Bloomberg Podcasts
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2023–2025
42:11 · 989 views · Jul 17, 2023
An Odd Lots podcast episode with Arizona hay farmer Trevor Bales on why growing alfalfa in the desert makes sense despite drought. He covers his family's history and the sun, pest and water arguments for farming there.
Linked in water and Arizona threads to explain why desert farming is more productive than people assume.
3 comments from Hacker News
Actually, AZ's desert has some shocking benefits for agriculture. * Lots of sun, so you can get many growing seasons. * No pests (there's nothing else for them to live on) * Few weeds to compete with what you are growing. I know, I was surprised too. This podcast goes into more details: this video
> Las Vegas, Phoenix, even Southern California do not really have any business existing in their present forms. The Odd Lots podcast recently had an episode "An Arizona Farmer on How to Grow Alfalfa in the Middle of the Desert": > Due to a combination of drought, climate change and booming growth, Arizona is facing looming water scarcity. But for all the sprawl and population increase, the overwhelming amount of water used in the state is not consumed by residences, but rather farmers. So naturally, many argue that we should be doing less agriculture in the desert and move the production of cotton, alfalfa and various vegetables towards places with more rain. On this episode, we speak with Trevor Bales, the proprietor of Bales Hay Farm & Ranch in Arizona about his family’s history in the state and why he thinks this dry desert is a great place to grow alfalfa. * [LINK] * this video * [LINK] One observation: some of the earliest civilizations in history have been in arid areas, e.g., Mesopotamia, Egypt. They just happen to be settled near rivers—just like the Native American did with what is now know as Phoenix: > The Hohokam people occupied the Phoenix area for 2,000 years.[23][24] They created roughly 135 miles (217 kilometers) of irrigation canals, making the desert land arable, and paths of these canals were used for the Arizona Canal, Central Arizona Project Canal, and the Hayden-Rhodes Aqueduct. * [LINK] * [LINK]
It's sunny for a lot of the year. Ex. you can get an extra harvest of alfalfa per year compared to other climates. this video