The purpose of this site is to show that there are many ways to grow a substantial amount of food for livestock and people with minimal water.
For prickly pear alone, there are over 8,000 scientific papers and articles written since the year 1820. Nopal (prickly pear) has been in use in Mexico millennia before the Spanish arrived. Since then it has spread around the world. There are many associations dedicated to this one plant and its close relatives.
My goal for this site is to create a searchable codex of all these resources, including recipes for cooking, methods of processing and discussion of other people's experiences growing these crops and how they solved any problems that came up.