In the coming decades, human-driven climate change will impact life on Earth in sweeping and complex ways. But one impact is particularly urgent. If humankind is to have a secure supply of food, we’ll need crops that can flourish amidst rising temperatures and increasing water scarcity.
And our hot and dry region may have something to contribute. As they seek out crops for a warming world, scientists are turning to ancient desert traditions, and to desert landscapes – including the West Texas mountains.
Rich Pratt is a plant geneticist at New Mexico State University.
“We're just really going to have to get serious about improving heat tolerance and drought resistance in our crops,” Pratt said, “or we're going to have to think about growing ones that are already adapted – like tepary beans. Gee, there's a thought.”
Pratt is a driving force behind the “Extreme Bean Dream Team.”
The extreme bean in question is Phaseolus acutifolius, the tepary bean. Indigenous desert farmers domesticated the tepary more than 4,000 years ago, and Southwestern farmers continued to cultivate it into the 20th century. But with the advent of dams and modern irrigation, teparies were abandoned for more water-intensive crops.
Now, there’s surging interest in this exceptionally hardy legume. Sarah Dohle is a bean-team scientist.
“It's not one group making the change,” Dohle said. “There is a wave of groups who are creating this momentum.”
Dohle manages a collection of some 17,000 bean varieties at the USDA National Plant Germplasm facility in Pullman, Washington. And she’s increasingly fielding requests for teparies – from both small farmers and agribusiness giants like Archer-Daniels-Midland.
Initially, she had few varieties to share; many domesticated teparies vanished when cultivation declined.
But in the Southwest’s sky-island mountains, the crop’s wild ancestor has endured. For several years, the team has searched the borderland mountains for wild teparies, and in September 2025, they came to the Trans-Pecos.
The team found wild beans at the Chihuahuan Desert Research Institute near Fort Davis. A search in the Guadalupes was stymied by torrential rains and flooding roads. In Dell City, helpful folks connected them with a local rancher, and they found particularly robust teparies on his land.
“These collection trips really work all the skills you have,” Dohle said, “plant identification, defensive driving, social skills. It's really fun.”
On state land in the Sierra Diablo Mountains, north of Van Horn, the team found a “blanket of beans,” Dohle said, growing amidst a canyon. The genes of these plants – which have adapted to survive both drought and flash floods – could be particularly valuable.
Through gene editing and traditional hybridization methods, the scientists are working to breed teparies with Phaseolus vulgaris, the species that includes most beans we eat, from black and pinto beans to great northerns. The tepary genes could make these common beans more heat- and drought-tolerant.
And teparies themselves are poised for a culinary comeback. The team is breeding fast-cooking teparies, making them convenient for home cooks. Leading chefs in the Southwest are now preparing tepary dishes. And Big Ag’s interest makes it more likely teparies will be stocked at grocery stores.
Pratt said it’s not a moment too soon to embrace this ancient desert staple.
“What is the trajectory we're on?” he said. “The decisions we make today are going to decide what kind of food security we have, what foods are available, how much they're going to cost 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now.”
“In wildness is the preservation of the world,” Thoreau wrote, and he may have been onto something. In the West Texas outback, rugged desert plants could help feed the planet.
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