What should farmers grow in the desert? – Mother Jones

Paul Sanchez drives the custom guayule Bailer from the Bridgestone Guayule Resource Farm to harvest a field in Stanfield, Arizona. The bailer cuts through the woody stems of the guayule, which would otherwise ruin a traditional bailer.
Bill Hatcher

This story was first published by The Food and Environment Reporting Network and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

I drove past miles and miles of empty fields dotted with Land for Sale signs outside Eloy. These farms had been hard hit by recent cutbacks in Colorado River water delivery. This was the water they had depended upon since the 1980s. Those still in the game were barely scraping by and bracing to increase rationing. Eventually, I came to a chain-link gate with a warning: “Watch out for snakes.” Behind it, I found a 300-acre desert laboratory operated by the Japanese-owned Bridgestone Corporation where a small team was toiling away, in some sense, on the same question.

The compound was far from the bright green alfalfa and fluffy cotton I was used to seeing in central Arizona. A stucco building was enclosed within a ring of barbedwire. It contained offices, meeting rooms, and even a greenhouse where white-clad geneticists could peer through microscopes. Out back, rows upon rows of ragged shrubs were growing at different heights. This was guayule (pronounced Why-oo-lee), which is a native plant to the Southwestern deserts and also produces latex. This unassuming outpost was the beginning. Bridgestone was trying to establish the country’s sole domestic source for the kind of high-grade natural rubber used in airplane tires and surgical gloves—and they were doing it with a crop accustomed to drought.

“This is a big investment,” said Dave Dierig, the farm’s trim and stoic manager, though he stopped short of naming a number.

The company wants to disrupt a supply route that has for more then a century been milking raw rubber from tropical forests. They want to shift it to the middle the searing desert. This laboratory must develop a wundercrop to produce high rubber yields while using very little water. But that’s just the start. Bridgestone will also have to develop guayule-specific farm equipment and convince Arizona’s farmers—who cling proudly to their role in providing food and fiber for American families—to produce something that can be neither eaten nor worn. Many companies and the US government tried it before and failed.

“You can’t do it and make a buck. Good luck to the guy who believes he can. But I think he’s dreaming,” Goodyear spokesman Hank Inman told the Los Angeles Times in 1988, the same year his company threw in the towel on its own guayule scheme.

Dierig, a plant breeder and also a Bridgestone tire designer, insisted that this time would not be the same. Bridgestone was the first to produce tires entirely from guayule in 2015 and received a $15million grant from USDA to continue its research a few years later. The company announced that they would be expanding their laboratory experiments in 2021. This was a breakthrough in the company’s genetic research and a commitment for opening a commercial processing facility here in Arizona by 2026.

I was staring at a sea of tealbushes as I scanned the landscape. This is how adaptation to climate change in Arizona looks like. River towns build wetlands to absorb floods and coastal cities build seawalls. Californians thin their forests of firewood. Desert farmers look for crops that can withstand 114 degrees and less than four inches of rain per year, while desert farmers try to find crops that can withstand 114 degrees and still make enough money to pay their air conditioners.

And if this crop wasn’t it, well, then understanding exactly why might still help thousands of farmers—and the agriculture industry as a whole—carve a path toward sustainability in the desert.

Dierig bent over a guayule bushI was shown the dense hairs and waxy coating which keep moisture from escaping from its leaflets. “There’s no other crop like guayule,” he explained. “It’s a true desert shrub” that just happens to produce latex. The densely planted shrubs sent their taproots down 20 feet to moisture below our feet. This trick allows them to survive long periods of time without rain. Guayule consumes about 3.5 acres feet of water each and every year. (An acre foot is enough for one acre of land a quarter of an acre deep. This is nearly half a meter less than cotton, and almost two ft less than alfalfa. Dierig’s team is working to shave off another six inches while also increasing yield.

A thousand years ago, people indigenous to the Sonoran Desert chewed the shrub’s stems to release their latex and collected it in balls they might have played with. One of those was found by archeologists in a dig just a few kilometers away. Considering that latex accounts for little more than 8 percent of the plant’s total biomass, it is astonishing that, within the hundred or so acres of guayule spread out before us, we were looking at enough rubber to make about 1,000 tires.

There are hundreds upon hundreds of plants that can produce rubber. But only a few produce the kind of rubber required to make high-grade latex and tires. Guayule is the one that can survive in dry environments. Today, about 90 percent of America’s natural rubber comes from hevea trees planted across some 27,000 square miles in Southeast Asia, accounting for three quarters of the world’s total production. This concentration puts global stocks at risk of disease and exposes U.S. businesses to market fluctuations. It’s not surprising, then, that Americans have been trying to drum up a domestic supply for some time.

