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Shrinking Mississippi River Puts American Farm Trade at Risks

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Re: Shrinking Mississippi River Puts American Farm Trade at Risks

#71

Post by bombcar »

dredmorbius wrote: post #67
bombcar wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The flow of the Mississippi after leaving Minnesota is no where near the lowest recorded: https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?wfo=arx&gage=... Low Water Records for Mississippi River at Lansing (1) 3.39 ft on 03/13/1938 (2) 4.19 ft on 01/23/1944 (3) 6.09 ft on 11/27/1942 (4) 6.34 ft on 02/04/1943 (5) 6.58 ft on 01/17/1945 (6) 6.76 ft on 08/14/1941 (7) 6.92 ft on 10/28/1940 (8) 6.94 ft on 01/27/1957 Current…

Typo? Should that read "is now where", "is not where", or ... ?

It should have been nowhere.

Re: Shrinking Mississippi River Puts American Farm Trade at Risks

#72

Post by WalterBright »

fredrikholm wrote: post #17
hinkley wrote: post #9

If you ever have a friend or family member who is trying to get around wetland conservation laws, they are contributing to the shrinking of our river systems. Water retention capacity in upper watersheds directly contribute to average river flow, which is very easy to show by the behavior of streams. Deserts are self-reinforcing systems where the heat pushes clouds up or away from them. Wet, cool forests draw in more…

It's painful how widespread this notion of 'nature steals precious water' is, and how quickly the practical implications of such a mindset leads to further destruction. The municipality where I live have an annual cycle of doing things like: * Scraping away every fallen leaf to be burned * Removing all twigs, branches and dead wood * Burning or spraying down all weeds * Cutting the grass, even in places no one walks…

Because I'm extremely lazy, that's what I do with my yard. I let the native plants do what they want, just cutting down the invasive ones.

It's been (slowly) turning into a lovely yard, lots of wildflowers, bees, and critters. No need to ever water it, either.

Re: Shrinking Mississippi River Puts American Farm Trade at Risks

#73

Post by s1artibartfast »

bluGill wrote: post #64
s1artibartfast wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody says that the US literally cant build anything anymore. The sentiment, backed by data, is that it is vastly more expensive and slower to build than in the past. This makes it hard to justify attempting a project at all. This analysis [1] shows that building tunnels in the US costs 10X more than in Norway, and 3X the average for the countries studied. Obviously, this means that with the same government budget,…

Just to make it worse, often the things we are talking about are areas where network effects matter so the more you build the better the return on investment. Or in our case because we can afford to build so little our return on investment will be much less than it could be if we build more.

Most of the reports I've seen site a few factors:

Availability of cheap skilled labor. Europe often sources it's cheap engineers and Trades workers from the East.

Inefficient regulatory Frameworks such as mandated workers to do nothing and an onerous environmental monitoring.

Political dysfunction and gridlock. Projects are often poorly conceived and continually change their design and intent over the course of a project.

Some of these might be considered Network effects I guess. If you don't build infrastructure, you don't have a healthy market for workers and companies with expertise

Re: Shrinking Mississippi River Puts American Farm Trade at Risks

#74

Post by renewiltord »

fredrikholm wrote: post #17
hinkley wrote: post #9

If you ever have a friend or family member who is trying to get around wetland conservation laws, they are contributing to the shrinking of our river systems. Water retention capacity in upper watersheds directly contribute to average river flow, which is very easy to show by the behavior of streams. Deserts are self-reinforcing systems where the heat pushes clouds up or away from them. Wet, cool forests draw in more…

It's painful how widespread this notion of 'nature steals precious water' is, and how quickly the practical implications of such a mindset leads to further destruction. The municipality where I live have an annual cycle of doing things like: * Scraping away every fallen leaf to be burned * Removing all twigs, branches and dead wood * Burning or spraying down all weeds * Cutting the grass, even in places no one walks…

A book that talks about this at a different level is One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka that follows the idea of Do Nothing Farming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_farming

Re: Shrinking Mississippi River Puts American Farm Trade at Risks

#76

Post by wsinks »

hinkley wrote: post #30
CharlesW wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> …I strongly suspect that is the '3 Whys' trap of the Five Whys Process. My search-fu fails me. What is this?

