At the Sedona City Council priority retreat on Jan. 18, city staff floated a tentative proposal to increase food security in Sedona.

“We’d like to work on developing a food security strategy for our community,” said Alicia Peck, the city’s recently-departed sustainability coordinator. “This could be as robust as doing a plan in case we have to shelter in place — how are we going to feed everybody? — or we could start out in small stages where we’re doing stuff like helping [producers] sell at the farmer’s market, or ensuring that the food pantry has a steady supply of fresh produce to hand out. Those are things we’d like to explore with our partners.

“Potential partners for this would be Sedona Greenhouse Project, Healthy World Sedona [and the] Verde Valley Food Policy Forum.”

Peck’s remarks echo those made by 2022 city council candidate Jennifer Strait, who referred to the Sedona Greenhouse Project’s “idea to turn the Dells or [a] similar property into both a food forest and greenhouse. What would it look like if residents ate nutrient-dense fresh food that was not trucked in [from thousands of] miles away, losing vitality?”

Sedona was a farming community for the first century of its existence. With both city government and private organizations recently stressing the need to diversify the city’s tourism-based economy, how might Sedona incorporate farming again?

Sedona Greenhouse Project

Sedona Greenhouse Project founder Timothy William “Shams” Teh thinks he and his collaborators can help answer that question.

“Local food was not getting to people’s plates in our community, so a new system needed to be crafted,” Teh said.

SGP organizes volunteers to grow food in backyards and private gardens “to provide our community with direct access to local produce.” They currently manage five gardens in Sedona and Cornville, partnering only with “landowners who want to grow food without the use of harmful chemicals.” Teh said they hope to bring a total of 30 acres under cultivation during the next few years.

“We would like to partner and utilize the city’s land that would typically sit fallow,” Teh commented, pointing out that SGP could bring a team of educated, dedicated people to the task of feeding Sedona.

Over the past two years, SGP has harvested about 1,400 pounds of food. This year, with increasing volunteer turnout, they expect to exceed 10,000 pounds.

SGP’s agricultural techniques emphasize soil preparation first and foremost.

“Building the organic matter is a major part of our farm technique, especially when we’re working with native virgin soil that hasn’t been farmed before,” Teh said. “By building soil, we are actually building a future for generations to come so they can produce food for their families.”

“Our style of farming is in alignment with biodynamic and polycultural high desert farming techniques,” Teh continued. “It also incorporates water harvesting and mulch basins to cut back on our water usage, and to utilize all of the runoff to feed our crops and fruit trees … We plant perennial crops, natives and fruit trees, which establish deep roots to help soils store more carbon … Keeping it local [also] reduces resource consumption used by trucks and transport.”

SGP makes use of succession and companion planting as well.

While the city of Sedona now includes the term “sustainability” in official documents as a matter of course, Teh argued that all sustainability begins with food sovereignty, the concept that individuals should control their own food production, that food should be produced and consumed locally and that food production should be tailored to human and environmental rather than financial needs.

“You can live without electricity, maybe not comfortably, but you cannot live without food and water,” Teh said. “Is this town sustainable if there is a food shortage?”

The city of Sedona’s website does not mention “food sovereignty” in any searchable city document, including the Climate Action Plan.

Food Forest

Teh favors the forest garden method of intercropping, which he described as the process of constructing a “food forest.”

Building a food forest begins with trenching contoured to the topography of the land. These trenches are filled with organic matter such as hay and wood chips, inoculated with mycorrhizal and mycelial fungal cultures and finished off with a mixture of compost and soil to create burms raised two feet above ground level. Drip irrigation, flood irrigation or overhead watering can be used.

After laying out the burms and irrigating, fruit trees and overstory legumes are planted first. These are followed by a cover crop, which might be alfalfa, clover, fescue, cowpeas or vetch.

“As soon as your cover crop has grown to two feet in height, and has started flowering, lay out your understory of crops that you would like, such as figs, pomegranates, berries and grapes,” Teh advised. “These are plants that will do well for your second story in your food forest.”

Continued pruning and mulching become necessary at this stage, as well as reseeding where necessary. The lower story of the food forest can include vegetables, herbs and additional cover crops that further complement one another.

Sedona’s Roots

“Farming was abundant, fruitful and certainly widespread, especially around Flagstaff, Sedona, and Williams,” Meredith Hartwell, of the Southwest Biological Science Center, wrote in a study of Coconino County’s agricultural history. “With current sustainable farming knowledge — as well as important elements such as irrigation and soil-building practices — many of the problems farmers faced then would be alleviated now.”

