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Like dot-com moguls in the '90s and real estate gurus in the 2000s, farmers in western Kansas are enjoying the fruits of a bubble: Their crop yields have been boosted by a gusher of soon-to-vanish irrigation water. That's the message of a new study by Kansas State University researchers. Drawing down their region's groundwater at more than six times the natural rate of recharge, farmers there have managed to become so productive that the area boasts "the highest total market value of agriculture products" of any congressional district in the nation, the authors note. Those products are mainly beef fattened on large feedlots; and the corn used to fatten those beef cows.
But they're on the verge of essentially sucking dry a large swath of the High Plains Aquifer, one of the United States' greatest water resources. The researchers found that 30 percent of the region's groundwater has been tapped out, and if present trends continue, another 39 percent will be gone within 50 years. As the water stock dwindles, of course, pumping what's left gets more and more expensive—and farming becomes less profitable and ultimately uneconomical. But all isn't necessarily lost. The authors calculate that if the region's farmers can act collectively and cut their water use 20 percent now, their farms would produce less and generate lower profits in the short term, but could sustain corn and beef farming in the area into the next century.
The Real Reason Kansas Is Running Out of Water | Mother Jones
I know this sounds like madness to people who might aproove of the farmers success, But.... stop producing so much corn or you are going to run out of water!
Same water problem in Cali's San Joaquin Valley.
Unfortunately, the aquifers underlying the SJV are collapsing and will never be renewed.
Add in desertification, toxic run-off, drought and we've got a big problem.
Think Mesopotamia.
The Real Reason Kansas Is Running Out of Water | Mother Jones
I know this sounds like madness to people who might aproove of the farmers success, But.... stop producing so much corn or you are going to run out of water!
It seems like a no brainer, draw water from the aquifer faster than it recharges and you will dry it up but my personal experience with this muddies the water a bit. My land has 8 springs one of which provides my house water. I bought this place 5 years ago during a rather dry period and a couple of the springs were down to a trickle. The guy I bought from said they used to run a lot heavier 10 years ago. Then after owning here maybe 3 years a couple of springs dried up and my house spring was slowing down so needless to say I was concerned. I started cursing the farmers in the valley with all their constant irrigation and blamed them for my springs going dry. Then we had a couple of heavy winters and all my springs ran heavy again and a couple of new ones even popped up. This makes me wonder about the aquifer recharge rate and how accurate that measurement really is. Seems to me a couple of good precip years fills the aquifer up again and there is no actual "recharge rate" you can accurately estimate. This is just anecdotal evidence though and I could of course be wrong.
But we need to make ethanol to save us from the global warming...
I agree, the whole concept of making transport fuel from our food supply seemed like poor planning.Only a moron would want to food for anything other than sustenance.
I agree, the whole concept of making transport fuel from our food supply seemed like poor planning.
Lord knows we are not like likely to run out of kudzu or even tallow trees.Why not use Kudzu or bamboo or sugar cane instead?
Only a moron would want to food for anything other than sustenance.
Why not use Kudzu or bamboo or sugar cane instead?
Lord knows we are not like likely to run out of kudzu or even tallow trees.
I favor making our hydrocarbons from scratch.
Fueling the Fleet, Navy Looks to the Seas - U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
Hydrocarbons solve the energy storage problems for most of the alternative energy sources.
They have a good shelve life, and our infrastructure is already set up to handle them.
People who think producing food is totally unreasonable should go on a hunger strike until they die.It has been my observation that short term unsustainable benefits trump long term permanent success every time. Plus this is Kansas. They view any type of reasonable behavior with aversion.
Well, to be fair, when it's ostensibly a scientific study about an aquifer and instead they start talking about a congressional district, the likelihood of it the study being worthless leftonut propaganda increases exponentially.Furthermore since this was a college study they'll just view it as a liberal agenda trying to cut into their profit.
Why not use Kudzu or bamboo or sugar cane instead?
I started hearing the first talk of this technology out of Germany about 5 years ago.That technology sounds very promising. If they can make it work, it could be a game changer, globally..
It simply takes too much water to grow a steak. In a new report, leading water scientists say the human population would have to switch to an almost entirely vegetarian diet by 2050 to avoid catastrophic global food and water shortages.
"There will not be enough water available … to produce food for the expected 9 billion population in 2050 if we follow current trends," Malin Falkenmark and colleagues at the Stockholm International Water Institute stated in the report. By their estimation, there should be just enough water to go around if humans derive just 5 percent of their calories from animal-based foods by midcentury, instead of the 20 percent of calories that they currently get from meat, eggs and dairy.
It's a simple numbers game: Cattle, for example, consume a shocking 17 times more grain calories than they produce as meat calories. All that lost grain (which humans could have eaten) requires water. "Producing food requires more water than any other human activity — and meat production is very water-intensive," Josh Weinberg, the institute's communications officer, told Life's Little Mysteries.
I started hearing the first talk of this technology out of Germany about 5 years ago.
Germans plan to make 'synthetic natural' gas from CO2
Someone is using a time honored Science technique of coping the way nature
Nature does something, except this time it is with energy storage.
It may prove to be a path to truly sustainable energy, Unfortunately the AGW
movement has been demonizing the storage medium (Hydrocarbons).
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