climate crisis

Farm update: March 16

/ Elizabeth / 5 Comments

Mid-March over here and we are preparing for a growing season that will challenge us yet again. While last year was the toughest we’ve experienced, 2026 looks likely to be harder. We simply did not have winter at all this year. This week’s predicted heat dome will break records across the region and might push our highs into the mid 80s – in March. Snowpack across the American West is in many places at its lowest recorded levels ever, most Mesa reservoirs are at 20% or less of capacity, the Colorado River will not meet its obligations this year, and we are girding ourselves for a hot, dry and fiery season. Will the grasshoppers return? Probably; they thrive in drought conditions, unlike us.

Enjoy this federally-provided data while you still can.

While our irrigation allocation won’t be announced until mid-May or later, we are preparing for our lowest allotment since starting the farm in 2018. This means altering our irrigation schedule, buying in more hay, and planting fewer crops. We are having lots of hard conversations about how we’ll manage our pasture and our crops on minimal water, and what changes we’ll make to prioritize our own physical and mental health – something we really struggled with last year.

Kale sprouts in the sunroom.

The sunroom is currently packed with the usual assortment of starts – peppers, tomatoes, greens, onions and much more. Even though it’s unlikely that I’ll plant as much I have in previous years, on the outside chance that we score a wet spring I’d still like to have our own organic starts ready to go in. I’m also growing lots of salad sprouts this year, which has been remarkably gratifying – the nutritious sprouts are so crunchy and fresh in our daily salads, and I can control the environment much better indoors. I plan to grow sprouts continuously, if I can manage it!

Outside beds have been seeded with all manner of hardy greens, plus peas and fava beans. I’m trying black chickpeas for the first time this season; unlike most dry beans, they’re planted early and I’m curious to see how they’ll fare here. We usually go straight from winter into summer, skipping the cool season loved by peas, rhubarb, cilantro and asparagus, but since we’re already in spring and have been since January…well, it’s difficult to know how well anything will grow. Historic temperature records and weather patterns might once have been useful, but now all bets are off and it’s just one big rickety roulette wheel. In a stable climate, temperature and precipitation levels are rarely broken; highs and lows exist within established, constant parameters. In a destabilizing climate, however, records are broken all the time; certainly we’ve seen this play out across the country over the past few years and especially this winter.

The climate crisis is forcing us all to adapt in various ways, and farmers are no exception. This week we watched this one-hour documentary about farmers across Colorado incorporating agrivoltaics on their land. Much of the film was shot here in Delta County and features many of our farmer friends and colleagues. Watch for free here, if you’d like.

Despite the obstacles, we’ll carry on growing food in a high-plains desert – at least for now. It feels like our food security is shakier and therefore more important than ever, yet in my anecdotal experience, fewer people are choosing to grow food, even in small quantities. Will you plant a garden this year or has it all become too much?

Take good care of yourselves, dear friends, and hope to see you in the streets on March 28.

Farm update: July 28

/ Elizabeth / 3 Comments

The corral’s warm metal panel is covered with grasshoppers each morning.

Friends, hello. Muted greetings from high summer in the desert, where it is hot, smoky and dry. Let’s not mince words – the world is full of terrible suffering right now, most of it instigated and/or supported by the current regime. It is hard to know how to phrase things appropriately in the face of an entirely intentional famine. We are experiencing our worst farming season in eight years, yet we have easy access to whatever food we might need or want – but children are being purposefully, deliberately starved, and collectively we are obviously fine with this. We are also fine with concentration camps, a militarized police state and taking benefits from poor kids to enrich billionaires. The active cognitive dissonance required to manage one’s daily existence in 2025 frequently leaves me in despair.

A lettuce plant and marigolds, both stripped to the stalks in a few hours.

Here’s one thing I do know – along with cruel, vengeful, power-hungry leaders, grasshoppers (and locusts) can also cause famine. The thousand-year drought in the American Southwest has created ideal conditions for these hardy creatures to thrive, and they are most certainly thriving here. Just about every conversation we’ve had with local friends over the past two months has centered on two topics: grasshoppers and drought. We’ve had no appreciable moisture this year, and the grasshoppers have absolutely annihilated many of our crops. Unless you have the experience of walking amongst our raised beds or our pasture and seeing tens of thousands of insects move at once, unless you’ve been hit in the face and arms repeatedly by these sturdy bugs, unless you’ve seen firsthand the scale of the devastation – you cannot possibly appreciate how bad things are here this year.

The kale is not thriving.

The brassicas (kale, cabbages, broccoli, bok choy, and so on) have taken the most damage, by far. Entire beds are destroyed in a few hours or days. I am pulling all the broccoli plants this week as they’re so badly eaten that there is virtually no chance they’ll develop proper heads this season, and it’s just painful to look at them every day. Mint, basil, thyme, tarragon – all the soft herbs are gone entirely.

The bean yield will sadly be far lower than expected this year.

As with all crops, the bean plants are at their most vulnerable when they’ve just put on their first true leaves; the grasshoppers love these tender, nutrient-packed starts. The rows are littered with empty stalks that didn’t survive, but we are seeing some resilience from beans that managed to escape that initial onslaught. We’ll likely get some beans, but certainly not the amount we’d planned on.

Dark-spotted blister beetles, a new arrival for us this year.

An enemy, but also an ally. It’s a delicate balance.

Because Nature never makes mistakes, the grasshopper invasion has been followed by dark-spotted blister beetles, who feast upon grasshopper larvae. We’d never seen these before, but they certainly have plenty to eat this year – although they also took out the beet and chard leaves on their way. They love alfalfa, too, and can be toxic to horses if their poison is heavily concentrated in hay bales.

Tassels on Painted Mountain corn; it’s drought-tolerant, cold-tolerant and apparently grasshopper-tolerant.

On the plus side, the grasshoppers have thus far done very little damage to our ‘Painted Mountain’ corn, an heirloom that I am exceptionally proud to grow this year. (You can see a little exploratory leaf-chewing in the photo above, but overall devastation is minimal.) I am so hopeful for this stand of open-pollinated flour corn and will share an update when we harvest.

The tomatoes and peppers have also mostly survived, with the exception of a few replacement transplants that disappeared in hours. I suspect the bitter compounds in well-developed Solanaceae plants aren’t appealing to grasshoppers, though the tiny ones don’t put up much of a fight since they’re likely too little to have developed their defenses. This metaphor is not just relevant in farming, obviously.

Lettuce plants reproduce by sending out their light seeds on the wind.

And of course the lettuce has gone to seed by now, so it’s time to harvest the little fluffy puffs to collect seeds for future plantings. Saving seeds always reminds me that gardening and farming are ultimately acts of optimism and hope, both of which I am sorely lacking at the moment.

Much as I wish I had a more positive update to share, I am also unwilling to pretend that farming is always easy or fun or rewarding. Sometimes it’s a miserable, exhausting sunbaked slog while watching plants be devoured in a matter of hours. Sometimes it’s replanting precious beans two and three times in the hopes they’ll survive the initial attack. Sometimes it’s bursting into helpless, infuriated tears, because when you’re irrigating, no one can hear you cry. And sometimes it’s taking resigned solace in the famous Zora Neale Hurston quote, “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” This is a year for questioning, dear friends, and for questioning a lot more than just farming.

Thanks for being here, as ever.