In the 1920s a blight hit Brazil’s hevea tree plantations and the U.S. government started growing guayule, but it soon gave up the effort. In 1940, when Japan invaded Indochina and blocked access to that region’s hevea, the U.S. government planted about 30,000 acres of guayule, then burned 21 million pounds of it when the war ended and it became clear that tapping foreign stocks was far easier, in the short term, than establishing a domestic supply. Thirty-years later, during the Arab oil embargo the U.S. gave the shrub a second abbreviated try to search for synthetic polymers. Guayules were abandoned each time in favor other crops or as soon the price of imported rubber fell. Sustainable production never took root.

Bridgestone has made some significant genetic breakthroughs. Desert farmers are now desperate for a way of staying in business. Maybe things will change this time.

Rimjhim Aggarwal, a sustainability researcher at Arizona State University, told me that the region hasn’t taken alternatives seriously in the past. “Now that the water restrictions are here, I think we need to look deeper into other options,” she said. And in light of the food shortages seen in Phoenix during the pandemic, Aggarwal said it’s critical that agriculture doesn’t disappear from the central valley. Even if you can’t eat it, guayule is a high-value crop with a buyer in the wings, and it might provide a cash stream that keeps farmland in production.

In August 2021 The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Announcement The terrible news: Cutbacks to Colorado River water were necessary in order to prevent a bigger catastrophe. Due to a complex web 20th-century water laws as well as a long list of court decisions and backdoor deals, hundreds of farmers in central Arizona were left with no choice but to cut their losses. In 2023, this sliver of the state’s $23-billion agriculture industry would lose its entire allotment of river water. 

This was something farmers knew. Those who haven’t sold out are fallowing (leaving unplanted) as much as 40 percent of their fields. Drip irrigation systems, high-tech field moisture monitoring and less-thirsty varieties have been purchased by some. Many more are, for the first time in decades, pumping groundwater—with limitations—from already stressed aquifers. Some have even tried alternative crops like hemp and barley. But so far, no new crop has lived up to its boosters’ hype, and most growers are sticking with what they know, as long as the water flows.

“There’s no point in growing something you can’t sell,” said Gary Deen, and he should know. From silver mining to cotton farming, Deen’s family has cashed in on some of rural Arizona’s most lucrative industries. I met him at the entrance to his 400-acre farm beneath a tree filled with so many warbling meadowlarks that I could hardly hear him recap the past hundred years of the state’s economic evolution.

Deen began growing Bridgestone’s guayule in 2015, but he hasn’t yet uprooted his wheat, cotton, or hay. The company planted 40 acre of its experimental crop on Deen’s property, managed the herbicides, harvested the shrub and paid him for the yield, as if it were cotton. Bridgestone was careful not to set too high expectations for farmers.

Dierig stated that past attempts put the horse before the cart. Before ensuring a long-term market, they gave experimental seeds to farmers. His team now uses seeds from a Colorado national seed bank and two proprietary varieties to map the DNA of different Guayule strains. This allows them to select traits such as drought tolerance and highest yield. Bridgestone also plants shrubs at satellite outposts in order to identify varieties that can withstand the cold winters at higher elevations. Guayule takes two to mature, and the company plans to grow in Texas and California.

Deen showed me his farm and a prototype baler, which was custom-made, cut through a field of the stuff. It looked like a weed next to his rows of wheat. Guayule’s woody stems easily throttle conventional balers, so Bridgestone is also developing new harvesting equipment tailored to the shrub. Even the seeds, five times smaller than rice, required a wax coating to prevent them from glomming together during plantation.

Bridgestone has overcome these initial hurdles because it sees great potential on the backend, Dierig stated at his laboratory. Domestic production will reduce the $1.4 billion a year that’s currently spent importing natural rubber to the U.S. Tires are just one aspect of the overall picture. Bridgestone is creating an ecosystem of markets that includes the largest Italian chemical company, in order to give farmers many reasons to grow guayule.

Its new Arizona processing facility will be capable of processing 1,000 tons per day of biomass into multiple high value products. Latex for use as hypoallergenic surgical gloves (a $28 million global industry), resin for adhesives, binders to asphalt and terpenes used in insecticides will all be possible once it is completed. Once these chemical compounds are separated, the remaining woody fibers, which account for about 80 percent of a shrub’s total mass, will end up as biofuel.

Deen whose arrangement with Bridgestone ended after the company switched to using farmland closer to the desert lab, the best part of the deal was getting paid up front. This level of certainty is rare in a world that sees crop prices fluctuate and acts by God seem to be occurring more often. Bridgestone is still trying to get enough growers.

“We’re paying a premium because we’re new,” Dierig said, but the company expects guayule to soon stand on its own—no premium, and no support for cultivation and harvest. Dierig needs 10,000 acres in the ground by 2024 to be able to meet his commercial production goals. Another 10,000 acres will be needed the next year. There are only 200 acres of land planted right now.

“If we could find a crop that’s a low-water user, like guayule, that we can make money on, year in and year out, we’re going to be all over it,” said Dan Thelander, an elder statesman of Arizona agriculture whose family grows on about 5,000 acres in the central valley. They will plant approximately 40 acres for Bridgestone this Spring.

