Drought? A Grain of Truth on the Subject...

Texas has four seasons:  Drought, Flood, Blizzard and Twister.

Unfortunately, we’ve been stuck in “Drought” for longer now than we remember having done in quite some time.  In the Brazos Valley, we ended 2010 down roughly 10 inches from our normal annual rainfall totals which, though the locals don’t want to hear it, is precisely the level at which climatologists predict we will be on a regular basis beginning as soon as within the next decade.

So, the fact that the long range forecast doesn’t look all that promising should come as no surprise.

La Niña is set to break up right on schedule next month, which will provide some measure of satisfaction, even if it doesn’t bring relief, because it will be nice to know that at least, if we are dry, we are not artificially dry.

However, there’s something to the notion that climate systems feed on themselves – had we been experiencing the wet weather our neighbors to the north have been enduring, there would be lots of moisture in the ground this summer, which would tend to cool off the air in the lower atmosphere via evaporation (kind of like “Gaia sweat”), and would tend to make afternoon thunderstorms more likely, since all that evaporated moisture might oversaturate the air on a local basis.

The opposite holds true, too, of course.  Dry soils do not sweat; no evaporation means that all those exposed dry soils – and in the case of the Brazos Valley, those are exposed dry clay soils – do nothing but bake, and absorb more heat, and leave us hotter and drier.

So.

We at Myrtle’s place are hunkering down for what looks like a somewhat uncomfortable four or five months to come.

We are also reflecting on what kinds of crops we are going to want to plant in future seasons.  Fortunately, we have made some headway on this project already, having begun our experimentation with amaranth and a few other experimental plantings this spring, and we can report some significant success in that regard.

The crimson variety pictured here is about two months old; grain harvest for this variety takes roughly 110 days from germination, so we expect to be harvesting around a pound of grain per plant sometime in late July or early August.  We have another bed which was planted right at two weeks ago, with more of this crimson variety, a giant orange variety from China, and Hopi Red Dye Amaranth, a variety we picked up from Seeds of Change which is used not only for greens and grain, but also for clothing dye.

This crop has proven to be a great boon to our garden for a variety of reasons.  First, it doesn’t require an awful lot of water.  While our sweet corn lay languishing in the hot, dry Texas Spring, our amaranth has been booming.  Further, it is multipurpose.  We still have some chard producing in our herb garden, but for the most part, greens have been hard hit by our high temperatures and dry weather.  Not so with amaranth, though.  The young leaves and shoots are particularly good in salads; as these parts of the plant mature, they get a little more bitter, but when cooked are still every bit as good as spinach.

We have not yet had the pleasure of a grain harvest, but we are looking forward to it with great anticipation, because amaranth grain is something of a celebrity item in the gluten-free world.  It can be pan-popped and served somewhat like quinoa, it can be blended into flours, it can be used to enrich hot cereals, it can be fermented and served as a beer.  The sky is the limit on what we might do with this wonder grain when we are done harvesting – and thanks to the long summer growing season, allowing us to stagger our planting, we will be getting greens from our amaranth all the way into July and August, and will be harvesting grain all the way from July and August into September and possibly even October, when we plant our fall quinoa crop.

There are some other grains we are looking at planting, too, in hopes of taking advantage of our hotter, drier “new normal”.  We have intended all along to include buckwheat in our summer rotation, and while we may need to rearrange our planting dates for this traditional cover crop, we are more convinced than ever of the desirability of diversifying with many different pseudocereals.

Millet – in particular, finger millet and foxtail millet, could well find their way into our crop rotation, too.  These are high-yield, hot weather crops which have seen tremendous success in arid regions of Africa and the Indian subcontinent; they are more nutritious than corn or wheat, and withstand weather that can only be described as abusive.  What’s not to love?

And finally, a food source which is already ubiquitous in the American South, but which hardly anyone in this country recognizes as a food source.  Sorghum.  Actually, in much of the South, it’s pronounced “Saw-grum”, but we digress.

