rights prioritizes tribes, tribal farmers and municipalities over farmers.

"We started using CAP water in the mid-90s, and by the late 90s, we converted our entire farm to 100% CAP water. Since then, we haven't pumped any groundwater. In combination with not pumping groundwater and the artificial recharge projects surrounding our farm, the water table has come up about 100ft since the late 90s,” says Wong.

Wong says this directly benefits municipalities because it enables them to store water for the future and access that water whenever they need it. BKW has no plans to fallow land anytime soon. 

Wong explains that growing heritage farms was first a business driven decision not a moral one. "It's nice for us to be able to grow heritage grains because, you know, it has that whole local flair. But you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket," says Wong. “It's good to diversify what kind of crops you grow because it allows you to weather different market fluctuations and take advantage of the highs and the lows. If they do come."

For Wong, it has been rewarding to work with local partners and even some of the tribes in the area to bring back White Sonora wheat and feed local grains to the local population. 

As for Wong's predictions of scaling their sustainable farming efforts, "It all depends on where you're trying to sell your crops and the marketability. If the entirety of Tucson wanted to eat just our wheat, I think we'd have enough land to do it. But it won't be as cheap as they can find at the store. We can't compete with a mainstream grocery outlet."

Wong does believe that there's an opportunity to grow awareness about sustainable farming that can help grow the market for the products. In the past, BKW has participated in community events such as Tucson Meet Yourself, where they set up an information booth to connect people with where their food comes from.

"I think every business wants to achieve 100% sustainability. It is difficult, especially when it comes to knowledge, information, and implementation," says Wong.