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Agricultural producers in particular
are concerned about climate change.
The fact that the weather is changing
and these sort of patterns they’ve relied on for
generations of farming certain landscapes are changing.
And so many of them are wanting to kind of deal with or address
some of those extremes.
For many people in the western United States,
including here in the Northwest, we have water rights.
And so farmers are concerned about when and if
their water rights will be cut off.
We’ve actually already experienced in the Northwest,
folks with junior water rights being cut off
from those rights earlier in the season.
And then actually, in 2015,
during a large drought in our region,
there were senior water rights holders who were cut off.
So, there’s a lot of concern about access to water resources,
and that continues to be something people are feeling
today, but are projected to experience much
more of in the future.
The Northwest Climate Hub is part of the U.S.
Department of Agriculture national Climate Hubs.
and we're really tasked with creating scientific information
and translating scientific information to a broad audience
of land managers, across public and private land
ownership, all with the aim of helping to reduce
risks associated with climate change.
Some of the climate impacts that we’re most concerned about
here in the Northwest are really around temperature,
which are increasing, and precipitation,
which is changing.
So, average precipitation might not change a lot,
but we’re expecting more extremes,
so more flooding and then more drought events.
And we’re also expecting to see more of that
precipitation falling as rain rather than snow,
which really impacts that reservoir of snow storage
that we look for to sort of manage a number of
natural resource systems that are important to us.
One of the projects that we’re working on with the
Climate Hubs here in the Northwest is this dry farming
collaborative work that’s being kind of led by researchers at
Oregon State University.
Many people might be familiar with dry farming in
the kind of cereal cropping world
where folks just don’t irrigate their crops.
But, most people don’t apply that to a western Oregon
or western Washington context
where we think there’s lots of rain.
But, because of some of these concerns about water rights
and water availability for irrigation,
folks are looking at dry farming as a way to grow
fruits and vegetables without irrigation.
So, they rely on residual soil moisture to grow plants.
Some farmers are formal research participants.
So, they actually work with scientists at Oregon State
who are helping them implement the trials using kind of a
replicated scientific method for installing these plots.
And then there are other farmers who are experimenting
on the sidelines.
So they may not want to put in an official research plot,
but they want to experiment with new varietals,
they’re interested in growing some of the squash
or the melons or tomatoes that folks are doing in the trials,
and they’re kind of sharing those more informally.
Amy Garrett, who’s the researcher at Oregon State
who’s kind of the lead,
she was really interested in making sure that there
was a facilitation of learning that happened
across these different groups.
So that it wasn’t just this formal research base
but there was a sort of an informal social network learning
that was happening as well.
And there’s good scientific research that confirms
that those kinds of networks are really important for
farmers to learn about new practices,
adopt them, and then maintain them over time.
We collected in-depth interviews with 20 farmers
this summer in the Willamette Valley.
What we found is, kind of resoundingly,
that farmers are really excited about dry farming.
Yields tend to be less than irrigated varieties;
however, it really depends on the varietal.
So a big part of the dry farming work is trying to
understand which varietals do really well in a
water-constrained environment.
One of the other things they’re exploring is taste.
Many people who market dry-farmed produce say
that it tastes better because it concentrates flavor and sugar.
And then, from just a practical kind of perspective,
it reduces farm labor.
It also saves weeding time, so they’re doing less weeding
because there’s less water. So, those are benefits.
So, not all of it is production-oriented,
but it’s kind of whole-systems approach.
Some of the farmers in our preliminary analysis are saying,
“Hey this gives me more flexibility.”
And then, it really addresses
these concerns about water limitations.
So, for some folks who literally don’t have
the water to irrigate, then this gives them
something that they can purposefully put in place
to be more proactive to dealing with those limitations
rather than sort of being reactive to something
that’s going to happen on a seasonal basis that they
may or may not have control over.
The dry farming effort is just an example
of some of the work that the Northwest Climate Hub
is doing in the region.
We really do work across agriculture, range, and forest
land, trying to link scientific information
with management decisions.
All with the goal of kind of helping land managers,
be they private or public,
manage climate risks and make decisions based on
good climate information that will hopefully reduce
their vulnerability to kind of
more extreme and variable weather in the future.
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