Rethinking Drought: Some People Survive and Thrive Through Periods of Low Rainfall.
It’s Not The Rain You Get. It’s The Rain You Keep
From my conversation with Andrea Malmberg, Jackie Eshelman and Abbie Kingdon-Smith, ranchers who hail from the dry American West.
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ANDREA MALMBERG: Somebody says, “How much rain do you get?”
I say, “All of it.”
HART HAGAN: Right! What do you mean by that?
JACKIE ESHELMAN: The land managers that are really doing a great job, a lot of that rainwater is going into the soil. It's going to prepare their place because they've prepared for that rain.
HART HAGAN: It's not the rain you get. It's the rain you keep.
ANDREA MALMBERG: Yep. So they have prepared their soil surface and their plant community for the rain.
When we moved to this place in Oregon--it's the dry side of Oregon--so don't everybody think it's always that wet side …
We have irrigation. People who have irrigation always use irrigation. It's like turning on the bulldozer.
What we discovered is that we actually needed to change the plant community because plants were suffocating. The data that Jackie was able to look at in Ecological Outcome Verification said the plant community is sedges and rushes. The roots are not deep. By stopping irrigation completely, we were able to almost double our production.
We changed our biodiversity. We still have sedges and rushes. We are not against those plants. But we also have clover. And we have many different kinds of perennial grasses and we don't even know what we possibly could have.
And we didn't plant anything.
HART HAGAN: Andrea, this is almost too good to be true. You're lowering your input costs, by decreasing your irrigation and you're doubling your production. That's almost too good to be true.
ANDREA MALMBERG: And we leased our water rights in-stream for salmon. So we profited by providing an ecosystem service. People can't do that everywhere. But is it too good to be true?
It is a scarcity mentality that says we need to control. That hasn't been working that great. What about doing less and making better decisions, using the data.
JACKIE ESHELMAN: One thing that surprises a lot of people is that you can over irrigate something, right? They think water, water, water is what it needs. They think plants need all this water, but they don’t.
It's hard to recognize that when you over irrigate, you compact the soil. Water compacts the soil. When there's no air in the soil, the life in the soil can't live, the roots can't go deep and the water runs off.
So over-irrigation is a thing, even in a place where you get maybe 9 to 11 inches of rain in a whole year. You can still over irrigate. In fact the plants in those communities have evolved to get 9 to 11 inches of rain.
THE “SMALL WATER CYCLE” IS BETTER THAN IRRIGATION
HART HAGAN: The best water is what's already in the soil, because the soil captured it, and is holding onto it. That’s plant-available water.
JACKIE ESHELMAN: Then you have the small water cycle, right? So, when your soil is holding water then those plants transpire. That water turns into dew and drops back into the soil.
There's this really small water cycle that happens. Most people, when they think about the water cycle, they're thinking about what they learned in middle school, where water evaporates off the ocean, turns into clouds and comes over the mountains. Then it rains and washes down the rivers, and back into the ocean.
That's the large water cycle.
But what we really want to see on the land, the thing that is most valuable on the land is that small water cycle. You need water holding capacity in the soil to have an effective small water cycle.
HART HAGAN: You get that greater water holding capacity by stopping the irrigation. And your animal impact is just right because of your grazing.
And then your plant communities have more plant families. According to the Jena experiments, the more plant families you have in a given place, the better it is for building soil carbon, which is a proxy for building soil life and soil structure. Soil that has structure is then able to absorb the rain.
JACKIE ESHELMAN: Absolutely.
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For the entire conversation, please click on the link to this video.