Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

Comparing Papago and Hohokam Irrigation
(from Rivers of Empire) Donald Worster
entire article at
http://www.waterhistory.org/histories/hohokam3/

Papago

The most extraordinary achievement in surviving the arid Southwest belongs
to the Papago, the Bean People. They have dwelt for millennia in the
Sonoran desert, a land that gets an average rainfall of less than ten
inches, where saguaro, paloverde, and the Gila monster are among the
flourishing forms of life. It was an unlikely place to take up farming, but
they made a stunning success there until the white man's technology entered
and destroyed their way of life(1). Papago agriculture, supplemented by
hunting and gathering, was a mobile affair, touching the desert lightly.
>From April to September they collected cholla buds, wild greens, acorns,
and fruit from the saguaro and prickly pear. For their protein they killed
bighorn sheep, mule deer, peccary, and rabbits. But it was particularly in
farming that they showed the most remarkable ingenuity. Whenever and
wherever the rain fell, they rushed to get a bean crop raised. The bean on
which they thrived was the tepary, a fast germinator. It had to be fast
given the short growing season in the desert, where erratic rainfall may
cause rivers suddenly to rise only to be followed in a couple of months by
soil that is bone-dry again.

The Papago and other Sonoran groups perfected a technique called
"floodplain irrigation," which was confined to a few river edges and arroyo
mouths. Here is how it worked: A flash flood comes roaring down the sandy
riverbed on a July day. It surges into a temporary catchment basin, where
it immediately soaks into the soil or forms a pond for later diversion.
Cottonwoods, willows, and burrobushes, some of them artificially planted by
the Indians in fencerows along the watercourse, slow the current, spreading
the water over a broad, flat surface and trapping the suspended silt for
fertilizer. Then, in the mud left by the flood, the Papago plant their
seeds, expecting to harvest them before the earth turns bricklike again.
The fields irrigated in this way are small, irregular patches-two acres
here, three or four there. This technique, at which they were so skilled,
was also called arroyo-mouth, or ak-chin, farming(2). The traditional
Papago had little margin for error or complacence, yet they can be
described as a people of abundance, at least in the sense that everyone
among them had enough to eat and enough leisure to spend, when work was
done, on stories, games, and tranquility.

Guiding floodwater as the Papago did required a communal effort, for no
solitary individual could handle the flood torrents. In 1895 an admiring
white observer, W. J. McGee, called the system "economy of solidarity,"
adding that no creature, human or otherwise, could get along in the desert
without it(3). Besides cooperation, Papago agriculture demonstrated an
intimate knowledge of the desert ecosystem, stream hydraulics, and
agronomy. But theirs was not a science devoted to the technical conquest of
nature; rather, it aimed more modestly at achieving a secure coexistence
and a thrifty subsistence.