Most Recent Posts

Fifty years ago Wednesday, John Lewis was the youngest speaker to address the estimated quarter-million people at the March on Washington.

"Those who have said be patient and wait — we must say that we cannot be patient," the 23-year-old chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) said that day. "We do not want our freedom gradually. But we want to be free now."

Aug. 28, 1963, also was the day the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous "I Have A Dream" speech, and few are as thoughtful about the significance of the day as Lewis, now a Democratic congressman from Georgia and civil rights icon.

That summer, the nation had seen black children attacked by dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham, Ala., as well as the murder of NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers.

In his 1963 speech, Lewis thundered: "Where is the political party that would make it unnecessary to march on Washington?"

Lonnie Bunch, director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, says Lewis originally planned to give a much angrier speech.

The most fluid mayor's race that New York City has seen in decades may finally be firming up. The city's public advocate, Bill de Blasio, has surged to a commanding lead in the latest poll of Democratic primary voters.

De Blasio's timing couldn't be better. In less than two weeks, those voters will begin choosing the successor to independent Michael Bloomberg.

All year, the big question in New York City politics has been which Democrat could cobble together enough votes to win the party's nomination for mayor.

"Where the bouncing ball will come to rest, God only knows," says Maurice Carroll, who directs the Quinnipiac Poll.

The poll has had four front-runners in as many months, including early favorite Christine Quinn, the speaker of the City Council, and former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner. In the latest poll, released Wednesday, De Blasio holds a commanding 15-point lead over his nearest rival.

De Blasio has positioned himself as the anti-Bloomberg: an old-school liberal who's not afraid to talk about inequality, as he did at a recent debate.

"In New York City right now, we are living a tale of two cities," he said. "Almost half our people — 46 percent — at or near the poverty level and our middle class is disappearing. We need a real break from the Bloomberg years."

A month ago, de Blasio was a distant fourth in the crowded Democratic field. His rise in the polls began with the implosion of Weiner's campaign following new sexting allegations against the former congressman last month.

But that's not the only explanation. De Blasio's message of raising taxes on the rich to pay for early childhood education seems to be connecting with liberal primary voters.

And he's been helped by a much-discussed campaign ad starring his multiracial son, Dante, who wears his hair in a 1970s-style Afro. The 15-year-old tells voters that his father is "the only one who will end a stop-and-frisk era that unfairly targets people of color."

A week without water can easily kill the average person.

But a garden that goes unwatered for months may produce sweeter, more flavorful fruits than anything available in most mainstream supermarkets—even in the scorching heat of a California summer. Commercial growers call it "dry farming," and throughout the state, this unconventional technique seems to be catching on among small producers of tomatoes, apples, grapes, melons, and potatoes.

At Happy Boy Farms, near Santa Cruz, sales director Jen Lynne believes dry farming could be an important agricultural practice in the future, when water will likely be a less abundant resource.

But the taste of her dry-farmed Early Girl tomatoes is the main reason chefs, wholesalers and individuals around the country are increasingly calling to place orders. She notes that many calls come from places where rains falls through the summer, making dry farming impossible.

"Once you taste a dry-farmed tomato, you'll never want anything else," she says, adding that she could be selling hundreds of 14-pound cases per day if her 10-acre tomato field could meet the demand.

At Whole Foods Market in Sebastopol, about 50 miles north of San Francisco, dry-farmed tomatoes have become a shopper attraction, according to produce buyer Allan Timpe.

"People definitely come here to get them," he says. "Once someone tastes a dry-farmed tomato, you've got a customer for life."

Timpe also carries locally grown, dry-farmed potatoes, which he says "are dense and really flavorful."

The idea behind dry farming is that by restricting a plant's water intake, its fruits wind up with less water content and a greater density of sugar and other flavor compounds. But the practice isn't as simple as just cutting off the water. First, dry farming in sandy soil, through which water drains easily, doesn't work. Just as importantly, the plants, or trees, must be dry-farmed from the time they're planted.

"We get the plants going with a little water, then cut it off after a few weeks," says Kevin McEnnis, who dry farms Early Girl tomatoes at Quetzal Farm in Santa Rosa.

Then, he explains, as the young but quickly growing vines become thirsty, they send their roots deeper underground than they otherwise would to find moisture, which can remain in the soil all year.

A technique that also helps dry farmers lock water underground is frequently tilling the top foot of soil into a fluffy dust layer. Underground moisture that creeps upward through the earth cannot break through this layer, and it remains below the surface.

But farming without irrigation has a major drawback: dramatically reduced yields.

