We are ranchers. And as ranchers in Northern California, we are intimately familiar with the impact of a drought as extreme as the one we are enduring right now – and how it affects the food you eat.

You’ve heard about the shorter showers, the intermittent toilet flushing. You’ve heard less about the expensive hay, being fed to fewer animals. But have you heard about the innovations that could reverse it all?

Indeed, how familiar are you with California’s water crisis, the worst in recorded history since 1894?

How much do you care about a state where 75% of the water is dedicated to agriculture – a state that produces nearly half of America’s fruits, vegetables and nuts?

Because you should. Because this drought is already making food less available and more expensive, and because there is opportunity to make changes now that are desperately needed if we want future generations to be able to feed themselves – especially before global warming kicks in even harder.

“We live in a geography of hope,” says Mas Masumoto, an organic fruit farmer friend who is drilling deeper wells to sustain his trees. “Hope for adequate rain and snow, hope for a short-term drought, hope our groundwater will last long enough to weather this thirst.”

Here’s the reason for hope: the great California drought of 2014 presents a long-awaited chance to assess root causes of our dwindling water supply and consider some radically new ideas for the future of food production. Only then will farmers and ranchers be able to produce food while creating a natural environment that can survive – and even reduce – the extreme weather conditions that are sure to lie ahead.

Agricultural operations have increasingly pursued water-saving innovations: drip irrigation systems are now standard in many areas, along with numerous other water saving technologies and practices. But more sprinkler and drip systems, more precise timing and less water in drought-tolerant growth stages could revolutionize irrigation and reduce agricultural water use by 17%.



And that’s just the start of the future of water on the American farm, which will be in for even more severe dry spells ahead due to climate change.

In the long term, California must dramatically alter the way it farms. It’s politically thorny, but unavoidable: treating water and soil as inexhaustible resources is no longer an option. Future agriculture must be restorative, not extractive; conservative, not wasteful; perennial, not annual.

Today, some 8m acres of California cropland depend on irrigation. Thousands of acres of grassland have been converted to almond orchards, as demand for almonds has skyrocketed and acreage has doubled. The water, of course, has not.

This is an untenable situation.

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. Natural ecosystems are complex, and dominated by perennials, a dense mat of fibrous roots that exists in the soil year-round, tightly holding soil and water. Annual crops have those fully developed living roots for just a few fleeting weeks during the growing season.

There is innovation happening all over the country in agriculture, from developing perennial strains of wheat, to sequestering carbon in grasslands, to reversing desertification with herds of cattle. This is the stuff of TED Talks. Now, in the midst of a catastrophic drought that refuses to go away, California needs true innovation in farming. We have no time to lose.