Trial Blazers is our community science program that was started to evaluate fun, new vegetable varieties for our Spring Plant Sale. In recent years, we've shifted the focus toward vegetable varieties that may excel in our increasingly hot climate, while exploring "dry farming" techniques where irrigation is not applied during the growing season. This practice is commonly associated with Mediterranean-type climates and indigenous farmers such as the Hopi, who grow many crops on less than 10" of annual rainfall.
In Utah, we already know that it is possible to grow some hardy edible 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 studying these possibilities elsewhere, there is very little information locally available for our climate. The Trial Blazers program aims to fill this critical gap in understanding and enhance our community's climate resiliency by trialing drought-resistant varieties of corn, beans, squash, melons, tomatoes, and potatoes - all without any irrigation after planting.
Unsurprisingly, our pilot year of dry farm trials in 2025 resulted in a crop loss of 85%! While this number may seem seem dramatically high, it actually means that 15% 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 all summer long! These initial results indicate that dry farming may be a viable approach for food production of some warm season crops, once we have determined the best practices and most suitable varieties. Trial Blazers will not be open for public participation in 2026, but we will likely involve other growers again in the future 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.