In the early twentieth century, the United States began to settle the arid regions of the West. At the same time, agricultural experts around the world started to develop a new agroecological zone: the drylands—landscapes that were considered too arid to be agriculturally productive in the conventional sense. Without the use of irrigation, agronomists argued that these drylands could be rendered productive through rain-fed agriculture, a combination of practices through which fields, crops, or fruits are adapted to rely only on rainwater for growth.
Figure 1: Dry farming techniques depicted in New Mexico in the 1940s. IRVING RUSINOW/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Though much has been written about this era in U.S. history, little is known about the reorganization of disparate geographic areas into modern dryland regions reshaped the environmental history of the Middle East and Latin America. The drylands were a geographic region that cut across political and economic boundaries in Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia, and beyond. Far-flung experts around the world drew upon technical knowledge to underpin settlement of the drylands.
The U.S. settlement of the drylands, in fact, brought an expert from Palestine, Najib Nassar, and an agronomist from Mexico, Rómulo Escobar, into the global dry farming development effort. Their role was more complex than simply serving as local instruments for U.S. agricultural policy. These experts claimed the dryland agroecological zone for themselves. Their research invoked a past glory of ancient practices both in the Fertile Crescent and among the Indigenous peoples of Mexico as evidence of the modern viability of arid areas. Here a more complex understanding of the settling of modern states emerges as not simply imposed from above, but also engaged with global peoples, movements, and traditions.
Through analyzing works by these Mexican and Palestinian researchers, the dry farming agroecological zone becomes not only its own geographic region, but rather the product of a process in which agricultural experts participated in developing and defining the dryland landscape. Nationalists around the world sought to secure political communities by encouraging people to settle in particular areas through the use of modern dryland agriculture.
The importance of the U.S. settlement and colonization project of the U.S. West cannot be overlooked. Yet as Enrique Dussel argued in 1994, centers of power cannot exist without exploitation of the margins. Here, we find unlikely margins in the figures of the Mexican and Palestinian early-twentieth century experts that enabled the U.S. dry farming project to claim its powerful center. The modern drylands agroecological zone emerged both in Mexico and Palestine with the willing and active role of Escobar and Nassar and within the context of an unlikely and uneasy relation to the U.S. colonization project. This discussion remains relevant within present-day discussions of a “return” to dry farming to sustain and expand cultivation across the U.S. West, Palestine, and Mexico.
The nature and sustainability of agroecological zones is the center of this issue. High-value cash crop production uses chemical inputs and irrigation to defy the relationship between the climate of a region and the type of crop being grown. In other words: Why not grow tomatoes in an arid area if water is available for irrigation? In contrast, dry farming methods, which were developed over millennia, did not have the luxury of greenhouses, artificial fertilizers, and irrigation networks, and were forced to develop crop varieties and methods that were highly-adapted to the rainfall and climatic conditions of a given area.
The notion that dry farming is a more “sustainable” alternative to costly irrigated production, however, is itself a distinctly modern idea. According to its advocates, dry farming offers a way to grow crop varieties that are adapted to drier regions rather than growing crops adapted to irrigation. The recent interest in a “return” to dry farming has a much longer history within the modern relationship of the Americas and Palestine. Such a return would first require the production of a dryland agroecological zone.
Recent work has sought to explore the drylands as a political-geographic space. Diana Davis’ 2016 book The Arid Lands argued that deserts have generally been seen as “barren” and “degraded” areas in need of improvement. She shows that in order to understand arid lands as modern biogeographic regions, it is necessary to challenge the assumptions of colonial scientists, governments, and international organizations that local people do not use natural resources efficiently. Davis’ exploration of scientific assumptions sheds light on concerns of “desertification” and how local, often marginalized people, are blamed for creating drylands through overgrazing and resource exploitation. Similarly, Arturo Warman’s 2003 book Corn and Capitalism has shown that the circulation of plant material like seeds cannot be separated from wider processes of colonization and settlement.
