Little Colorado River Watershed (Arizona –USA)

Outstanding Features

Farming has been an unbroken cultural tradition within the 67,000 km² of the Little Colorado watershed for at least 4200 years, placing the southern Colorado Plateau among (if not) the oldest agricultural heritage systems in the U.S. The Colorado Plateau is a geomorphically, biologically, culturally and linguistically extremely diverse region. Its agro-habitats range from 1350 m above sea level to nearly 4000 m in elevation, utilizing an astonishing range of soils and water sources for food production.

Preliminary estimates suggest that some 30 ecosystem types on the Colorado Plateau collectively harbor some 2,500 vertebrate species, well over 1,100 invertebrate species, and over 16,000 vascular plant species.

Despite the Anglo-American bias of assuming that this diversity is most strongly associated with more “pristine” landscapes such as the Grand Canyon and Painted Desert, it appears that the landscapes that have been culturally managed for centuries also have a rich biota, one that has been shaped by traditional land use practices. For instance, of the Colorado Plateau's 300-some endemic plants, roughly 2/3 (188 taxa) have been historically used, managed, or tolerated in fields, orchards and corrals by the region's indigenous farmers and ranchers.

Some of the very same fields documented as cultivated four centuries ago by Zuni (and perhaps by Hopi) remain in use today, without soil erosion, nutrient depletion or saliniation noticeably diminishing their food producing capacity. The astonishing variety of geomorphic settings, altitudes and water sources drawn upon by Zuni, Hopi, Navajo, Apache, Tewa and Southern Paiute farmers make it difficult to summarize all practices in brief. In addition to these surviving traditions of indigenous communities Hispanic, Basque and Anglo immigrants have introduced their own ranching, sheepherding, and orchard-keeping traditions since 1540 AD, which have been adopted and further adapted by indigenous communities as well.

Because the climate of most of the region is semi-arid and prone to drought, its farmers and ranchers have selected their seeds, breeds, and management practices to tolerate, escape or avoid water stress. This has led to the development of some of the most drought- and heat-tolerant crop varieties and livestock breeds in the world, including blue corn (maize), tepary beans, turkeys and Navajo-Churro sheep.

Well over half the lands in this watershed belong to the sovereign nations of the Navajo, Hopi, Tewa, Zuni, White Mountain Apache, and Southern Paiute, all of whom retain oral histories of farming traditions extending back centuries. Local residents of the Little Colorado River watershed have developed orally-transmitted traditional ecological knowledge systems for food production that are well-adapted to the uniqueness of their landscapes. This traditional ecological knowledge has been transmitted in at least six indigenous and three European languages within the Little Colorado River watershed. This watershed functioned in both cross-cultural seed and breed exchanges for millennia, such that food security was derived not merely from local food self-sufficiency, but through regional networks of support that provided “disaster relief” after floods or prolonged droughts.

As late as the 1930's the several thousand Hopi scattered across three mesas on 500,000 hectares were not only food self-sufficient, but exported their surplus farm goods to neighboring Anglo, Navajo and Hispanic settlements. Yet following the effects of the Dust Bowl and World War II, globalized food supply and delivery systems undervalued local food-self-sufficiency and informal regional trade networks. In the 1950s, many Native American and Hispanic residents of the watershed were officially declared poor (in terms of cash income per year) and were offered food aid, further weakening local food systems. By 2000, most farmers markets, and other agricultural support services in the watershed had all but disappeared. Since then, however, a food democratization movement has initiated large community-supported agriculture projects

Goods and Services Provided

In the traditional agro-ecosystems of the Little Colorado, planting a diversity of land races on different dates has functioned as a bet-hedging strategy against drought, pests, diseases, heat, early or late frosts. They also attract different pollinators, soil microbes and beneficial insects, some of these organisms of value in ensuring crop yields of more than one species. The intercropping of annual crops between rows of fruit trees also created favorable microclimates and may have reduced soil erosion as well.

Traditional ranching and farming communities of the Little Colorado are tangibly contributing to endangered species habitat conservation and to water conservation. The renewal of interest in local food security based on traditional biodiversity has dovetailed with local (particularly tribal) interest in protecting springs artesian water flows from underground aquifers that supported farming and livestock production as well as wildlife over the centuries.

Threats and Challenges

The following threats to biological, cultural and agricultural diversity on the Colorado Plateau have been identified: 1) land fragmentation driven by urban and suburban growth; 2) damming, diversion or depletion of water; 3) poor grazing practices; invasive plants, animals (and microbes such as West Nile Virus); 4) mining; 5) devaluation of traditional stewardship practices, local knowledge and cultural values; 6) changes in land tenure/immigration; 7) logging; 8) proliferation of roads; 9) conversion of wildlands to industrial agriculture; and 10) poorly managed fuel loads and fire suppression. In addition, language loss and culture change are being accelerated by globalization as they are nearly everywhere on the planet, hastening the loss of traditional agro-ecological knowledge. A peculiar challenge in this watershed is how to accomplish conservation planning among so many jurisdictions, cultures and language traditions—the very same elements that help retain diversity at an informal level.

Policy and Development Relevance

A decade of community discussions concerning declines in spring flows, farming and ranching, crop diversity and food security have triggered a renewal of local interest in seeing that this unique heritage is maintained and renewed.

Although this U.S. region is not in a developing country as most of the other, initially-designated Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems are, American Indian nations have been recognized as emerging sovereign nations that are similar in their development phases to developing countries. There are many coordinated planning efforts in the region that engage tribal land managers, farmers, ranchers and government scientists in implementing the Endangered Species Act, the American Indian Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and CITES to protect traditionally-utilized wildlife, to restore their habitats, and to prevent illegal trade in endangered wildlife products. All these initiatives have some transferability to other GIAHS sites.

Global Importance

There are four key features in this watershed that merit recognition as globally-significant: 1) as the oldest continuously farmed areas on the North American continent; 2) as farms and ranches retaining both high levels of indigenous crop diversity and wild biodiversity across a staggering elevational range of agrohabitats, 3) as a multicultural watershed with local knowledge about farming, ranching and landscape encoded in at least seven languages, 4) as a multicultural food system innovatively exploring means to market the heritage value of place based foods.

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Project proposal