The Trial Blazers program is our community science program. In its early stages, community gardeners, Pals of the Plant sale, WCG staff, and our most dedicated volunteers evaluated new vegetable varieties to select the best of the best for our Spring Plant Sale. We recently shifted the focus of this program toward trialing vegetable varieties that may excel in our increasingly hot climate. Additionally, we have begun experimenting with "dry farming" techniques where irrigation is not applied and crops are dependent only on water stored in the soil from natural precipitation. This practice is commonly associated with Mediterranean-type climates that have hot and dry summers, but has also been perfected over millennia in the US Southwest by Hopi farmers who grow robust crops of corn, beans, squash and melons with less than 10" of annual rainfall.
In Utah, it is already possible to grow some hardy perennials and cold season annuals without supplemental irrigation, but the viability of unirrigated warm season annual crops is unknown. While institutions such as Oregon State University and the Dry Farm Institute are rigorously studying these possibilities elsewhere, there is little information locally available about best practices and suitable crop varieties. The Trial Blazers program aims to fill this critical gap in understanding and enhance our organization's climate resiliency by trialing drought-resistant crops such as corn, beans, squash, melons, tomatoes, and potatoes - all without any irrigation after planting.
Unsurprisingly, our pilot year of dry farm trials in 2025 witnessed a plant survival rate of only 15%. But these dramatic crop losses obscure the fact that a substantial number of plants not only survived without any supplemental water during the 8th hottest summer on record, but they also put on healthy growth, avoided pest infestation, flowered, and fruited - in some cases almost as if they had been irrigated summer long. These results indicate that dry farming will be a viable approach for food production of some warm season crops in the future, once we have determined the best practices and the most suitable varieties. This trialing process is not open for public participation at the moment, but we will likely involve other growers as we refine our successes. Please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for more information.