Hearing about California’s drought issues might be temptation to give thanks that at least we’re not them, but of course, in America, we are them. When the state that supplies us with so much of our food goes dry, there’s the threat that we all go hungry. So many smart West Coast techies are too busy trying to develop the next billion-dollar app to innovate in this area, but even traditional common-sense approaches could alleviate some of the problems. Of course, there are economic drivers keeping such practices from being implemented. From California rancher Nicolette Hahn Niman’s Guardian piece:

“Looking at California’s desert-like farm areas, it’s hard to picture the land as it was before being plowed. Early Europeans reported endless carpets of wildflowers and ‘tall grasses up to the bellies of the horses’. In the mid-1800s, the wild flora was stripped away and huge fields of wheat were planted. When crop yields declined, fields were abandoned or converted to rangelands.

It’s a vicious cycle that has been the curse of destructive agriculture for thousands of years: remove native vegetation, continuously grow crops, don’t rest the land or return nutrients. Erode and exhaust soils. Move on. Repeat.

And it’s not just California: a society’s inability to feed its people from local resources has contributed to the collapse of civilizations throughout history. ‘We remain on track to repeat their stories,’ warns the professor David Montgomery in his fascinating book Dirt. ‘Only this time, we are doing it on a global scale.’

But Montgomery also urges that we can choose another fate: understand the land, take care of the soil. We need to farm as nature does – with diverse crops, and plants and animals together – rather than the so-called ‘monocultural’ school of farming that grows huge fields of annual crops.”