Desert Farming, Then and Now

Cotton bolls ready for harvest

NPS

Farming in this part of Arizona started 4,100 years ago with corn. Little by little, over the centuries, travelers brought in beans, squash, gourds, pumpkins, tobacco, and cotton. People here gradually dug a vast network of canals to take water from the rivers into their fields. Communities living along the miles of ditches worked together to maintain their irrigation system.

The first Spaniards who visited the Casa Grande in the late 1600s noticed that people here grew cotton. Cotton thrives in hot climates, but it is a very, very thirsty crop. Without irrigation, cotton won't grow in a desert.

Today the farm fields near Casa Grande Ruins are still one of the largest cotton-producing areas in the United States. Irrigation still makes desert farming possible.

Long-Range Trade and Travel

Farmers living near the Casa Grande traded cotton and surplus crops for raw materials and other goods. Copper bells and scarlet macaws came up from the south. Turquoise and obsidian came here from the north and east. People in southern Arizona journeyed to the Sea of Cortez and to the Pacific, returning with sea shells. They fashioned their shells into beautiful bracelets, rings, and pendants.

220 Miles of Canals

Near Casa Grande Ruins, the Ancestral Sonoran Desert People irrigated as many as 19,000 acres of crops. Earliest canals built —3,500 years ago

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• Developing Farms

  
  

  Jacob Butler of the Salt River-Pima-Maricopa Indian Community talks about ancient farming and what crops were grown.

  Credit / Author:

  NPS, movie outtakes, thanks to volunteer editor Jenise Cook

  Date created:

  10/14/2020

  Audio Transcript

  [Jacob Butler] Well, we have this thing it’s called, like now we have an onion and it’s known as a litois or the man in the maze’s onion. And at one time it was it was a wild crop. It was just a wild onion. Hundreds if not thousands of years ago one of my ancestors went and grabbed that and started domesticating it, started working with the plant so it would be more grower friendly I guess so create a relationship with the farmer.

  And so they done that time after time in succession for hundreds if not thousands of years and now we have a staple crop that isn’t wild. And it’s actually a Pima Variety. And so an O’odham Variety. We have our aboriginal Hohokam cotton. Not Pima cotton like you see in the store. We have our true Hohokam cotton that has been grown since the time of, almost said the time of the Hohokam, or since the time of our ancestors 2000 years ago and beyond that. And so we still have, we still retain some of the-the crops that were originally grown here. And some of them we’re still trying to get back.