Travelling scholars field report
Posted by: Tony Hamilton	Date: 4 September 2004

Its John Wayne country here; miles of desert, majestic cactuses standing sentry along the road, dust devils in the distance and flat-topped mesas on the horizon. The journey from Bakersfield California to Phoenix, Arizona was the archetypical American ‘road trip’. Mile after mile of ‘black top’ stretched ahead of me as I hurtled down the highways and freeways. I passed through the Mojave Desert, one of the driest places in the USA with an annual rainfall of only 2” (50mm). Nearby, Death Valley, the lowest point in the USA sits 80m below sea level. Andrew Airforce base is located here, where the first commercial flight into space occurred recently. I guess that if it failed and crashed, the only object for miles would be the odd cactus.

The road wound its way past San Bernadino bypassing the legendary traffic snarls of Los Angeles. It runs parallel to highway 66 for a while. Although as they say, “You can get your kicks on Route 66”, I stuck to the faster Interstate 10. I was in a rush to see what Arizona had to offer, so I continued past Palm Springs , a golfing mecca dotted with casinos. Indian reservations are permitted to have casinos on their land and a friend commented that “Its ironic that the Indians can now legally steal back from the pale faces”.

A narrow windswept pass is home to thousands of huge wind turbines. There doesn’t appear to be much planning, just a mass of towers sprouting like overgrown daffodils after winter. The California State prison is located near the border, in the middle of this desert, about four kilometres from the highway. A large sign states the ‘bleeding obvious’: “California State Prison, Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers”. The highway then crosses the Colorado River at Blythe. The Colorado is also a source of water battles. An agreement to divide flows between USA and Mexico was based on flows during a wetter than normal period and in dry years it seems Mexico is the loser.

My directions to the first Jojoba Ranch took me past a huge, vacant RV Park (Caravan Park) in to middle of the desert. Why they were located in the middle of the desert without so much as a tree for shade had me mystified, until it was explained that the ‘Winter Birds’, (our ‘grey nomads’) drive from northern USA and Canada in the winter in search of sun. They often arrive in groups, or rendezvous with friends each year in the desert where the cost of living is cheaper and these sun-seekers make their own entertainment.

Jojoba, a scrubby, grey-coloured perennial bush is a native of Arizona and New Mexico. Native Americans of the region have long known the unique properties of its wax. It’s a replacement for sperm whale oil and has a similar chemical structure to sebum (skin’s own moisturiser). However, attempts to commercialise this crop have not been so successful. In fact, it has a reputation as a ‘shonky crop’ as many plantations were established as ‘taxed-based, get rich quick’ agricultural investments and failed miserably in the 1970s and 1980s. Both California and Arizona have thousands of hectares of abandoned jojoba.

However, approximately 4,000 hectares of Jojoba are still grown in Arizona, irrigated from wells (bores) as deep as 300m and as hot as 38oC. Improved, clonal varieties were developed and better agronomy practised. The sun ripened seed falls to the ground after summer and is either brushed up into hoppers by modified almond harvesters or vacuumed into bins by homemade harvesters. Either drip irrigation or furrow irrigation is used. Growers in Arizona seem to have a competitive go-it-alone attitude to marketing. Efforts at collective marketing have failed; a salient lesson for the Australian jojoba industry. Some large growers, such as Purcell Jojoba, independently clean, crush, value-add and market jojoba. Others simply sell cleaned seed without value-adding the product. The price has been historically volatile and new crops from Argentina pose a competitive threat. Yet a resilient few growers continue to cultivate jojoba in these harsh desert conditions.

Out of the ashes of the desert rises Phoenix, a huge metropolis of three million people and growing by 50,000 houses annually. This growth and the desire for a new house with a ready-made garden, provides opportunities for nurseries to provide well grown (two to four year old) potted trees for planting out. They sell from a few hundred dollars to over two thousand dollars each, depending on age and species. One irrigation consultant, an expatriate Aussie, has been using plant and moisture monitors in these nurseries to maximise growth and save water while irrigating these pots. In addition to measuring plant water use and weather conditions (temperature, humidity etc) he measures plant stress using variable displacement technology (VDT) monitors. These monitors, clamped to trees, record day night stem shrinking and swelling by measuring micron changes in stem diameter. The magnitude of this shrink-swell can be related to plant moisture stress. Micro irrigation is fine-tuned to minimise any stress and the experimental use of this technology to actually regulate irrigation controllers is occurring.

The central Arizona Water Project also provides irrigation for a range of agricultural activities around phoenix, including cotton and lucerne hay for large feedlot dairies. As dusk envelopes the countryside a purplish hue surrounds the distant mountains and mesas with the ever-present cactuses silhouetted against the evening sky. It truly is cowboy country in Arizona.