Adapting to arid conditions, local farmers embrace water-resilient practices

A soft, silver early-morning light washed over Eliza Mason’s 4-acre farm as she reached down and sifted through the leaves of her tomato plants.

The plants, rooted in arid, crumbling soil, are fruiting without the benefit of water. Mason hasn’t watered her tomatoes since they were planted in May.

Instead, she relies mostly on rainwater. 

On the vine, she cupped a chocolate stripe tomato, feeling for suppleness and looking for dark green streaks. It was ripe. She plucked it. 

Since 2017, Mason, 39, has owned and operated her farm, Lilliputopia, tucked away in Monroe just north of the Lane-Benton county line.

Four 3,000-gallon tanks loom over her farmstead, filled by water that cycles through a rain catcher collecting runoff from the greenhouse roof. Her farm, however, needs less water than most. A one-third-acre plot of her land is designated for dry-farmed crops.

Oregon’s wet winters help set farmers up for dry summers of growing. Dry farming allows deep roots to absorb residual moisture from these wet seasons. 

For Mason, dry farming was an obvious choice. 

“It is way less time-intensive and resource-dependent,” she said. “ We have challenging soil, and we’re not watering anything, and we still can get crops to grow.”

Adopting such techniques is fortuitous for farmers like Mason who find themselves in the southern Willamette Valley, where drought conditions have arrived weeks ahead of schedule. In some pockets of the state, drought has reached extreme levels, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. 

Water scarcity for the state could mean potential water restrictions in the next month or even water shutoffs for properties that rely on public water.

Increasingly frequent and extreme summer droughts are forcing the hands of many local farmers in Oregon to develop new techniques, some of which require little to no irrigation.

It’s unclear how widespread dry farming is in Oregon, but interest is increasing: A dry farming program at Oregon State University has 550 members on its mailing list, with 300 to 500 growers regularly showing up to annual conventions. 

Adapting to a drier climate

Dry farming, an all-encompassing term for production of crops without agricultural irrigation during dry seasons, is not a novel idea. 

These farming practices predate Western agronomy, said Teagan Moran, outreach program coordinator with the Oregon State University’s Small Farms Program. “Dry farming is and has been practiced across the globe, from the Mediterranean Basin to the American Southwest, from East Africa to South Asia. Indigenous communities across the world have developed sophisticated, site‑specific methods for growing crops without irrigation, often in climates far drier than the Willamette Valley.”

Moran has worked for OSU Extension’s Small Farms Program in Linn, Lane and Benton counties for about a decade. She works with the OSU Dry Farming Program and the Dry Farming Collaborative, a network promoting dry farming through hands-on research. 

OSU’s Small Farms Program, hosted through the university, began in 1996. 

Moran joined in 2018, and over that time, she has seen climate change before her eyes, with dried-out water supplies, erratic rainfall, longer summer dry spells, wildfire risk and higher temperatures. Pests and weeds have also taken a greater toll on the land.

The Dry Farming Program, which is part of the Small Farms Program, was established in 2013 and serves as a climate adaptation strategy for growers facing water scarcity.

“I just think that climate change, in particular, the extreme heat domes, the extreme temperature fluctuations and the extreme droughts that we’re getting is really forcing us to adapt and to change and experiment even more,” Moran said. 

The research done through the university looks to explore the limits of the conditions in which crops — like tomatoes, melons, squash, corn and beans — can grow. 

“Can we significantly reduce the amount of water that we’re irrigating? Can we cut it off at a certain time and still have that crop be successful?” she said. 

Moran isn’t ready — yet — to call dry farming a comprehensive solution to Oregon’s increasingly frequent droughts. But she is working with others committed to creating a dry farming network.

Building a dry farming network

In 2019, the nonprofit Dry Farming Institute was established to expand on the work done by the Dry Farming Initiative. The two programs collaborate to share data, host workshops and field days. 

Cassandra Waterman, communications and outreach director for the Dry Farming Institute, is one of Moran’s partners in the research. Waterman first got involved with dry farming as a student research assistant at OSU, worked up the academic ladder, and joined the initiative in February.  

Waterman and the team, alongside OSU’s Dry Farming Program, have put together a Water Resilience Toolkit — a guide built from years of conversations with farmers — to help growers map out drought strategies based on local conditions. The document was released Tuesday, Aug. 4.

“We have tried to outline our process and our framework … and invite growers to explore their own context and develop strategies that support them, their goals and their unique context,” Waterman said.

In addition to the toolkit, the initiative organizes and leads field tours at showcase sites — typically OSU’s farms — where people interested in dry farming can see what it really looks like in practice. The next field tour is scheduled Aug. 26. 

Waterman also highlighted a project aimed at middle schools in which students collect soil and crop samples. The students are sent home with seeds to implement in their school gardens. 

“It just really requires a presence and a willingness to learn and get creative,” Waterman said. 

Navigating the risks 

The long-term success of dry farming depends on whether consumers are willing to support it — which would go a long way toward making it profitable for farmers.

In a five-year study from 2018 to 2023, researchers from OSU found dry-farmed tomatoes grown on suitable sites can be profitable, based on actual 2022-2023 harvest data. 

The study, based at the OSU Vegetable Research Farm in Corvallis, ran multiple trial types and includes a real cost-and-revenue comparison. 

The profitability, however, depends on multiple factors, including market premiums and production costs. 

“Will consumers end up choosing to pay more for a product that they believed was being grown in a way that was aligned with their values, and as water becomes more scarce?” Moran said. 

With the economics of local farming being complicated with slim profit margins, more research needs to be done to nail down cost-effectiveness of dry farming, Moran said.

In California, the trend for water-stressed acreage is leaving land unplanted. Strict groundwater limits have cut farm water by 50% in some regions, according to the Organic Produce Network. Those water restrictions have forced farmers to leave around 240,000 acres uncultivated annually.

With a failure to adapt quickly enough to statewide water shortages, California lost over 7,300 farms, a 10.5% drop between 2017 and 2022.

Although climate conditions here are different — with Oregon receiving more annual rainfall than California — the struggles for local farmers in California could be a preview of what Oregon farmers could face as droughts become increasingly prevalent. That’s why Oregon growers are attempting now to build climate resilience. 

Back on the 4-acre farm, some years work better than others for Mason. This summer, her tomatoes are thriving, yet on the other half of the plot, all of her squash crops are dormant. 

“It’s just more of an inherent risk when you’re dry farming,” she said. “Obviously, you’re more susceptible to weather such as the heat wave.”

Mason planted her squash before a heatwave early, which she believes killed them all. “They didn’t even seem to sprout,” she said. 

For this reason, OSU’s Moran emphasizes that dry farming strategies should be evaluated carefully, crop by crop and site by site. 

“There are certain soil types that work, and there are certain soil types that don’t. Every site is unique,” she said. “There are just certain crops that we have not yet either been able to research or we don’t really know how they would do under completely dry farming conditions.”

In late July, Mason cradled a handful of juicy tomatoes. The morning clouds had moved on and the sun baked the cracked soil, but she remained unbothered. 

“Have faith. You’ll be amazed,” Mason said. “I always recommend people just try it; it’s kind of a no-brainer. Everybody grows tomatoes and sells them at the farmers market, so if you can do this without water, it’s a huge advantage. There are trade-offs, of course, but it’s easier and requires fewer resources. I’d imagine more people would want to do that.”