Hopi farmers' harvests shrunk by long drought. Planting crops is ‘necessary'

Yahoo

26-04-2025

Michael Kotutwa spent the summers of his boyhood planting corn alongside his grandfather. In the sandy soils of the Colorado Plateau, they buried seeds deep into the soil, awaiting rain.
Planting 'felt necessary,' said Kotutwa. Every summer after his 20s, throughout two decades of university education and another six years after earning his Ph.D., he has returned to the Second Mesa to dryland farm on 9 acres of land.
His grandfather planted every year until he died at 88, just as their Hopi ancestors had for over 2,000 crop seasons.
Now, a 30-year megadrought in the Southwest and declining numbers of farmers on the reservation have brought challenges to that way of life. Even when planting hardy seeds that communities have selected for hundreds of generations to fit the arid environment, dryland farmers rely on winter moisture and timely summer rains to have a crop.
There have been several rain busts in recent years, less snowfall, and summer heat has risen dramatically in the last century, stunting crops. At the Winslow National Weather Service station, the closest to Hopi lands, temperatures historically climbed over 100 degrees just a few days a year. In 2024, there were 31 days with three-digit temperatures in Winslow, and in 2020, there were 43.
Some Hopi families' seed supplies dwindled in 2020, after Arizona was hit by one of the hottest and driest seasons on record.
'We're not building it back up to where it used to be,' Beatrice Norton, a Hopi tribal member and chairperson of Oraibi, told The Republic then.
That year, only 4.3 inches of rain fell in Winslow, the nearest weather station to her town. Hopi corn requires between 6 and 10 inches of rain.
The sustained drought also means there is less forage for sheep and livestock, and that the spring used to feed a few Hopi irrigated gardens, already diminished by mining operations' groundwater pumping, is under higher stress.
'This is more than an environmental crisis; it is a disruption of how our communities live, learn, and thrive together," said Trena Bizardi, senior program officer for the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance and a member of the Navajo Nation.
At the same time, the profound transformation of the land and the seasons doesn't change the work of many to carry traditions forward, she added. 'We have this persistent spirit which is rooted in our identity.'
Kotutwa, now an assistant professor of Indigenous Resilience at the University of Arizona, has experienced many years of crop loss. Yet more than worrying about the clouds that don't come, he is concerned about his community preserving its health and knowledge, and about not neglecting his cornfield to crows and squirrels.
Given seeds, a gourd full of water and a planting stick from the very beginning, according to Hopi creation stories, men and women are meant to care for the crops, he said.
'The most important thing,' adds Kotutwa to the creation story, 'was that we're supposed to put faith in everything that we do.'
Throughout the ups and downs of the northeastern Arizona climate and the droughts of the last century, Hopi families have continued to plant.
In the 1930s, when the dust and drought hit the high plains of the midwest, Hopi families still grew nearly 4 million pounds of corn, on top of beans, melons, squashes, pumpkins, peaches, apricots, pears, apples, grapes and other garden vegetables, wrote ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan in his book 'Where our food comes from.' Some even sold the surplus.
In the 1940s, when U.S. wars took the men to war, Nabhan wrote, farms around Tuba City 'produced more corn than they could consume.'
Since then, coal mining operations expanded on Hopi and Navajo land, extracting increasing amounts of water and drying up natural springs. On top of that, Hopi farms have seen less rain and higher temperatures in this millennium than during the Dust Bowl — conditions that scientists project will exacerbate under climate change.
A scientific study suggests that several states in neighboring Mexico, where the government has banned planting GMO corn to protect native varieties, could see a 40% decrease in yields for rain-fed cornfields under current climate conditions.
'Living out here for all my life, there's a tremendous change,' Ronald Humeyestewa, a farmer and member of the Mishongnovi tribal council, told The Republic in the dry summer of 2020.
'But I don't think Hopis will ever, ever let go of planting.'
Through youth projects, seed-keeping initiatives and microgrants programs, organizations strive to build up Native food systems.
Only about 15% of the people in the Hopi reservation are still farming, Kotutwa estimates. It's a big drop from the 1930s when nearly the whole community was planting and kept 63 varieties and species of fruits, vegetables and grains.
'It may not be visible to people on the outside, but everyone is still continuing in adapting and carrying all these traditions forward,' said Bizardi, with the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance.
Dryland farming: 'Everything depends on the corn': As crops wither, the Hopi fear for their way of life
Projects like the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network are working toward seed 'rematriation,' which involves taking heirloom varieties back to their original Native lands and sharing knowledge among Indigenous communities.
The Natwani Coalition, a nonprofit and affiliation of Hopi organizations dedicated to preserving farming traditions and restoring food systems, performed a comprehensive food assessment years ago and sustains youth and seed programs, micro-grants opportunities and a "farm talk" podcast.
New surveys are underway in Hopi, said Kotutwa, who is leading a half-million-dollar project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to catalogue native seed biodiversity, expand cultivation, propose a model for data sovereignty, and grow a 'regional intertribal food and agricultural network' to revitalize native foodways.
Under his grandfather's name, Kotutwa also opened a foundation and plans to establish a seed house and youth agricultural program that integrates the Hopi language. He has taught young people the technique: how far to space, how deep to plant, when to harvest, he said, 'but it's not about the process; It's about the why.'
Farming is deeply connected to the Hopi's cultural and religious life. Communities that thrived in the desert long before Arizona was called a territory still practice dryland farming because farming is their lifeway.
'This is what you're supposed to be doing,' Kotutwa added. 'This is what you were told to do from the very beginning.'
Clara Migoya covers agriculture and water issues for The Arizona Republic and azcentral. Send tips or questions to [e-mail].
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Hopi dryland farmers face reduced corn harvests due to long drought