Understanding the Dry Farming Movement
Part physical geography of soils, vegetation, and climate, part agronomy, and part social geography of settlement and colonization, the early twentieth century dry farming movement sought to make settling arid lands viable. This was possible due in large part to the Dry Farming Congress, a U.S. organization founded and supported by railroad and real estate companies, agricultural experts, and the government, which sought to expand their hold on arid areas of the U.S. West through improved farming methods. Such farming techniques, which had been refined by native cultivators in arid regions for generations, became the subject of great scientific interest in the late nineteenth century when Europeans began settling drier regions of the Western United States.
Codified by agricultural scientists as “dry farming” or “dryland farming,” the research volume produced by the Congress advocated methods to improve agriculture at four levels, targeting questions of how to retain more soil moisture; how to make moisture available to plants; how to breed plants to tolerate drought; and finally, how to control erosion. The Dry Farming Congresses began in 1909 in collaboration with the railroad industry, reaching a peak attendance of 10,000 at the 1912 Congress before declining in subsequent years. In making the case for these improved farming methods, they drew upon a wellspring of ancient agroecological history, both from Indigenous peoples in the Americas and peoples of the Fertile Crescent. They brought together agricultural experts to build upon ancient practices while applying “rational” and scientific tools to them.
The fortunes of the movement changed with the Great Depression and Dust Bowl in the 1930s, alongside improvements in irrigation, dams, and other technologies that made irrigated cultivation possible where it had before been agroecologically impossible. The same is true in Palestine, where the dairy industry’s investment in crops for livestock to graze precipitated a turn to irrigated production because rain-fed production could not sustain enough grassland production for livestock to graze in Palestine’s climate. Though such developments are important aspects of the history of dry farming, this piece focuses on the movement’s heyday—the era of the Dry Farming Congresses.
Zonas de lluvias escasas: Low Rainfall Zones in the Mexican-American Drylands
The presence of international delegates at the U.S. Dry Farming Congresses has rarely been discussed. But delegates from Canada, Australia, Mexico, Argentina, South Africa, Hungary, Algeria, Brazil, Turkey, and others participated in the Congresses. Rómulo Escobar was one of them. In 1914, the Mexican agronomist published a long article in a Juárez-based agronomy journal called “El Cultivo de Secano,” (“dry farming.”) Writing at the height of the Mexican Revolution, there is no doubt that the upheavals and devastation wrought by the war informed his work. Tellingly, the Mexican state agriculture ministry was then called the Secretaria de Agricultura y Colonización (Secretary of Agriculture and Colonization), reflecting the centrality of agriculture to the establishment and sustenance of rural settlements. Escobar’s article covers the history of the North American dry farming movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the central arguments on its benefits, the scientific evidence for dry farming, the machinery required, and its early Mexican experiments. Escobar participated as an international delegate in the 1908, 1909, 1910, 1911, and 1912 Dry Farming Congresses in fledgling outposts like Cheyenne, Wyoming and Billings, Montana.
Escobar, like his North American and Palestinian colleagues, turns to the antiquity of dry farming to make a case for its modern applications. He argued, “the foreign delegates to these Congresses have gone to say that in their respective countries, [crop] varieties that retain soil moisture have been used from time immemorial.” Moreover, he states that there is a distinctly Mexican ancient form of dry farming in the present: “We Mexicans know that our Indians in certain regions of the country conserve the moisture of previous rains well in the soil to use them in the crops of the following year,” he wrote. He cited Palestine among other areas as places that have prospered in “zonas de lluvias escasas” (low rainfall zones):
In India, in Palestine, in Russia, in Persia, in China and in general in nearly all the nations of the globe where there are areas of low rainfall, farmers resort to certain procedures that have the principal objective of the conservation of the soil moisture. The nations that have most prospered in antiquity have been the exact same ones that have occupied zones of the globe where rains are scarce, and naturally their agriculture must have been adapted to the local climatic conditions.