Stan Devoto, a farmer in Northern California, says his dry-farmed trees produce 12 to 15 tons of apples per acre per year. Irrigated trees, on the other hand, may bear 40 or 50 tons. And McEnnis says he harvests about four tons of tomatoes off his acre of vines each summer and fall, whereas conventional growers may reap 40 tons per acre.

Indeed, in most areas of conventional agriculture, dry farming is unprofitable and unusual. Exceptions include most European wine grapes — which local winemaking laws actually require be grown without irrigation — and much of America's grain production.

Paul Vossen, a University of California farm adviser in Sonoma County, says many people who dry farm do so only because they have no water with which to irrigate their land. "They do it because they have to, and so they'll make it part of their marketing strategy," he says.

But winemaker Will Bucklin, of Old Hill Ranch in the Sonoma Valley, has an underground water supply. Still, he dry farms 15 acres of old-vine Syrah, Zinfandel and other varieties — one of just a few California winemakers currently dry farming. His grapes are smaller, and yields at harvest time slightly lower, than on irrigated vineyards.

"But the small size of the berries means there is a lower juice-to-skin ratio," Bucklin says.

Since grape skins contain flavor-making tannins and polyphenols, dry farming can — at least in theory — produce richer, more intense wines. Bucklin concedes that he isn't certain that a novice taster, or even an expert one, could tell a dry-farmed wine from a conventional one in a blind tasting.

But in a highly populated state where water tables are dropping and rivers dwindling to trickles, Bucklin is confident, at least, of one thing:

"I'm using a lot less water than my neighbor."

Across the High Plains, many farmers depend on underground stores of water, and they worry about wells going dry. A new scientific study of western Kansas lays out a predicted timeline for those fears to become reality. But it also shows an alternative path for farming in Kansas: The moment of reckoning can be delayed, and the impact softened, if farmers start conserving water now.

David Steward, a water expert at Kansas State University, says that he and his colleagues started this research project with a specific kind of person in mind: "The family farmer who's trying to see into the future, and trying to pass on his or her land to their grandchildren."

Farmers in western Kansas have good reason to worry about the future. They know that big irrigated fields of corn in this part of the country are taking water out of underground aquifers much faster than rain or snow can fill those natural reservoirs back up.

Steward decided to come up with better estimates for how soon the aquifers will go dry and how that will affect farmers. He got together with experts on growing corn and raising livestock. "We were trying to provide a little bit better glimpse into the future, so that people would have a better idea how to plan," he says.

According to their calculations, if Kansas farmers keep pumping water out of the High Plains aquifer as they have in the past, the amount of water they're able to extract will start to fall in just 10 years or so. They'll still be able to continue harvesting more corn for another generation, though, because technology — better irrigation systems and genetically improved corn — will let them use that water more efficiently.

But after that, even the latest technology won't save the corn fields. Irrigated fields will start to disappear, followed by cattle feedlots. The long expansion of agricultural production in western Kansas will end.

Yet Steward and his colleagues also lay out some alternative paths that the farmers of Kansas could take. For instance, if farmers reduced their water use by 20 percent right now, it would take a big bite out of their corn production, but production then would resume growing. It wouldn't peak until 2070, and then it would decline much more gradually. "If we're able to save as much water as possible now, the more we save, the more corn we'll be able to grow into the future," Steward says.

These predictions appear in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The exact numbers are new, but the issue of water conservation is a familiar one in western Kansas. Thirty years ago, local governments in several parts of the region set up groundwater management districts — essentially, committees for discussing ways to attack the problem.

Mark Rude, executive director of the groundwater management district for southwest Kansas, says that discussion can turn emotional "because there's nothing more fundamental to the local family farm than the water supply."

At the same time, he says, the families on those farms are worried about the future. They want their grandchildren to have plenty of water, too.

Rude says, in his district, they've discussed lots of alternatives for how to reduce water use: cuts in irrigated acres; cuts in the amount of water used on each acre. But it's mostly talk so far, rather than action, for a very practical reason. His agency may not have the legal authority to force farmers to cut back on their water use.

Those farmers own rights to water the way they own land. Any rule that tries to restrict that right could be challenged in court. "The last thing people really want to see is simply a whole lot of court cases," Rude says.

The groundwater management districts have been trying to avoid that outcome by coming up with plans everyone can support.

There's a model for this. In one small area in northwestern Kansas, farmers have agreed to use 20 percent less water for the next five years. "It's an experiment, and a lot of people are watching that," Rude says. "And of course, that figures prominently in the conversations about, 'If we were going to do it, how would we do it?' "

If they can't come up with a plan for cutting water use, of course, eventually the natural laws of hydrology will step in. Farmers will use less water when the wells go dry.