“Early settlers in Sedona, as in Flagstaff, focused on food subsistence farming,” Hartwell explained. “Produce was often grown between young fruit trees before the trees matured. Some truck gardens were small enough to be watered by cisterns, provided there was regular rainfall and the home had enough ‘domestic’ water to spare. Many residents and farmers had a few [or a few dozen] chickens and turkeys that provided them with eggs, meat and manure for their gardens. Market gardeners had a ready sales outlet in downtown Flagstaff and Sedona’s stores, and farmers from both locations supplied a variety of vegetables for residents to purchase. When rain was scant and farmers’ dry-farmed crops failed, they would sometimes find financial success in their ‘backyard’ efforts.”

By the 1920s, Sedona was home to thousands of fruit trees. The Jordan family alone had an orchard of 1,500 trees, 600 of which were peach trees. Frank Pendley grew over 800 apple trees along Oak Creek. Common Sedona vegetable crops of the period included beets, carrots, lettuce, cabbage, beans, sweet corn, tomatoes, cucumbers and squash.

From the 1930s to the 1950s, Hartwell said, “fruit and vegetable growing in Sedona was prolific and successful.” In 1953, the Coconino County Agricultural Extension Service recorded 150 acres under cultivation in Sedona and around Oak Creek.

An Extension Service report of 1930 estimated that the Oak Creek Canyon area could produce 50,000 boxes of fruit during one growing season, equal to some 2 million pounds of fruit, which could supply 300 million to 400 million calories depending on the type of fruit — peaches are less nutritious than apples.

Sedona’s agricultural history was being rooted out by 1960, as the expansion of the national highway system and the discovery of a new aquifer beneath Grasshopper Flat that could supply water for development made the sale and subdivision of orchards more profitable than farming.

The city’s population grew from 350 in 1950 to 2,022 in 1970 before rising to 5,368 in 1980 and 7,720 in 1990.

In 2017, the city of Sedona reported just 18 jobs in agribusiness.

Under Cultivation

How much land would it take to feed Sedona?

Japanese agronomist Masanobu Fukuoka spent 30 years developing the concept of “do-nothing” or “non-cultivation” farming, which emphasized the environmental and labor advantages that could be gained from working with existing symbiotic systems in nature.

“I was aiming at a pleasant, natural way of farming which results in making the work easier instead of harder,” Fukuoka wrote in “The One-Straw Revolution.” “I ultimately reached the conclusion that there was no need to plow, no need to apply fertilizer, no need to make compost, no need to use insecticide.”

Fukuoka also rejected weeding and pruning, recycled straw from his crops back into his fields and allowed chickens to roam among his plantings. He found that these methods increased both the fertility of the soil and the rate of topsoil formation.

Using succession and complementary plantings that included rice, barley and clover, Fukuoka achieved yields of 22 bushels of grain from a quarter of an acre of ground. For his citrus orchard, he used a layered approach similar to Teh’s food forest, with acacia trees to fix nitrogen, weeds and clover to provide ground cover and vegetables beneath to supply additional aeration and nutrients.

“If the farmers who live in this village eat only the foods that can be grown or gathered here, there will be no mistake,” Fukuoka summed up. “If 22 bushels [1,300 pounds] of rice and 22 bushels of winter grain are harvested from a quarter-acre field such as one of these, then the field will support five to 10 people, each investing an average of less than one hour of labor per day. But if the field were turned over to pasturage, or if the grain were fed to cattle, only one person could be supported per quarter acre.”

The nonprofit Ecology Action estimates that “one person’s complete balanced diet can be grown on about 4,000 square feet,” although the organization promotes “biointensive” growing methods that rely heavily on tightly-packed plants, compost, external fertilizer and tilling, which increase both resource and labor needs.

Applying Ecology Action’s estimate of 4,000 square feet of agricultural land per person suggests that Sedona’s population of 9,684 would need about 900 acres of crops to ensure food sovereignty. Using Fukuoka’s estimate of five people per quarter acre suggests about 500 acres of land would be required.

Sedona is approximately 19 square miles, or 12,160 acres, in size. Of this area, 49% is national forest, which reduces the total amount of land available for private or municipal use to about 6,000 acres. The amount of land needed to feed Sedona’s current population would therefore be between 8% and 15% of the total non-federal area of the city.

If food security, food sovereignty and sustainability depend on access to land, and there is almost no agricultural land in Sedona, the numbers show that achieving these objectives will require either the conversion of residential and commercial space back to agricultural use, or, alternatively, a reduction in the city’s population.

For more information on the Sedona Greenhouse Project, visit sedonagreenhouse.org. For more information on food sovereignty, visit viacampesina.org/en.