https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22abl58Atns&feature=youtu.be
Drought Adaptation Industries of Alamogordo has created a line of products to help with New Mexico's water issues.
Between social distancing and isolation, many of us are looking for something to do. One option is to get out back and create a garden. However, living in the southwest we must be aware of the water we’re using.
Jennifer Clark deals with gardens both professionally and personally. She is an avid backyard gardener and she told me about an Alamogordo product that is helping residents create healthy gardens and why that is so important.
“Because of the fact that you are able to conserve water, that’s the big thing, you don’t need as much water to take care of your plants, and these pods and pellets and everything breakdown in the water and it actually feeds the root system all at one time. It makes it really easy for us to use them and just for your environment because we are all on restrictions during the summertime and we can't use that water,” Clark said.
And the results were more than saving water and money. She had a bumper crop and one squash made it all the way to the top.
"I thought oh my goodness I have this awesome squash, I’m going to enter it and see what happens. And so, I entered it into the fair and ended up winning grand champion of the fair with my squash,” Clark said.
Big prizes aside, according to a report from The Hamilton Project, water use in New Mexico averages around 107 gallons per person per day. And the Environmental Protection Agency claims that as much as 50 percent of the water we use outdoors is lost due to wind, evaporation, and runoff caused by inefficient irrigation methods and systems.
It’s a ring like this that Jennifer grew that prize-winning squash in. It looks really simple, just pressed together organic material, but to get to this finished product took over 15 years of research and development.
And at a non-descript factory tucked away along Route 70, a New Mexican is working to cure pellets that have a similar makeup of the drought ring. It’s a small operation, but as founder Glenn Bell tells me, these products can have a big impact.
“I looked at hundreds of years of science and found out if you take a broad spectrum, wide based compost products, not just one, multiple thereof. You can attract the widest variety of microbiologic life. The widest variety of microbiologic life is going to give you the widest variety and health of the environment and the planet,” Bell said.
And healthy soil is a big deal in New Mexico. The Healthy Soils Act was passed last year with the goal of restoring much of New Mexico’s agricultural land.
But It was more than just soil or business for Glenn. The poverty rate in New Mexico is around 19.5%. And according to a report by New Mexico Voices for Children, low-income families are more likely to suffer from food insecurity and they have to spend a much larger portion of their income on food purchases than middle- or upper- income families.
“I was asked a long, long time ago a way to grow food in drought for poor people on a whole lot less, a whole lot less knowledge, less water, a whole lot less cost right. So, after lots of years of work and development and research we figured out how to do it. And so we ended up with a product that can grow a hundred and fifty to a hundred and seventy percent on less than one to two percent of the water and less than five percent of the effect and it costs about six cents a pound finished product,” Bell said.
This system can benefit large scale outfits, such as cities, who have large amounts of turf to maintain.
“You think about the average city, we will take Alamogordo, Alamogordo is the mean. They have 300 to 350 acres of manicured turf they take care of, all that has to be watered. They will do an average first watering cycle somewhere around 1/3 and acre foot, which is about 100 thousand gallons. So, if you can take 66% of that out, now that 100 thousand gallons of water turned into 33 thousand gallons of water. How many households could live on 66 thousand gallons of water?,” Bell said.
With temperatures rising consistently and water always an issue in southern New Mexico, it will take innovative solutions to protect the resources we have now.