As Western Oregon faces drier and hotter summers, researchers at Oregon State University Extension are investigating crops that can withstand drought and require less irrigation. Shayan Ghajar is an organic pasture and forages specialist at OSU Extension. He has been researching grasses and legumes that can resist Oregon’s drying climate and still feed people and livestock. Ghajar joins us with details of his research and what it could mean for Oregon farmers.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Are farmers in Western Oregon ready for the drier, hotter summers to come? Shayan Ghajar is doing his part to prepare them. Ghajar is an organic pasture and forages specialist at Oregon State University Extension. He’s part of a team that’s investigating crops that can withstand drought and require less irrigation. He joins us now to talk about what he has found so far. Shayan, welcome to the show.
Shayan Ghajar: Thank you. Good afternoon.
Miller: Why did you seek out climate resilient crops as your focus?
Ghajar: One of the reasons I got into agriculture originally was an interest in security and just societal well-being. I used to actually be in the foreign policy world, in the Center for American Progress actually. You got a guest earlier from there. But way back in the day I was working on foreign policy issues in West Asia or the Middle East, a lot of people call it. And I was there during the Syrian Civil War, which was exacerbated by a major drought. I’ve always been interested in agriculture, so I started to think about a shift in careers because I saw just how important agriculture was to human safety and well-being, in a very concrete sense, not just a nutritional sense.
Miller: That war and human life was at stake here?
Ghajar: Exactly. Agriculture in a society that’s doing well, is just a fun way to think about getting your food and nutrition. But it’s very much a life and death issue in most of the world, and hopefully it’s something that we can never experience in the United States. One of my goals for this kind of work is to make sure we have regional and national food security that’s not as shaky, when climate change comes knocking.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for the extent to which growing seasons or conditions are expected to change just in Western Oregon in the coming decades, just how big a change we’re looking at?
Ghajar: One of the projections I’ve seen from Oregon itself, with different researchers with OSU and other groups, is that we’re going to have a 6.3 °F increase in summertime temperatures by 2050, which is only 25 years away. That’s most of the listeners’ lifetimes. That’s probably going to be something they experience compared to the historical average temperature. It’s quite a lot.
Miller: That sounds like a lot for people just living their lives. What about for the success of crops? What does a 6.3 degree increase in average summer temperatures mean for the kinds of crops that have traditionally been planted in Western Oregon?
Ghajar: Traditionally, Western Oregon has been and still is one of the best places to grow cool season forages. And by cool season I mean plants that do the bulk of their growth essentially in spring and fall, not as much in winter. But if it’s kind of a warm winter, they can even grow in winter sometimes. So generally, Oregon is one of the best places on Earth to grow grasses for dairy or for beef production. And that’s why we have such a strong dairy sector in Tillamook, for example. That is not absolutely going to change, but some of the plants that do better here in pastures probably will change. And I think they are changing.
But our summers, despite that kind of nine months of the stereotypical Pacific Northwest kind of raininess, are quite brutal on a plant, and that’s true even before climate change. We have, technically, a Mediterranean climate which means that spring and fall are pretty temperate, but summertime is very arid. It dries out the plants very quickly, and some of the evapotranspiration rates, like how quickly things dry out, are comparable to parts of North Africa, even without climate change. So when you factor in a 6° F increase in temperature, you’re getting pretty crispy for a plant.
Miller: You focused on what are called multi-use crops. What does that mean?
Ghajar: I worked with Lucas Nebert, who used to be heading up the dry farming program in the Center for Resilient Agriculture and Food Systems at OSU. Now, he’s joined me on the organic program team. There are seven of us working on different organic production topics. But his specialty is human foods and my specialty is keeping livestock fed. And we’re both interested in this kind of climate resilience – that’s the purpose of the dry farming program. So we teamed up for this one.
The reason we looked at multi-use crops is because climate change, when it comes to agriculture, is a wicked problem. It presents a bulk of challenges for any individual operation and for society as a whole. So when you have a wicked problem I think you need a wicked solution, where you have a lot of different functions from one particular plant. There are no silver bullets, but if you have a plant that could feed a person, feed a cow or feed sheep all in one plant, that’s more useful than a plant that only does one or the other.
Also, we pick plants for their cover cropping potential because a lot of plants can be pretty good at mobilizing nutrients in the soil or protecting soil from erosion. And as I mentioned, it’s a pretty dry season, and you can sometimes see the dust blowing off of agricultural fields that aren’t covered in summer in Oregon. So cover cropping is not something you’re eating. But it’s also still serving a very useful purpose for growing crops and protecting the environment.
