In the parking lot behind a grocery store in Portland, Ore., last September, several hundred tomato aficionados gathered on a sunny, breezy day for Tomato Fest. While many attendees devoured slices of tomato quiche and admired garlands of tomatoes with curiously pointed ends, I beelined to a yellow-tented booth hosted by Oregon State University. Agricultural researcher Matt Davis was handing out samples of experimental tomatoes.
I took four small plastic bags, each labeled with a cryptic set of letters and numbers and containing a thick slice of a yellow tomato. Scanning a QR code with my phone led me to an online survey with questions about each tomato’s balance of acidity and sweetness, texture and overall flavor. As I chewed on the slice from the bag marked “d86,” I noted the firm, almost meaty texture. Lacking the wateriness of a typical supermarket tomato, it would hold up beautifully in a salad or on a burger, I thought. And most importantly, it was tasty.
I learned later that this tomato had been dry-farmed, a form of agriculture that doesn’t require irrigation. Dry farming has roots stretching back millennia. But in the western United States, the practice largely fell out of widespread use in the 20th century.
Today, however, farmers in the West are once again experimenting with dry farming as they grapple with water shortages, which are being exacerbated by rising temperatures and more frequent and intense droughts linked to climate change.
Finding a more sustainable way to grow food in a thirsty state like California, for example, where agriculture accounts for roughly 80 percent of water usage and where a third of U.S. vegetables are grown, is a top priority. Dry farming won’t solve all of agriculture’s woes, but it offers a way forward, particularly for smaller-scale producers, while drawing less on a scarce natural resource. And even though the practice isn’t without limitations — dry-farmed produce tends…
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