The arid portions of Texas are a lot like Ethiopia, Sudan and Chad. These regions support millions of peasants on a subsistence basis. So I would think one would start with the growing of appropriate grains like sorghum or millet. The stuff is highly nutritious for both people and animals, and is grown in a number of nutritious varieties for differing conditions. Tastes good, too, when made into injera.
The same might be said of the dryer parts of India. There are no better stewards of the land on this planet than the Bisnoi, who live in the Thar Desert. They have made a successful go of it for the past couple of thousand years, while more modern irrigation schemes have recently salted the place up and damaged the water table in pursuit of rice for the millions. So one is invited to reflect that a tribe of primitives who've never taken a single course in agronomy have come up with superior solutions to those of a board of the highly educated and published PhD's India invited to design their program to "bring the desert to life".
Not much on the web about them, I suspect. But you could search for a very fine book the Sierra Club published called The Law of the Mother, edited by Elizabeth Kempf (1993).
(Prosopis cineraria) for its wood, shade, edible pods and generally beneficial effect on the arid environment, its people and its wildlife. This is just a "forinstance", and much work needs to be done on finding out what some people have known for thousands of years.
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