BIG PIVOTS: Less Water, More Food? Part Four

This story by Allen Best appeared on ‘Big Pivots’ on December 27, 2022. It was first published in the summer 2022 issue of Headwaters Magazine. We are sharing it in four installments.

Read Part One

Louise Comas, a plant physiologist at CSU’s Water Management Systems Research Center, gets excited when talking about how natural processes can be used in soils to make nutrients available to plants through microbial partners. Water is an element of this.

“If you use a little less water the plants will create a bigger root system, which could allow plants to increase interactions with microbials,” she explains. The goal is figuring out the sweet spot, defined by restricting water enough to promote more extensive root growth but not so much as to hinder plant productivity and decrease microbial biomass.

Derek Heckman, who farms near Lamar in eastern Colorado, has been doing his own experiments, trying to find the best balance of cover crops, minimal tilling, and the right mix of chemicals.

To improve the organic matter in his soil, Heckman plants cover crops of cereal rye and legumes after the autumn harvest. This puts roots down, part of what Heckman describes as an attempt to create subterranean channels for water infiltration and for sunshine. It can also provide marginal food for cattle allowed to feed in the corn fields before the spring planting.

Cover crops serve several purposes but are not the end goal. Corn, when it’s planted, can tolerate little competition. So he uses herbicides to kill the cover crops. He is a farmer of organic matter, but he is not an organic farmer. Artificial fertilizer and pesticides are tools, he says, to be used as sparingly as possible. When the corn has emerged and can survive competition, he plants cover crops again, this time mixes of cereal rye, red clover, cow peas, radish, flax and buckwheat. Some of those cover crops actually discourage insects and diseases damaging to the corn.

After returning to the farm, Heckman continued the journey begun by his father 20 years before. He set out to do more and became one of several dozen farms in Nebraska, Kansas and Colorado getting funding through The Farms Project. The Colorado Conservation Tillage Association funnels federal funding to Colorado participants, of which Heckman is the only irrigator. The grant has given him the opportunity to experiment.

“A lot of guys are comfortable with what grandpa did and what dad did, and that’s what they do,” he says. “I want to see changes in our operation.”

Summing up, he ticks off what he understands to be core tenants of regenerative agriculture: 1) minimum tillage, 2) leaving roots in the soil as long as possible, 3) integration of livestock into the fields, 4) augmenting the soil by keeping residue on top; and 5) diversifying the plants. It might not be possible to do all five, but that’s the goal.

Those same principles are echoed by the Colorado Department of Agriculture’s soil health program. The program was borne of ideas articulated by a group of more than 100 farmers, researchers, agencies and grower groups. The STAR (Saving Tomorrow’s Agricultural Resources) program assigns points for soil health practices. Farmers and ranchers rate themselves.

“This is a great way for farmers to show what they’re doing and to be proud of the process,” says Cindy Lair, conservation program manager for the agency.

A companion program, STAR Plus, expands the same concept through conservation districts and similar entities. More than 130 individual producers have signed up through STAR Plus.

Regenerative agriculture is not just a topic in rural Colorado in the land of big and even bigger farms. It’s also the central focus of Amanda Weaver’s 13-acre farm called Five Fridges, sandwiched between multi-family housing developments in the Denver metro area’s Wheat Ridge. An economic geographer by training, she now teaches classes about agriculture at the University of Colorado-Denver and, since 2011, farms.

On Five Fridges, Weaver has partners who grow vegetables for local consumption while she raises chickens and operates a goat dairy. Animals are a key component of her operation, which she readily admits is essentially a laboratory for her thinking about regenerative agriculture. The animals add nutrients to the soil; she even sells chicken and goat manure to nearby growers who don’t have the benefit of livestock. As in southeastern Colorado, she emphasizes balance. One of those balances has to do with carrying capacity. One year’s maximum production can come at the expense of long-term benefits. Weaver’s farmland is protected in perpetuity through a conservation easement, managed by Colorado Open Lands, so the long-term benefits and effects of her operation make a difference. In this way, and perhaps more, Weaver and Heckman see agriculture in much the same way. Farming must be seen as a multi-year proposition.

On the Western Slope, soil health restoration is being tested in an experiment on sagebrush-dominated rangelands south of Montrose. Ken Holsinger, an ecologist with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, says the intent is to restore diversity to the lands and improve the water-holding capacity of the soil.

Holsinger says the federal land was likely deteriorated by improper livestock grazing, particularly prior to adoption of the Taylor Grazing Act in 1934, but may well have continued until the 1970s prior to implementing modern grazing practices.

This experiment consists of a pair of one-acre plots that have lost their topsoil and have become dominated by sagebrush and invasive vegetation. Such lands produce 200 to 300 pounds of forage per acre but should be producing 800 to 1,000 pounds per acre of native grasses. The soil will be amended with nutrients to restart the carbon cycle. Afterward, 50% of the sagebrush will be removed.

“We are looking at restarting the carbon cycle and ultimately holding more water in the soil profile,” says Holsinger. “It’s all about rebuilding the diversity in the soil and plant forms.”

One way this enhanced water-holding capacity of restored soils will matter is by preventing the monsoonal rains that western Colorado typically gets in summer from washing soil into creeks and rivers, muddying the water. If the experiment proves successful, then the task will be to cost-effectively scale it up, ideally to the watershed level.

Holsinger hopes the concepts, if proven effective and cost effective at scale, can be employed across other deteriorated rangelands in Colorado.

Back in Silt, at the site of Spring Born, Charles Barr, the company’s owner, got serious about building a greenhouse in 2019. He liked the idea of innovating in agriculture. “I liked the idea of continuous production, I liked the idea of resource conservation, and I liked the idea of moving production closer to consumption.”

The technology is not hydroponic. Sunlight and soil remain critical inputs, along with water. The same technology can be used to grow broccoli, tomatoes, and other fruits and vegetables—or, for that matter, hay.

Innovation can be challenging, though. Barr’s first major challenge was getting local approval. Barr wanted to build the greenhouse at a geothermal site, but his chosen county put him off. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, his financier, promised to loan money for something similar, as long as it was in Colorado. Garfield County, where Silt is located, was one of three counties in Colorado that said yes, he’d get easy approval. Operations began in August 2021.

In far western Colorado, Richard and Mandy Massey have also been innovating. After building a new metal-sided barn near Gateway, southwest of Grand Junction, they have been growing wheat and barley inside in a hydroponic operation as a supplement for their cattle. Their investment was triggered by the drought of 2018. They still need water, but less of it.

Together, their stories speak to the need for innovation. “That will be the model going forward for all of these agricultural areas,” says Barr. “They have to find new sources of revenue, they have to find new ways of doing business, and they have to find new ways to conserve water.”