Escobar did not rely on words alone to argue the modern-day applications of past dry farming methods. He had field experiments underway to select for certain traits like drought tolerance and yield to improve and adapt important crops for cultivation and settlement of dry areas. State-run agricultural research experiment stations show maize, nopales, and other crops in northern Chihuahua and Nuevo León. Escobar describes a selection of maize varieties, including “Mexican June Corn” which was “as we understood taken from the La Laguna region” of Mexico, “improved” in the United States, then taken back to Mexico by Escobar as an improved variety which produced a “uniform crop.” Among many other promising crops, he also expressed a desire to acquire drought-resistant wheat from Algeria, suggested that it had been impossible thus far to garner the seed.
It is at that point, much like his colleagues in Palestine and Brazil, that Escobar turned the question of an ancient successes and experimentations with viable dryland crops into a larger, political and social project—of settlement and colonization. He also explicitly stated that while the antique roots of dry farming were clear, contemporary dry farming revealed “that in the modern procedures of cultivation there is something transcendental and new, something rational enough to have caused a real revolution … ”
Figure 2: A farmer picks crops on a farm in Gaza. UNDP PAPP/FLICKR
Escobar saw modern dry farming as a means of developing the drylands into agroecological zones for settlement. As with his U.S.-based colleagues, he sought to establish and sustain agricultural settlements in dry areas in no uncertain terms:
It is in all of these zones where we have seen that in the future agricultural colonies will be established, serving those areas which are now deserts to sustain a population that is better nourished, more educated, and with more requirements than our current rural population.
The project of connecting agroecological transformation to societal transformation is common in early twentieth century writings on the topic as well as in the current discussion of the importance of dry farming to the future of agricultural settlements in California. In this sense, dry farming was as much about creating and connecting agroecological zones well suited for sustaining rural areas as it was about modernizing agricultural methods.
Reappropriating Palestine in the North American Drylands
Around the same time that Escobar was writing, the Palestinian writer Najib Nassar also sought to improve Palestinian agriculture through the use of modern drylands science. Writing at a time of great political uncertainty—the sunset of Ottoman rule— Nassar combined articles he had published with Arabic translations from a scientific book, Dry Farming, published in 1911 by American agricultural scientist John Widtsoe, a founder of the Dry Farming Congress. The volume, published as Al-Zirāʿa al-Jāffa (Dry Agriculture) in 1927, aimed to improve Palestinian methods in dry agriculture by learning from U.S. dry-farming methods. What explains Nassar’s willingness to invest the time and energy into translating a 253-page tome celebrating the U.S. conquest of the desert and its peoples?
It seems that Nassar saw baʿlī (dry agriculture) cultivation as providing a more durable attachment to the landscape. As a modernist, he also believed that he could appropriate U.S. drylands science for the defense of Palestinian land. He sought to draw Palestine into the same agro-climatic zone—the drylands—so that he could exploit dry agriculture within that landscape. As such, Nassar used the physical geography of Palestine to adapt modern U.S. dry farming knowledge within Palestinian practice. There was very little technical knowledge of dry farming in Palestine, Jordan, and Syria, he noted in the introduction of his translation. Thus he hoped to bring that knowledge of dry farming back to Arab farmers by translating the work into Arabic.
Nassar’s work also claims that given the limited capacity for irrigation, modern dry farming should be adopted by updating traditional practices. This was not a mere question of pragmatism. Rather, it struck the heart of one of the most important debates that gave rise to a central problem in Palestine: the socalled “carrying capacity” of the land to support new settlements. This stood in direct opposition to Zionist efforts, which were exclusively focused on implementing and improving irrigated agriculture.
