Name: Harvesting the Future
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Legacy of the Land

Wenona & Sal Baldenegro (Tucson, Arizona) - Agriculture can thrive in the desert. The Tohono O'odham people have used Ak Chin farming, a form of dry farming, to grow crops for thousands of years, and in this short documentary, cultural experts demonstrate these traditional practices as well as implementations for future community planning.

Ak-chin farming makes desert agriculture possible, and now, those practices help communities today.

Harvesting the Future

The Arthur Vining Davis Foundation

GBH Climate and Environment Fund

Agriculture can thrive in the desert. The Tohono O’odham people have used Ak Chin farming, a form of dry farming, to grow crops for thousands of years, and in this short documentary, cultural experts demonstrate these traditional practices as well as implementations for future community planning.

Ak-chin farming makes desert agriculture possible, and now, those practices help communities today.

Nature

Harvesting the FuturePublished: September 13, 2024Joyce Miguel: Water is sacred. We harvest water that comes because that is the gift for us.Clifford Pablo: Water is our life. What happens if we run out of water? What do we do?I grew up with my grandfather and some of my elders. How I earn field work is looking at different ways that people do their traditional farms. That's what I try to duplicate.Joyce Miguel: The summer season is our big season when we're growing, and so we focus on planning. We have to plant with the rains. The traditional farming, what the O'odham used to do is not really disturb the vegetation, but plant where the waterways are.This is a brush dam. We did this to help slow down the water and build up the soil again because as the waters come rushing in, it's been eroding the area, and it's making the wash whiter. And so here what we did is take the natural material from the dead trees and put them down into the ground, and then the branches, we just laid them all the way across, and it's at an angle like a U-shape.Clifford Pablo: When it rains, it collapses all the leaves. Little branches, the rapid droppings, and that's what washes in to build that soil.Joyce Miguel: The O'odham word for the natural fertilizer is called wakola. You can harvest that and use it in your plants or in your garden.Vina Sarmiento: This is one of the basins that we have here. It collects the surrounding water coming from the traditional farm. The contour that we have that wraps around these bushes and the mesquite tree also collects the water, and it allows the water to sit and absorb, to help recharge the aquifers. When this area fills up, it flows to this outflow, and it will slowly go into the basin that's inside there, and it will flow over into this other basin that we have right here, and it will go into the wash down the ways helping to provide water for the plants that we have beyond the farm.Serenity Ventura: So here we have our rock basin. Its purpose is to slow down the water for a gentle flow into the field. The water is coming from field one and then flows into field two. Once the water rises into the basin, it flows over the hump, and the rocks are positioned up and down so that the water is flowing slowly and steady to prevent erosion from happening and helps the water flow out gently.Jesus M. Garcia: So we have here this runoff irrigation system or dry farming. An ancient people took advantage of this slope by putting piles of rocks that eventually become like little check dams. As the rain is running down the slope, it basically slows down the flow of the water, therefore retaining humidity minutes and does enough to grow more crops.So you can tell that it's a little bit overgrown. There's other plants that are taking advantage of the moisture. You can see that this terrace is a little higher than the terrace down below. And then that terrace back there is a little higher than this one, so that is the essence of this runoff passive water irrigation system of cultivation of agaves.Make sure that the roots are nice and well covered, and they don't have any air underneath. So this way then this little rock debris kind of like small gravel type rock will provide shelter and mulch for this agave. And there you have it. So now all we need to do, that's all the human work we need to do here. The rain, when it comes, will do the rest of it, and then that agave will be set for another five, six years.Brad Lancaster: Here in the Tucson area, I've been inspired by Clifford Pablo, and with the traditional Ak-Chin runoff farming practices, and that's really what we are doing with this street side and in-street water harvesting. It's another form of Ak-Chin runoff farming, but instead of pulling the water from a ephemeral arroyo or desert waterway, we're doing it from the paved street arroyo.Our goal is to infiltrate more water than all these plantings will use. We size these basins so that they're large enough to capture enough water to meet all the water needs of these plantings with a surplus amount of water that can infiltrate the aquifer and also reduce flooding. This one will easily harvest probably over 10,000 gallons of water a year. In our built environment, we have that concrete curb between street and the dirt area where you can plant. And so I see that as the Berlin Wall separating the water flow from the floodplain. And so we're trying to reunite that. So we drill a hole or cut the curb of that wall, so the water flowing down the street can reunite with the floodplain. It's just like when we line our rivers with concrete or whatnot, we are denying the water to be able to go out onto the floodplain and reduce flooding and infiltrate the aquifer still more.So by capturing runoff from the road adjoining this, the street side basin, we're able to increase the available rainfall by 3 to 10 times. And we have calculated that the average neighborhood street in Tucson drains over a million gallons of rainfall per mile per year, and that's more than enough rain to sustain over 400 native food-bearing shade trees per mile or one tree every 25 feet on both sides of the street. So that's basically what we've been doing. These water harvesting strategies, these work everywhere. What are the traditional practices of your area or similar climates elsewhere in the world? Because everywhere there is a dry season, you will find there is a cultural lineage and history of water harvesting.Jesus M. Garcia: The farther we look into the past, the better off we can be in the future. I have always had a respect for people who have had traditional knowledge and continue to practice it.Clifford Pablo: Nobody ever does traditional farming anymore. That's why I was trying to bring it back.Vina Sarmiento: My grandma and my grandpa, they farmed. I never knew them, but I feel like that kind of, it's giving me that chance to know them in gardening because it kind of got lost with them.Serenity Ventura: It's who our people were back then, and it makes me who I am today, and I get emotional. It just heals a certain part of me that I needed healing. It's very precious that beauty that you have with the land and with the language, and most of all with your people. Himtaq, our way of life. It's who we are.

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