Said Thelander, who has been involved in discussions of water shortages for years, “Everybody’s feeling the pain, but I can tell you that agriculture in Pinal County is gonna feel a lot more pain than anyone else.” As farmers fallow land, he explained, “there will be more laborers not getting paychecks; then they’re not buying things in stores—the fertilizer, the seed, the pesticide, the tractors, equipment, and repair.” A crop like guayule might lessen the strain on farmers and also buoy this weary community.

The Thelanders could handle 1,000 acres of guayule, but Dierig wants to keep initial production spread across many small parcels to hedge his bets against the region’s patchy rainfall patterns. This means that they need to win buy-in from a small number of farmers who are used to growing cotton or hay over the generations. These farmers then sell their produce to local dairies and ranchers as well to customers overseas who pay set prices for cheap grass.

Dierig and his team give presentations at Bridgestone’s farm to win new converts, and they’ve garnered a commitment from the Gila River Indian Community, whose tribal growers are entitled to more Colorado River water than any other central valley farmers. Guayule is at a distinct disadvantage as traditional decisions often determine cropping decisions.

When Eloy was established, in 1918, locals lobbied to name it “Cotton City.” A century later, the lucrative crop is still a winner: in 2019, farmers planted 85,500 acres of cotton in Pinal County, bringing in $92 million in revenue. Pinal ranks 10th among the nation’s cotton-growing counties. At his farm’s office, Deen proudly displayed a fibrous cotton tuft atop a hunk of silver ore. Bridgestone finds this cultural inclination a problem, but so does the economics.

Tractors, fuel, seed, fertilizer, water—everything has grown more expensive lately, but land most of all. Thanks to Arizona’s fervent drive to build tract housing and strip malls, its average price of cropland, at $7,700 an acre, surpasses that of all Mountain West states (Idaho is a distant second at $4,450 an acre). Many farmers in central Arizona lease their land rather than own it. This makes them reluctant to take on risks that could delay their rent payments. Bridgestone will continue to pay cotton prices, and guayule requires less water than cotton. Farmers could make more guayule with the water they have, and make more money.

But it’s not that simple.

Pinal farmers also receive more federal funds than farmers in any other Arizona counties. Water-loving Cotton is also more heavily subsidised than any other crop in Arizona. Nationwide since the early 2000s, direct subsidies—paid at a set rate every year regardless of conditions—have largely been replaced by federally funded (and taxpayer supported) crop insurance payments, which compensate farmers if they experience a loss in crop yield or a decline in revenue. According to the Pinal Farmers Insurance Program, crop insurance payments rose from $3.2million to $24.6million between 2000 and 2020. Data The Environmental Working Group collected this data. Three quarters of that money was paid to cotton growers to cover their losses, and half of those losses were caused by a “failure of irrigation supply.”

This government might be able to encourage a farmer to continue using water-intensive cotton despite extreme drought.

“Crop insurance is not intended to discourage or encourage the plantings of specific crops, but is simply there as a tool for growers of these crops,” explained Jeff Yasui, the USDA’s director of risk management for the Southwest. “The availability of the program does not consider water issues or the disbursement of subsidies.”

In recent papers, however, agricultural economists have argued that the USDA’s crop insurance program disincentivizes Experimentation with measures that could help farmers adapt to climate changes. Even programs that encourage climate-smart strategies, such as planting cover crops, may not be as lucrative than insurance claims. Stanford University researchers published their findings last year. reported The loss of temperature-related losses could account for 14 percent of the $140 million in crop insurance paid to farmers from 1991 to 2017.

If the government really wants to help desert farmers adapt in drought, it might invest in adaptation as well as in subsidizing existing conditions. In the latest Farm Bill, the USDA provided support for some projects aimed at climate adaptation—like the $15 million Bridgestone received to help with research—and President Biden’s infrastructure bill earmarked more than $8 billion to update and augment water infrastructure in the West. Farmers who wish to trade bags of cotton seeds for small grains of guayule will not be able to do so once Bridgestone stops paying their current premium.

I didn’t expect to find a silver bullet for the West’s water crisis at Bridgestone’s desert laboratory, and I didn’t. Clearly, guayule has enormous potential, otherwise the tire company, the US government, public universities, and so many others wouldn’t bother with it. It’s also true that Arizona’s farmers are heavily invested in crops that make little sense in a landscape facing megadrought. But the desert has been made hospitable by decades of dam construction, canal laying and deal striking. 300 days of sunlight make it a great place to grow anything.

As one farmer explained after a long day of harvesting hay, “We have so many more costs here, but we can produce better yields per acre, and we can produce better quality because of our climate. If I was a supreme ruler of the world, there wouldn’t be anybody living in this goddamn state except farmers and ranchers.”

In the cities and suburbs, I’ve met many who would similarly like to have Arizona to themselves. We all have to share it for the time being. And as long as that’s the case, we’d be better off designing a sustainable future together rather than holding our breath until the water runs out.

This article was supported and edited by The Water Desk at the Center for Environmental Journalism, University of Colorado Boulder.