Nassar oscillates between two poles of recognizing and even celebrating the “accomplishments” of countries like the United States in dry agriculture, while simultaneously insisting on the particularity and history of traditional Palestinian methods. A complex figure, Nassar was at once a part of the Nadha (“awakening,” a modern Arab movement of self-realization), intellectually arguing for a deeply modernist project of development that worked to advance a settler colonial agenda. It was not simply a matter of redefining development or progress, but rather, an attempt to produce another reality. In other words, he aimed to deploy the climate, rainfall, topography, and other geographic features to secure a Palestinian claim to the land. In one of his many digressions from the English text in his translation, Nassar articulated this entangled position that is characteristic of the Nadha period:
Our mighty ancestors established ancient cities and were models of effort and vigor … The great Arab cities like Baghdad and Damascus and others whose inhabitants were in the millions were witness to the Arab Renaissance and their advancement in the days that Europe was languishing in darkness and America was unknown. Why do we delay and not follow the example of ancestors and of contemporaneous Europeans and Americans and walk in their path, instead of leaving our lands to go to waste and our cities to go to ruin and poverty to seize us? May the Arabs open their eyes to what modern nations are building. Let us learn and benefit from the experience of the amazing American nation in dry agriculture. If we invest our land with modern technical principles, we will restore the wealth (tharwa) of our ancestors and the prosperity (umrān) of our land.
Nassar invoked a common theme of his era in calling for redemption of the land to a past glory. In holding aloft the “amazing” U.S. system, he made connections to assert Palestinian national claims, drawing on the biogeography of Palestine’s low rainfall averages to solder a connection to other drylands: that is, to permanently settle people, settled agriculture was also necessary. Palestine’s physical geography enabled him to demand Palestine’s inclusion within the global drylands zone—and thus in part to justify its developmental capacity.
Dry Farming Today
From the days of the Dry Farming Congresses to today, interest in dry farming has persisted. There has been a recent upsurge in interest in dry farming, which produces its crops using techniques that exploit only rainfall and not irrigation. In California, there is a growing realization that its water crisis is caused by production and consumption patterns that overdraw water resources. Supplying year-round vegetables, nuts, and fruits has depleted aquifers in the U.S. West to the point of collapse, according to a 2015 report by the Congressional Research Service. Some producers of wine, almonds, and olive oil, among other products, are turning to dry farming to sustain their products. A 2016 National Geographic article stated that “proponents of the practice believe dry farming could be the way of the future, as climate change and water use continue to drain aquifers.”
Figure 3: From Rómulo Escobar’s early 20th century works on dryland farming PHOTO COURTESY OF OMAR TESDELL
Dry farming is a “way of the future,” but also a practice as old as agriculture itself. A 2012 article in Fast Company noted,
By tapping the moisture stored in soil to grow crops, rather than using irrigation or rainfall during the wet season, dry-land farming was a staple of agriculture for millennia in places like the Mediterranean, and much of the American West, before the rise of dams and aquifer pumping.
Palestine, as part of the wider Mediterranean region, is one of the most-often invoked examples of an ancient dry-farming zone. It has served as a wellspring of evidence for those looking to render many areas of the Americas productive.
The logic of settlement guides the bond created between dryland farming methods and agroecological zones. In both Palestine and Mexico, local experts sought to appropriate a U.S.-based dry farming movement for their own purposes. Both researchers wrote at times to great upheaval—the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the height of the Mexican Revolution— bringing great anxiety about the role of agriculture in the internal colonization of rural areas for political power. Both researchers saw their economic and social work to improving the viability of existing rural settlements as a political act. In making the connection between ancient dry farming practices in their homelands, Nassar and Escobar engineered a new agroecological zone in the United States—the modern drylands—to bring about particular territorialized political and social orders. In both cases, the deployment of modern dryland agriculture was a way to secure political community within national borders.
The work of Escobar and Nassar and their relationship to the dry farming movement in the United States unseats common conceptions about global scientific orders. A new U.S.-based center emerges from the margins of agroecological zones of Palestine and Mexico. Exploring previously unknown connections between Escobar and Nassar in the United States enables us to see the powerful place-making capacity of agricultural research. Considering the Mexican and Palestinian cases together develops our understanding of the global dryland agroecological order in a way that would not be possible if the Mexican and Palestinian experiments were considered in isolation.
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Omar Imseeh Tesdell
Omar Imseeh Tesdell is Assistant Professor in the Geography Department at Birzeit University in Palestine. His research examines landscape and agroecological transformation in the Middle East and North America.