Much of the world eats sorghum with minimal processing – stews, breads, popped grains, pastes mixed with pulses… any way you can think of to cook the raw grain, someone somewhere has done.

And in the U.S., too, there is a history of using sorghum flours, particularly when wheat was too expensive or otherwise unavailable.

However, most Americans have inherited a snobbish attitude about the consumption of sorghum, most likely owing to its association with poverty – only someone who could not afford processed white flour would cook with sorghum flour, after all – and as a result, if we think of sorghum and food at all, it is in the context of sorghum-based “molasses” (which, technically, isn’t a molasses, but that’s another huge digression).

We’ve got lots of sorghum-based recipes, though, for everything from peanut butter cookies to breading for chicken or fish, and while it is true that sorghum is somewhat more powerfully flavored than wheat, the difference is not really that much different between wheat and sorghum than it is between processed “white flour” and raw whole-grained wheat flour.  In fact, we suspect that most people would not require much time to not only get used to the stronger flavor, but come to prefer it.

Nutritionally, sorghum has wheat beat all hollow in terms of assimilable vitamins and minerals, though wheat is perhaps a tad more protein-laden.  Sorghum is extremely high in iron, though, which is the principle reason molasses is so often prescribed for pregnant and nursing mothers. 

As a crop, too, sorghum has wheat beat all hollow.  Wheat production is land intensive, water intensive, and highly susceptible to climate variations.  Sorghum, on the other hand, is a fairly tall plant with a large quantity of grain per plant and, most importantly, it is highly drought resistant.  In extreme conditions, the sorghum plant will roll its leaves tightly to reduce evapotranspiration and will even, should the need arise, go dormant. 

A field of dried out wheat plants is just hay.  A field of dried out sorghum, though, can be revived with one good rain.

There are those, of course, who will remember that we live in the middle of the city.  What are we doing raising grain at all?  Doesn’t that take, like, acres and acres?

No, it doesn’t.  We have been pleasantly surprised by how much grain we can produce in a relatively small area.  Quinoa was the first grain we grew, of course, and our initial planting was fairly small, but based on calculations done after an actual harvest, we have concluded we could have grown something on the order of 15 to 20 pounds of quinoa in the plots available last winter.  We have added more tilled plots since then, so who knows how much we may end up growing.

Amaranth, as we may have mentioned, can be expected to garner anywhere from ½ to 2 pounds of grain per plant.  We will probably get somewhere around 100 pounds of amaranth seed this summer; in subsequent years, we can greatly increase this harvest at little to no greater expense in anything except elbow grease.

Finger millet has a similar production capacity, with the seed heads basically being an overgrown version of cattails, and while we don’t yet have empirical data to work with, word-of-mouth from fellow microfarmers suggests that sorghum can be at least as productive as quinoa.

In short, we ought to be able to produce all the grain we need on our little half-acre of heaven without taking any land away from the production of our more typical fruits and vegetables.

In addition to all of the aforementioned benefits, growing grains ought to also prove a boon to our livestock.  Some of the best homemade chicken feeds we have encountered start with Milo, a fairly popular variety of sorghum.  And whether sorghum, amaranth, millet, buckwheat, quinoa, or some as yet undiscovered gem, bees will be flocking to these plants which are, after all, nothing more than glorified flowers.

Making sure something is growing out there which can withstand the scorching summer heat gives us confidence that our bees (when we finally put them in) will themselves be under less stress as they attempt to eke out a living in our increasingly harsh environment.  We will also have to rely less and less upon the animal feed industry to care for our hens in these same summer months.  This is a good thing all around.

So, if you see us occasionally smile through the haze and sweat this summer, know that it is only partly because we are completely bonkers.  Part of that smile will be because we are sensing possibilities in the challenges before us.  And given that Mrs. Myrtle Maintenance is one of the greatest bakers in the world, we expect that they are tasty, tasty possibilities.

Keep cool, and…

Happy farming!