The University of Arizona is making plans to renovate and update its DK Ranch experimental station in Cornville after almost a decade of limited usage to provide more learning opportunities for local students and agriculturalists.

The ranch, which occupies just over 45 acres along the west bank of Oak Creek, was donated to the University in 2017 by the family foundation of Phoenix attorney Daniel Cracchiolo and is sometimes known as the DK Cracchiolo Ranch.

“We haven’t been doing as much as we would like to have,” U of A College of Agriculture Dean Shane Burgess said of the ranch’s recent history. “What we’ve been doing is looking at grass-finishing beef that we would have raised at the V Bar V Ranch as some of the experiments we’re doing. We’re looking at organic fertilization of soil in there, especially looking at how local growers could become certified organic if they’d like to in the future. We had a lot of work on water flow rates in the creek pipeline that we needed to look to fix so we could start looking at doing irrigation experiments. And we’ve had a number of courses from Yavapai Community College over the years that have used the ranch.”

The university is working with Sedona architects Dan Jensvold and Stephen Thompson, known locally for designing the Sedona Cultural Park and Sedona Creative Life Center, to develop the new plans for the ranch.

“They are highly skilled and they were already working with the county supervisors and some private partners, and they offered to take a look at our land plat and our aerial view and help us with some envisioning,” Burgess said.

“Shane wants us to do kind of a Dells master plan for it,” Thompson said, referring to the concept plan the architects previously developed as a proposal for the city of Sedona’s Dells property in Yavapai County. “A little more dynamic, educational, residency, summer camps, regenerative agriculture with all the local cash crops and riparian restoration.”

“Eco-tourism kind of stuff is what I’m hoping,” Jensvold said.

“In essence a community facility,” Thompson said.

“The possibilities there seem almost endless,” Burgess said. “It really depends on what is important to the local community, and it’s taken us some time to get a critical mass in the local community to help us work there via our cooperative extension system. What we’re looking at right now is really a focus on many of the components of regenerative agriculture, small-plot agriculture, certainly we’d like to see a massive growth in the 4-H programs there … I know the community has a big push on regenerative production systems and that certainly fits in well with the valley’s climate and soil needs and also with the economic markets that exist in the valley.”

“What people are now calling regenerative agriculture is just practices that are consistent with maintaining our ability to produce from the land,” Burgess explained further, adding that the term is often understood to include methods such as no-till agriculture and cover cropping that have little to do with Verde Valley conditions.

“The way that regenerative agriculture is perceived in most of the country has no real relevance to that particular valley,” he said. “It doesn’t even have relevance to most of the state. In that valley, for millennia, people have been producing food and fiber and fuel from the land in a very sustainable way … practiced both by the nations, the native peoples there, but also by the ranchers there … People are now looking to what has been done there and what could be done in that valley better.”

Regenerative agricultural practices were summarized by the agronomist Masanobu Fukuoka as “farming as simply as possible within and in cooperation with the natural environment, rather than the modern approach of applying increasingly complex techniques … which results in making the work easier instead of harder.”

Because of the reduced labor required, Fukuoka termed this approach “do-nothing farming.”

Agricultural scientist Jane Mt. Pleasant and archaeologist Manfred Rosch wrote that humanity’s switch from swiddening to tillage resulted in a 90% drop in efficiency as measured by the ratio of labor inputs to caloric outputs, and that the subsequent replacement of tillage by plowing resulted in a further loss of efficiency of up to 80%.

“The main thing about it is to produce food that is not only enabling local food security and the capacity to grow the economy on specialist foods that might be going into the tourist sector there, but also on food sovereignty,” Burgess said. “We want to get off the commodity track and we want to de-commodify … creating products that enable us not just to sell into the commodity markets.”

Burgess described DK Ranch as a “land laboratory” that has the potential “to be able to answer specific questions that the private sector could then use to be better at food security or food sovereignty.”

“Food sovereignty” is a term coined by La Via Campesina, a farmers’ rights movement that organizes small-scale cultivators to oppose corporate control of agriculture, and is defined as “the right of people to have access to healthy and culturallyappropriate foods, while defining their own food systems.”

To place the absence of local control of food production by producers themselves in context, a 2022 study by the Natural Resources Defense Council found that just four companies in the United States control “more than 80% of the country’s beef processing, 70% of the country’s pork processing and 60% of the country’s sheep and lamb processing.” Another four companies control more than half of the American poultry market.

“It’s whatever the community really wants to do,” Burgess said. “It’s much more about lifestyle, agriculture, water use, that sort of thing. In a community like yours, it’s much more boutique, and that’s why a small footprint like DK Ranch can have a disproportionate impact.”

He also stressed the potential opportunities the ranch will offer for better integration of agricultural operations with the Verde Valley’s existing tourism economy.

“A lot of what we’re looking to do is be able to integrate so that local businesses, especially those built around sustainable tourism, can use that site like every other experiment station site in the state as a place where we can do community-relevant research,” Burgess elaborated. “So at the moment we’re at a place where we have a very nice network of local community leaders and businesses, and what we’re doing now is we’re looking directly to various scales of funding agencies, whether they’re federal or local or whether it’s philanthropy, to move forward on the initiatives we’d like to be doing in partnership with the community.”

Burgess offered an example of how locally-controlled agriculture can support tourism while keeping the revenues from that tourism local.

“Almost all of the very expensive wine [in Arizona] is bottled in the Sonoita region,” Burgess said. “Wine down there has increased in value four-to-fivefold in the last decade … People from France are literally flying into Sky Harbor [International Airport] and driving to Sonoita because that’s the only place they can get this wine … that’s made an enormous difference to the economic sustainability of that small area.”

The ranch’s location on Oak Creek and existing irrigation network provide another important advantage for an experimental farm: An abundance of water.

“The good thing about doing it there is even if we do something that we’re testing on purpose that uses more water than we would rationally like to in the economy, we’re doing it as part of an experiment to demonstrate something or other with partners in sustainability, such as The Nature Conservancy, so that the bigger area, which is the rest of the valley, does something a different way,” Burgess said.

He added that the Verde Valley is one of the focus areas for the university’s future planning “because it can inform most of the rest of the state.”

“The valley has an amazing opportunity to be a leader in how a region can see itself as an integrated ecosystem,” Burgess said. “There’s a real opportunity for many places in the nation to be looking at the Verde Valley for many aspects — social aspects, science aspects — of which the infrastructure at DK would just be one contributor.”