Regional Climate Records and Local Experience: "Drought" and the Decline of Dryfarming in Central New Mexico by Alison E. Rautman Department of Anthropology Michigan State University The traditional saying "all climate is local" suggests that climate may be re- corded and experienced at different spa- tial and temporal scales. In situations where "climate" or "climate change" is proposed as an explanation for some observed change in human behavior, it seems particularly appropriate to identify the proper scale at which climate would have affected human societies. In some cases, for example, regional climatic sum- maries may not accurately describe the small-scale conditions that are relevant to people who are making economic de- cisions based on their own and their neighbor's actual experiences (Clark 1985; Katz 1979). In this study, local and regional cli- matic recordsfromthe American South- west are compared with statements from official publications and also from local inhabitants to investigate the role of cli- matic conditions in one case of local economic change—the abandonment of commercial dryfarming of beans in cen- tral New Mexico during the 1940s. These comparisons show that a local climatic record is sometimes quite diver- gent from the regional summaries. Fur- thermore, the local records do not always exactly correspond with the local ranch- ers' general perceptions of climatic con- ditions during specific years. Use of multiple sources of data helps identify more precisely the climatic variables that apparently contributed to local percep- tions of "good" and "poor" conditions for dryfarming. Local Changes in Precipitation: Hypotheses and Tests For ranchers living near GranQuivira in Torrance County, New Mexico 1 (Fig. 1), the year 1921 is remembered as an especially goodyearfordryferming, when people harvested remarkable crops of beans and garden produce such as mel- ons. Dryfarming supposedly became increasingly diffi- cult in this area dur- ing the 1930s and 1940s. The early 1930s are remem- bered as particularly bad "drought years." Continued poor yields are at- tributed to a long- term change in the seasonal pattern of precipitation begin- ning in the 1940s. The ranchers uni- formly attribute the decline in commer- cial dryfarming to a change in local cli- matic conditions that made it increas- ingly difficult to sus- tain high yields of beans and other dryfarmed crops in this area. By the late 1940s hardly anyone in the area was cultivating beans as a cash crop. People who stayed in the area shifted to stockraising, supplemented by part-time wage labor; a very few, however, com- bined stockraising with subsistence dryferming of beans, maize, and pota- toes. I am not aware of anyone who is relying on subsistence farming in the area today. , Santa Fe Pecos. ~ I 1 - . . L a s Vegas ^N =- ^ Golden Tijens ja Albuquerque Los Lunas" Tajique * ^ « Pedernal J** .Eitaocia-*- "^> aMauntainalr •Progreaao aCorooa ran Quivin •V; , Pasture $ dcroft » . \ T 1 ^ Figure 1: Gran Quivira and Region 12