Happy Urban Dirt

Atmospheric uncertainty has become modern normal. Many farmers, gardeners and settlements are looking for ways to adapt food production to be more resistant in the face of “global strangeness”.

Below is a fragment Growing food in a warmer, more arid soil By Gary Paul Nabhan. Has been adapted to the network.

In the early eighties I was lucky to come across what could be the hottest, drier environment in which time-honored desert farmers produced food in North America. She appeared in a place named Susvuk, on the Pinakate Volcanic Mexican Grani shield, with at least 40 miles of LAW, dunes and arid beds of Lake Playa between him and the nearest city.

Currently, part of the Mexico Biosphere Reserve for Pinakat and the surrounding Gran Deslesto, it has passed even 36 months without measurable rainfall; Summer temperatures often reach 120 ̊F (49 ̊C). One morning in the central summer part I flew over the pinacate, when the Mexican family began to sow corn, beans and bonfires after the first rains in the summer season.¹

It is compelling to find out what these residents of the desert can plant among such an extreme landscape, I went to the edge of lava and visited the field on foot several times during the growing season. There I registered air temperatures 114 ̊F (46 ̊C) at full sun temperatures and soil 165 ̊F (74 ̊C) during a conversation with farmers and taking the temperature of arable plant leaves! The rains appeared only twice this year, but the muddy clay in the field stored enough moisture in the soil from this first rain to bring almost all crops – Mexican June corn, two species of beans (Tarie and Pintos), squash and watermelons – to their flowering stage.

Compact teparian plants adapted to the desert had the ability to grow and produce beans, but almost all pinto beans sown on the same day germinated, but more and more often suffered from heat stress. Pinto plants first interrupted their flowers, then pods, and then their leaflets closed, cramps and withered. Meanwhile, Tepara bean leaflets remained lively, following the sun’s movements for most of the day. It was as if they were sun collectors programmed to reveal the widest possible surfaces of the leaves to burning sunlight to capture energy as soon as possible.

Based solely on three tiny rains and rafting from volcanic slopes just before the field, the theepary beepan bean plants created an equivalent equivalent of 1200 pounds on AKR without any additional irrigation. Pintos produced less than a cup. Corn, squash and watermelon varieties adapted to the desert were almost as good as teparic beans.

However, an anecdotic can be such an incident, it reminds me of two realities that already affect our food safety, and which will become even more common in the future. One of these realities can bring out a pessimist in you, and the other can get an optimist.

The first reality is that many places in North America regularly suffer from summer temperatures exceeding 100 ̊F (38 ̊C), while they rarely did it in the past. Such heat waves put unprecedented stress associated with varieties of farm animal cultivation and breeds, which have low thermolerance tolerance for temperatures above 95 ̊F (35 ̊C). When heat levels are outside the physiological limit of some gardening crops, such as beans, the production of floral buds, open flowers and pods decreases, those that are produced interrupting and falling from the plant, and the number of seeds set to the plant becomes drastically reduced or irrelevant.² Plants stressed with heat are also more susceptible to insects eating leaves and viruses, which sometimes wear. After reaching some thresholds of heat and moisture stress – because these two factors are tightly intertwined – the cultivated plant will simply undergo high fever and dying.

Such temperatures damaging plants are clearly on us with increasing frequency. In 2011, Yuma, Arizona – the nearest American city to the diminutive field of beans in Susol, Sonora – summed up 114 days with temperatures reaching 100 ̊f or more, and 177 days over 90 ̊F (32 ̊C). But such long temperature times growing above 90 each day are no longer restricted to real desert regions. In 2011 and 2012, cities in the following states set modern records of the longest series of extreme temperatures (over 90 ̊F per day) in their history: Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Nowy Mexico, North Karolina, Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas. In the northern states from Maine to Illinois and southern Dakota, the cities for the first time reached a temperature of 100 ̊F or for the first time in decades. In more southern locations, such as those in the country of hills near Austin in Texas, farmers had to deal with 90 days of triple temperatures for the first time. This heat wave hit Texans like fires

Dat palms are used to shade the walls of the house and reduce the heat load in the Egyptian Oasis of Siwa, in the heart of the Sahara desert and drought, which surrounded them around. The following year (2012), almost two -thirds of the North American heart stood in front of comparable heat waves and drought conditions, destroying American corn cultivation and forcing food prices to grow up to unusual heights.

The southwestern ramada covered in the shade allows for the production of vegetables throughout the summer in Tucson Village Farm in Arizona.

Of course, the high fever of the earth has not broken yet. In a breakthrough report, the intergovernmental panel regarding climate change (IPCC) synthesized the results of 23 models of climate change forecasting. Based on a set of well -seen assumptions regarding the future release of greenhouse gases, these models predicted a globally average boost by 3.2 ̊F (1.8 ̊C) to 7.2 ̊F (4.0 ̊C) in the next century.³ This, of course, will introduce low thermal tolerance crops in the threat zone to heat stress in most of the main regions producing food in North America.

This leads us to the second reality, which hit me like a revelation when I worked on the Susol Facility, pressed between these two lava flows in Gran Deslesto. While most crops and cultivation patterns do not have sufficient thermolerance tolerance to support us avoid the food safety crisis, some. It may be true that “the existing climate of a huge part [Desert Southwest] is already marginal for agriculture “⁴ But inventive farmers found ways to build a “guild” of mutually adapted varieties of crops, animal breeds and canopy of canopy, which constantly produce food, even when placed in the fire of arid subtropical and tropical landscapes.

Such guilds show “collective” strategies for relieving heat stress and possible utilize of solar energy that cascatts through their guild or microcommunia. Most importantly, farmers from around the world have developed significant knowledge tanks on how to put these food crops in a context in which they rarely, if at all, bear the burden of heat stress. Let’s see what worked for them, which can also be adapted, improved or analogous in a specific phase of food.

Notes

1. Gary Paul Naban and Paul follows. 1985. Gathering of the desert. University of Arizona, Tucson.
2. Hide Omae, Ashok Kumar and Mariko Shomo. 2012. “Adaptation to high temperatures and water deficit in ordinary beans (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) during the reproductive period.” [Indian] Journal of Botany 80414: 1–6.
3. Ga Meehl, TF Stocker, WD Collins, P. Friedlingstein, W Gaye, JM Gregory, A. Kitoh, R. Knutti, JM Murphy, A. Noda,
   Scb rapper, ig watterson, aj weaver and zc zhao.,
   S. Solomon, D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, KB Auster, M. Tignor and HL Miller, editors. 2007. “Global climate forecasts”. At Climate Change 2007: Fundamentals of physical sciences. Working group contribution and in the fourth report of the intergovernment panel evaluation on climate change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Great Britain and Recent York.
4. Jim Norwine, John R. Giardino, Gerald R. North and Juan B. Valdés. 1995. The changing climate of Texas: predictability and implications for the future. Texas A&M University, College Station.

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