KPU researchers find ways for food crops to grow in B.C. drought conditions

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Researchers at Kwantlen Polytechnic University are exploring how food can grow and thrive during British Columbia’s dry summer drought season. 

Through a process called dry farming, scientists look at water that accumulates in the soil during the wet and rainy seasons, and keep that moisture locked in during dry months. They factor in a number of variables including soil health, plant species, plant spacing, shade, and mulching to prevent water from evaporating. 

Naomi Robert, senior research and extension associate at KPU’s Institute for Sustainable Food Systems (ISFS), says all of these aspects contribute to how well a farm will hold water. 

“I would like to ultimately be able to produce food for communities in a way that doesn’t inhibit future generations to also produce food,” Robert says. “That’s the ultimate goal … [is to] build resilience to changing climatic conditions, which is an increasing challenge for agriculture.” 

The initiative grew after a town hall KPU hosted in December 2023 with local producers and farmers discussing drought and potential solutions, says Thom O’Dell, North Vancouver Island regional agrologist with the B.C. Ministry of Agriculture and Food. 

The ministry has committed up to $70,000 towards the project. 

“Adapting to the extremes of climate was a really high priority that came out of that, as did the issues around shortage of water, and so this ticked several options,” O’Dell says. “This is a project where rather than looking at accessing more water, it’s how do we make better use of the water we do have in the summertime.”

Robert and O’Dell say the Pacific Northwest has the ideal climate for dry farming because of the long rain months and dry summers. Robert adds much of the research in this climate has been done in Oregon, Washington, and California, but less so in B.C. 

In 2023, KPU partnered with the Dry Farming Collaborative at Oregon State University (OSU), which has 10 years of dry-farming research expertise, to begin testing this method on the B.C. coast. 

The extreme weather events B.C. has seen within the last four years — which include the devastating 2023 wildfire season, where more than 2.84 million hectares of forest and land burned, and the 2021 heat dome which saw Canada’s highest temperature ever recorded of 49.6 C in Lytton, B.C, a town that burned to the ground shortly after — are ramping up the necessity for this research. 

“That was a wake-up call,” O’Dell says. “I haven’t forgotten being out at my nursery in 44-degree weather, watering my plants frantically to try to keep them alive.”

Their team is now in the process of working with three sites on Vancouver Island and Salt Spring Island to trial dry-farming practices this summer. Each farm will have a crop plan and equipment to monitor soil moisture, temperature, and estimated evapotranspiration, which refers to the loss of water from the soil surface through evaporation and transpiration from the leaves, throughout the growing season. 

The farms will be focused on three different plant species: dry beans, tomatoes, and cucurbits, which are members of the squash family. Plants species were chosen by drought resistance, those with a sales market, and those that were successfully dry farmed with OSU. 

Robert says while the team has funding for their research through the summer, they will need more to keep the project going. 

“Agriculture is not a ‘do something once and then everything’s figured out.’ So we’ll need to keep working at it for the foreseeable future to really build an understanding of how we can be successfully dry farming in our climate.”