Though surrounded by desert, the Coachella Valley produces between $400 million to $600 million in agricultural products each year. To understand the future of farming in the Coachella Valley, this Palm Springs Life article claims that you must first understand how it began and how remarkable it is that agriculture exists here at all.
The article claims that farming in the Coachella Valley began with the railroad. The Southern Pacific Railroad’s first steam engine chugged from Los Angeles through Indio in 1876 and in the following year the east-west rails were joined in Yuma, Arizona. The railroad didn’t just bring farmers to the area established an efficient way to bring goods to markets elsewhere.
At about the same time, the government began sizing up the desert as potential farmland and sent agricultural explorers around the world looking for new food crops that would thrive in the desert soil with help from water from the deep, massive aquifer beneath the desert floor, which extends between the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto mountain ranges in Palm Springs to the Salton Sea. One USDA agricultural explorer, David Fairchild, returned to the desert from the Middle East with date palm shoots. Fairchild is also responsible for bringing cherry trees to Washington, D.C., as well as introducing 200,000 other exotic plants and crops to the U.S. Fairchild’s date trees thrived in the sandy soil, launching the agriculture industry here and creating a new market for the sweet fruit.
Over time, more fruits and vegetables, including row crops like artichokes, peppers, carrots, onions, spinach, and strawberries, many varieties of citrus, and the fruit that became one of the area’s largest moneymakers, table grapes, were planted. Not only did farmers here enjoy a particularly long, almost year-round growing period, but they also had the benefit of a reversed season where they could get produce out to the markets when seeds weren’t even in the ground elsewhere. This region began producing the bulk of winter crops for the country, including salad greens, carrots, cantaloupe, and bell peppers.
As more fields were planted and groundwater levels began dropping, local farmers looked to the Colorado River for irrigation water and in 1949, the 122-mile Coachella Canal, a branch of the All-American Canal opened, ushering river water into valley farms. The Coachella Canal is how the valley became one of the nation’s winter salad bowls.
Now, threatened by climate change and a historic drought, area farmers are taking steps to preserve water without compromising their livelihood. Agriculture currently accounts for roughly half of the total water use in the Coachella Valley Water District (CVWD), and farmers have been increasing measures toward conserving this precious natural resource.
Since there’s not enough rainfall here to cover the diversity of crops and their water needs, desert farmers have been forced to become innovators. Very few farms use the older style of irrigation — flooding the fields with deep pools of water; most have moved to drip systems that pull from shallow reservoirs instead. Efficiency also helps. In 1976, the Coachella Valley farmed 55,369 acres, using 366,000 acre-feet of water. In 2014, gross farmed acreage came in at nearly 70,000, using 289,000 acre-feet. In large part the improvement in efficiency is due to the use of vegetable and fruit transplants. The concept is similar to Head Start programs for children: nurseries provide a stable environment where little seedlings can flourish and succeed until they are large enough to succeed in the desert fields.
Other innovations are becoming the norm in commercial desert farming; growers are using specialized software to track germination rates, monitor inventory, and verify plant counts; other farmers use iPhone apps to check soil conditions and track water usage.
Please use the following link to read the article, written by Maggie Downs, courtesy of Palm Springs Life Magazine: http://www.palmspringslife.com/Palm-Springs-Life/October-2015/How-Green-is-Our-Valley/