In the desert animal and plant density is lower due to limited water resources. So you might have to follow nature and have a lower productive plant density.
You can however optimize your 2 acres by using
wood chip to conserve water evaporation, encourage soil life to keep mineral bio-available decrease the amount of water that plants need to extract the mineral they need, and aerate the soil to hold more water and bio-available mineral, increase the amount of biomass in the soil (bio-char/woodchip/compost/etc). So inputs like mineral/rockdust, beneficial fungi/microbes, woodchip/bio-char and machinery to aerate the soil and earthworks/water works might be needed.
In terms of desert food guild, I would start of with a layer of onion/garlic family + thyme/rosemary/mint family + blackberry/bamble "family" + currant/gooseberry family + pomegranate + stone
fruit (apricot/almond/plum/etc) + there are others like jujube/fig/etc. as for nuts (almond+sweet kernel apricot+ uzbek pistachio, macadamia nut) there are a few conifer type nut and ginkgo also. I would also have an overstory of palm tree (wine palm, date palm, etc) and also nitrogen-fixers.
The above can help lower you actual water/electric usuage. You can also time shift the electrical usage to lower the dollar amount for electricity even if the actual kilo-wattage doesn't go down. Usually it is cheaper in the night so you can only water at night or use a tank and gravity
feed during the day)
Actually watering only at night sounds like a very good idea to also cut down on evaporation loss and so is drip irrigation vs overhead.
You might also have to start out with the expectation that you will have to spend alot of money doing earthwork and drip irrigation to get the system started but a few years down the road you will need less inputs once the system become more self-sustaining.
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