[Gordonjcp]

Your problem there is that you have agriculture at all, in a desert. Deserts aren't great places to grow food, and in turn the lack of food and water means that deserts aren't great places for people to live.

There's a bootstrap problem to be solved. If you want water, you need ground-covering plants, which need moist loamy soil, which needs water, and so on. For any of this to work you need to start by turning as much grassland as you can get into pasture (with irrigation, sadly, which needs water) and grazing it with livestock, and then kind of building that out over time.

Monoculture arable farming makes deserts. You need to stop doing that.