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One mid-morning in May, the temperature at Oatman Flats Ranch, in southern Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, had already soared into the 90s. By 4 p.m., the thermometer peaked at 105 degrees—a withering spring heat, but still mild compared to the blistering summer months ahead.
“I joke that this farm is a little better than Death Valley, but I’m not really joking,” said Yadi Wang, the farm director, as he drove his pickup through this 665-acre ranch about a two-hour drive from Phoenix.
“If we’re going to hold on to farmland, we need a significant change in how we farm and what we farm.”
For Wang, every day at the ranch is different. During the winter, he spends his days preparing fields of heritage wheat, planting seeds, and laying pipes from irrigation ditches to the row crops edging the now-dry Gila River. Early summer is the busiest, with the farm team spending up to 10 straight days harvesting the desert-hardy wheat, barley, and other grains.
“These cash crops translate into the tangible,” Wang said. Yet much of his time is devoted to a longer-term, less noticeable project: restoring degraded land, often through practices that originated with the Indigenous peoples of this region.
Oatman Flats Ranch is attempting to create a sustainable, scalable model for regenerative farming in the Southwest, demonstrating what can and perhaps should be grown in an increasingly hot, dry, and water-limited region. In 2021, Oatman Flats Ranch became the region’s first-ever Regenerative Organic Certified farm, with practices build soil health and biodiversity, help sequester carbon, and reduce water consumption. Now it’s been designated as a Regenerative Organic Learning Center by the Regenerative Organic Alliance (ROC), welcoming other farmers interested in observing and talking about the practices there.
‘We Need a Significant Change in How We Farm’
“If we’re going to hold on to farmland, we need a significant change in how we farm and what we farm,” said Dax Hansen, the ranch’s owner.
A combine harvests blue durum wheat on the south side of Oatman Flats Ranch in the summer. (Photo courtesy of Oatman Farms)
But it won’t be easy. Oatman Flats Ranch has undergone a dramatic transformation that required significant investments in training, research, equipment, and techniques, all of which took years to deliver a return. Although processes have been refined and problems worked out along the way, with insights that Hansen freely shares with other farmers, many practices are out of reach for the average farmer.
“It’s an experimental farm,” Wang said. “I have a lot of respect for [Hansen], willing to get all these cash assets to pour into this, to lose money. Not many people can or are willing to do that.”
Hansen, a successful financial technology lawyer who grew up in Mesa, Arizona, purchased the property from his aunt and uncle in late 2018. Oatman Flats Ranch has been in the family for four generations. His grandfather Ray Jud Hansen ran cattle in the 1950s before becoming one of Arizona’s first conventional cotton farmers.
The land was severely degraded when Hansen bought it, with compacted, salty, eroded fields caused by decades of conventional farming practices and 10 years of neglect. The soil was more than 55 percent clay. “It was pretty bleak,” Hansen said. “[The land] had basically been sterilized, with almost nothing growing on it.”
Hansen wanted to demonstrate the potential for regenerative farming in the arid Southwest, so he and his team redesigned the farm. They began by restoring the dilapidated infrastructure, repairing wells and pump equipment, excavating irrigation ditches, and purchasing the necessary farm equipment. They cleared hundreds of invasive trees, leveled the fields, fertilized them with manure, and planted cover crops to improve soil and water quality. In addition, Hansen commissioned an ethnobotany and archaeology study of the property to understand what crops had historically been planted at Oatman Flats Ranch.
Meanwhile, the neighboring farmers no longer grow food for people; their crops provide feed and fuel. Oatman Flats Ranch is surrounded by millions of acres of alfalfa for livestock and corn for ethanol, watered by one of the world’s fastest-draining aquifers.
Dax Hansen purchased the farm in 2018 with his wife, Leslie Hansen to create a model of regenerative farming in an increasingly hot and water-scarce Southwest. (Photo credit: Adam Riding)
“Climate change and a persistent megadrought are reducing the flow of rivers in the West, yet we have been unable to sufficiently reduce our dependence on these rivers to keep demands balanced with supplies,” said Brian Richter, president of Sustainable Waters, an organization focused on water scarcity issues. “The result is increasing depletion of rivers, lakes, and aquifers.”
The constraints led Hansen and his wife to explore water-conserving crops. His team planted drought-tolerant, and nutrient-dense White Sonora wheat and mesquite trees.
“We embraced the abundance of heirloom and native crops in the Sonoran Desert,” Hansen said. “We are looking at the land and asking it what we should grow, rather than asking the land to grow what we want.”
Hansen hired farm attendant Juan Carlos Gutierrez and Wang, who shared his vision of healing the land and were knowledgeable about water, soil, and biodiversity. Wang has a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and a Ph.D. in agriculture and life sciences. Gutierrez does a bit of everything at the farm, including planting and harvesting, maintaining farm equipment, managing cover crops, rotating animals, and milling wheat and mesquite into flour.
In five years, Oatman Flats Ranch’s regenerative practices saved over a billion gallons of water, doubled the amount of organic matter in the soil, and steadily transformed the once-beleaguered ecosystem, according to its May 2024 Regenerative Impact Report. The water savings are measured by tracking the flow rate of each well on the ranch to calculate the amount of water used per round of irrigation. The acre-feet of water used at Oatman Flats Ranch are then compared to the estimated acre-feet used in conventional wheat production. (One acre-foot is enough water to flood a football field 1 foot deep, or more than 325,000 gallons.)
“When we grow regenerative, we can use 2 or 3 acre-feet of water,” Hansen said. “Alfalfa and cotton will take like 9 or 10 acre-feet.”
To measure soil organic matter, Wang takes samples from the surface of the fields and sends them to the Motzz laboratory in Arizona and the Regen Ag Lab in Nebraska for analysis. Soil organic matter is the key indicator of soil health, influencing nutrient and water availability, biological diversity, and other factors critical in growing healthy crops. In some fields, soil organic matter has grown from 0.8 percent to 2.4 percent, according to the lab results. Yadi said 0.8 percent is about normal for the region, while 2.4 percent is very high, an outlier. “People think it’s impossible,” he said.
Regeneration Rooted in Indigenous Practices
Southern Arizona’s rich agricultural history stretches back more than 5,000 years. By 600 CE, the Hohokam people were constructing North America’s largest and most elaborate irrigation systems along the Salt and Gila Rivers. The descendants of the Hohokam—the Pima and Tohono O’odham—continued to farm the land up to and after the arrival of the Spanish, who began to colonize southern Arizona in the 1600s. They continue to farm in Arizona today.
At the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation, about two hours southeast of Oatman Flats, the San Xavier Co-op Farm uses historic land management practices and grows traditional crops that reflect their respect for the land, plants, animals, elders, and the sacredness of water.
