Farming on Thin Ice

Checking my rope, I gasped a little at the sunrise-splashed view to my left. A near-vertical drop of about four thousand feet was less than a step away. Despite that, I felt fairly safe. My climbing boots were solid on the ledge, and I was roped in. The howling, 70-mile-per-hour wind that kept us awake most of the night had finally abated as we set out with headlamps around 3 AM. As the last in our party, my task was to clean up the protective string of chocks, nuts and carabiners the leader set on the route and hang it on my sling as I climbed. My partners were out of sight above me.

The year: 1988. We were at about 13,450 feet on the Grand Teton in Wyoming. It’s a beautiful jagged and abruptly uplifted mountain, and it was my first time up. We took one of the signature “easy” routes up, rated at a mere 5.4 in difficulty. It even had a name: the Owen-Spalding Route. The climb was fairly easy to follow upwards, face to the cold, dark granite. There were plenty of handholds, only two “chimneys” to ascend and easy, wide ledges to stand on. 

But the exposure fairly took my breath away. Not exposure from the cold. It was  a balmy 30 degrees Fahrenheit on this August day. Rather, it was the exposure of simply being confronted with nothing but thin air when the Owen Spalding broke out on what is called the Upper Saddle. And that view to the north was hard to ignore. 

It was the top of what is grimly called the Black Ice Couloir. It’s a tight, near-vertical gully named that because the long, warm days of summer shed the previous winter’s snow, exposing a permanent, bulletproof sheet of “black,” or “ancient,” ice. This exposed ice is consolidated and hard, likely dating from the last ice age. Its cliff-like gradient and northern exposure means it rarely receives sunlight, except perhaps in the first light of day around the summer solstice. Even then, during that early summer period, it is invariably covered with insulating snow.

This couloir is the highest point of water-yielding snowmelt in the entire Snake River watershed. It’s a telltale indicator of how much water will flow down the Snake as it wraps in a 1,078-mile, northward-pointing, crescent-moon arc across the wide belly of Idaho.

*****

Ontario, Oregon. US Highway 20, March 17, 2026: Caryl and I are whizzing 70 mph across farm fields in the broad Snake River plain right in the middle of the rain-shadow desert formed by the volcanoes of the high Cascade Crest of Oregon.

It’s surreal. Desert may be an understatement. Most of these fields, irrigated from the Snake River with rectilinear fields festooned with center pivot, drip tape and gated pipe, are barren. They are simply bare dirt. Certainly, here and there, alfalfa fields show about five inches of growth on this March day. But 90 percent of them completely lack any form of life. 

They are bleached whitish brown, the color I’d expect volcanic ash to be with minimal organic matter. Most of the fields will grow onions and sugar beets. They are clayey dust.

I think it works within that paradigm for a farmer. The water can’t really penetrate the ground due to platy compaction layers below the surface. Without organic matter in the dirt, the clay lacks pore spaces for water, and thus tends to repel water. This means an operator can judiciously apply minimal water exactly when and where it is needed. Also applying the appropriate chemicals at the precise time will grow a very big onion.

But what vexes Caryl and me is that even the untilled desert used to contribute to the water cycle before it was made into cropland. Plants lived on the soil year-round. Occasional native grazers would eat the plants, stimulating greater diversity and more soil life. Water would infiltrate the soil, finding a place among abundant, deep roots and a diverse sub-surface biota. Plants covering the ground shade it, protecting it from excessive evaporative water loss and preventing runoff after the occasional desert rain shower.

Winter cover crops on today’s farm ground could offer a similar level of protection to soil moisture and the web of life beneath the surface. I mean, we all need onions. But nearly all onions are grown using this near-hydroponic method. Couldn’t we protect the soil and keep the water cycle intact?  

Wait. What? What does bare soil have to do with the water cycle? Does the water cycle function without plants? The fact is that it doesn’t. Certainly, if rain falls on that bare farmland dirt, it likely won’t soak in very much. The water will likely penetrate the surface down to the tractor-compacted subsurface, and then slowly evaporate off from the soil surface into the atmosphere. But what’s the problem with that? Water rises up into the sky, ready to make clouds and rain, right?

Wrong. Water vapor needs some kind of “nucleus” to condense on to form cloud droplets. There must be some sort of particle for water molecules to aggregate around. Then, it takes as much as 1 million of these cloud droplets to form a raindrop. A dust particle can work as the core of a droplet, but dust tends to repel water vapor. This usually prevents water droplets from aggregating until a favorable water attracting chemical veneer coating accrues on the dust particle, or water vapor concentration reaches “supersaturated” proportions, or both. Dust particles are very large, and when water aggregates on the dust finally occurs, a very large droplet forms. They in turn form “mega” drops of rain or hail. These weigh a lot, and fall hard and fast. 