Miller: Can you tell us about some of the specific crops that you’ve been testing out in the last few years?
Ghajar: I like to focus on crops that have a proven track record in other parts of the world that experience very hot, dry conditions as well. And since we’re focusing on annual crops or crops that are just one and done – you plant it, it grows for a little while and then you harvest it – we don’t have to focus so much on crops that are also resilient to the rainy season for this project.
We looked at things like sorghum. That one’s from Northeast Africa originally; teff, which is from East Africa; pearl millet from – there’s some debate where that’s from – I think West Africa is the latest I’ve read now; cowpeas, mung beans and tapery beans, which are all leguminous, meaning they fix atmospheric nitrogen from the air you breathe, which is mostly nitrogen, and turn it into nitrogen that’s available in the soil for plants to grow; also, some kinds of lablab, which are also legumes. So a lot of these plants are from Africa and Asia, with the exception of tepary beans, which are domesticated by Native peoples here on this continent, primarily in the Southwest, on what’s now Tohono O’odham land.
Miller: What crops seemed the most promising in your work so far?
Ghajar: So far, among the grasses that we tested, sorghum is still the most productive annual warm-season grass we’ve got. That one has had a fairly long track record in Oregon, unlike the rest of these. We did want to have a baseline crop where we do know it does well here and let’s make sure it’s still working with the new climate. And that one is still a very useful plant to have. It’s about 5,000 pounds per acre of dry matter. By dry matter, I mean if you cut all the plants and weigh it out, then subtract the weight of the water, that’s what dry matter is. So it’s without the water weight, essentially. And 5,000 pounds per acre is quite a lot. It’s definitely cheaper than buying hay, which is what a lot of livestock producers in Western Oregon do.
Sorghum is also a pretty tasty grain for human consumption. And yeah, that one has been tested since the 1930s in Oregon, one of the first warm-season plants ever tested here. It’s still going strong, so it’s a pretty good option. It does have some potential toxicity issues. It generates some different chemicals that you just have to be careful of if you’re a grazer. But we have tests where you take some leaf material, do a few things and then basically find out whether or not it’s safe for your cows to eat. So it’s kind of a double-edged sword in that regard, but still one of the most productive and reliable crops that you can get.
Other crops include cowpea, very popular in the Southeastern United States but not as popular in Oregon. We found that it is a very reliable producer. We tested these crops on 10 farms last year and this one did well on nine of them, which is pretty wild. It’s unusual for a crop to be that consistent, considering we had farms all over Western Oregon where we were testing. So we were very happy with that.
Sunn hemp, that’s one of the exceptions. It was basically two out of three uses because a human cannot eat sunn hemp, or they shouldn’t. But it’s good for livestock and it is good as a cover crop. As the name suggests, you could also use it for a fiber crop if you are so inclined, but that one was consistently super productive too. So another thing that farmers can consider. And that one had beautiful flowers and it seemed like the bees liked it. We did not measure anything about pollinators, but if you’re a big fan of bees or pollinators, it’s a good thing to look into.
Miller: In general, what do you think it would take to get farmers to change what they plant? I’m curious what kind of evidence you think you’d need to present before they would be willing to devote, not the majority, but even just a sizable chunk of their acreage to a crop they’ve never planted before?
Ghajar: A lot of the agricultural world would benefit from social science research, because there’s so many different things about how to prove to different groups of people that a scientific option is the best way to go. But to be honest, I haven’t really needed to dress things up too much in Oregon. What I found is, having worked around the world from Tajikistan to Uganda, Mongolia, the East Coast of the United States, Great Plains and the Rockies, Oregon producers are fantastically innovative, really open minded. We’ve also done something, at Extension, called a needs assessment because we are publicly funded. It’s our job to serve the producers of Oregon. Even though my job title says “organic,” we on the organic team, serve all producers who are interested in low inputs.
So we do needs assessments. We find out what people are interested in. I’ve only been in Oregon four years, but the first week I got here, my first impression was, wow, we need some warm season options because it was August right after a heat dome. And what we found in these needs assessments and just through my observations is that it’s the number one concern farmers have. Whenever I talk to them about what is the biggest obstacle, if you’re feeding hay in summertime or if you’ve got kind of a dust bowl going on in summertime, it’s a financial hit as well. Oregon’s producers are very productive and innovative in wanting a solution for that.
Miller: Shayan Ghajar, thanks very much.
Ghajar: Thank you.
Miller: Shayan Ghajar is an assistant professor of practice for organic pasture and forages at Oregon State University Extension.
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