Excessive amounts of dust in the atmosphere is one culprit behind the extreme rainfall we’ve seen over the past few years. It becomes feast or famine (literally?), because of the long time it takes for dust particles to finally serve as a nucleus for water droplet aggregation.

This becomes an even greater problem in the context of dirt and chemical agriculture. Large raindrops cause soil movement upon impact; with enough fast falling rain, the bare soil washes away. Within minutes, gullies are formed, and a field is lost. The once rich topsoil is now in the river, eventually finding its way to the ocean in some instances. 

Because of an abiotic agriculture.

And now, what about biotic agriculture? Here’s where plants and soil microbial biodiversity come to the rescue. Living soils with diverse plant cover grow plants that emit water (a process called transpiration), oxygen and two other key components: biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) and bacteria. They are released from the plant’s breathing organs, called stomata, on the underside of leaves (yes, bacteria live inside the plant). The BVOCs react with “free radicals” in the air to form secondary organic aerosols (SOAs). I know this is a lot, but these two items are much smaller than dust particles, and water is drawn to them. Much of the water vapor that is drawn to them was emitted by the plants themselves via transpiration. Both the plant chemicals and bacteria thrive in diverse native grasslands (not so much in crop monocultures).

Because water is drawn to them, droplets condense quickly on the welcoming surface of organic aerosols and bacteria. Water droplets aggregate, forming raindrops, snow or ice, and as they enlarge, they fall. They are not big drops, but they are more frequent. Soil impacts are lessened, and even more so if the rain falls back onto the diverse system from which it arose. 

I have a rancher friend in Mexico named Alejandro Carrillo. He has turned his part of the Chihuahuan Desert back into grassland using his grazing animals. And he has witnessed this very effect: light rainfall and more frequent rains occur on his large ranch.

He is a rainmaker. 

Meanwhile, the contingent of conventional bare-dirt farmers scattered around the West—the majority of crop farmers—do not create vegetation and soil biology that allow for anything but extreme rainfall events. With a generally eastward weather flow, the eastward snowpack suffers. For onion and beet growers farming in Ontario, Oregon, the next snow-collecting mountain ranges are the Tetons, and Swan of Idaho and the Absaroka of Wyoming. The National Park Service has been monitoring glaciers in Grand Teton National Park and discovered a categorical decline in the Teton Range’s glacier extent.

Most people think regenerative agriculture is about storing carbon in the soil to address global warming. That is important, but it is probably not the primary benefit of increasing soil organic matter and keeping a living plant cover over the soil. I think the biggest global benefit is the effect of the water cycle: more water infiltrates and is stored in the soil, available to plants. More plants emit the rain-making bacteria and BVOCs. More gentle moisture events occur and fewer extreme events. Climate change is not the primary cause of reduced snowfall deposition. Instead, the true culprit is a breakdown of the water cycle, mostly due to bare-soil monocrop agriculture and continuous grazing. 

But this doesn’t change the climate’s temperature, you may say.

But it does. The water cycle is key to thermoregulation. Walk underneath the canopy of trees on a hot day. It’s cooler because the trees are transpiring water from their stomata. Like a rooftop “swamp” cooler, heat is being removed with the water vapor. I’ve taken the top of the soil temperature on our irrigated grasslands and found it to be as much as 40 degrees cooler than the nearby continuously grazed public lands desert range just a quarter mile away (not our grazing ranges).

One word describes this phenomenon: desertification.

If we look at where desertification has historically occurred on the planet—such as in Africa’s Sahel or Mesopotamia’s “Fertile Crescent”—those situations arose long before automobiles or fossil fuel emissions from power plants existed. Early cultures in those areas of the globe almost categorically practiced continuous grazing and exposed-soil monocrop agriculture. And they desertified what was once covered by green plants.

Reflecting on my climb of the Grand Teton nearly 40 years ago, I wondered if the ancient black ice that I observed on the North Face even still existed on the highest source of the Snake River. And I thought about the farmers and ranchers in those valleys hundreds of miles away that tilled and grazed their lands, ignorant of just what their practices were doing: the very water they depended on to irrigate their croplands was likely being depleted by their agricultural practices.

They, in fact, are desertifying. As is already happening in the arid West, ultimately, they may run out of water. And be out of business. 

There’s a better way to grow food. Together, we can insist on a change. We can start by buying only food grown on living soils that maintain year-round plant cover. This is what off-season cover crops do: they insulate and shade soil and retain water while enhancing a living soil sponge beneath them. 

And they will start to turn any farmer or rancher into a rainmaker. 

And on that Grand Teton, ancient black ice will remain. Snowfields and glaciers will expand.

Happy Trails.