What routerl said. Skipping out on root cause analysis by stopping as soon as you find something actionable. Those shallow analyses often result in a much bigger cleanup project that is also much less effective. Great for empire building, not so great for progress. It just so happens that I usually catch people at this when they only have 3 Whys mapped out. There's something going on there but I'm not sure I understa…

I really appreciated this! I've heard of the five whys earlier in life, and later on I've heard of 'the 3 whys', part of the selling technique that everyone has to answer:

- Why buy anything? - Why buy from you? - Why buy now?

I knew it wasn't that, and the idea of the 5 Whys funnel crapping out at 3 Whys does make sense!

Re: Shrinking Mississippi River Puts American Farm Trade at Risks

#77

Post by wahnfrieden »

ericmay wrote: post #57
mc32 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that we can find better solutions than what lawns provide, however, weeds, nature and plants will take over an unmanaged property pretty quickly... maybe 20 years. In 100 places are near unrecognizable. The abandoned areas of Detroit did not take 100 years to become overtaken by nature. And that's a continental climate. In Tropical climates the rate will be quicker.

Sure, but in the context of this discussion unmanaged property simply isn't an issue, in my view. It's too much management that's causing problems.

OP is thinking of protecting property value

Re: Shrinking Mississippi River Puts American Farm Trade at Risks

#78

Post by jeffbee »

DavidPeiffer wrote: post #20

For anyone curious about water levels around their region, the US Geological Service monitors water levels in real time across thousands of stations. I had a great discussion with a couple USGS data scientists at the RStudio conference in July. Their remote monitoring stations report the data to their servers typically in 15 minute intervals. If you're worried about the water level at a particular location, they have…

That's a great site. I usually start from water.weather.gov but I don't remember why. It's cool how much data U.S. governments collect. You can get everything from water flow and depth to the price and quality of wholesale lettuce.

Tidbit from your water gage link: parts of central Florida are still under record-high floods, days after the hurricane. https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/02296750/#par...

Re: Shrinking Mississippi River Puts American Farm Trade at Risks

#79

Post by hcrisp »

bombcar wrote: post #18
fredrikholm wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's painful how widespread this notion of 'nature steals precious water' is, and how quickly the practical implications of such a mindset leads to further destruction. The municipality where I live have an annual cycle of doing things like: * Scraping away every fallen leaf to be burned * Removing all twigs, branches and dead wood * Burning or spraying down all weeds * Cutting the grass, even in places no one walks…

The absolute amount of effort we spend fighting nature instead of just guiding and living with it is frightening.

I spent some time as a volunteer sandbagging one of the levees in Missouri as high water neared flood stage. While there, I heard a quote attributed to an old-time farmer who was also the president of the Upper Mississippi Valley Drainage Association who also appeared before Congress on damages caused by varying the water level. The quote was along the lines of: "We think we can drain water from certain areas and farm the land next to the river, but that land belongs to the Mississippi. It can take it back any time it wants to."

Re: Shrinking Mississippi River Puts American Farm Trade at Risks

#80

Post by jonwachob91 »

jeffbee wrote: post #78
DavidPeiffer wrote: post #20

For anyone curious about water levels around their region, the US Geological Service monitors water levels in real time across thousands of stations. I had a great discussion with a couple USGS data scientists at the RStudio conference in July. Their remote monitoring stations report the data to their servers typically in 15 minute intervals. If you're worried about the water level at a particular location, they have…

That's a great site. I usually start from water.weather.gov but I don't remember why. It's cool how much data U.S. governments collect. You can get everything from water flow and depth to the price and quality of wholesale lettuce. Tidbit from your water gage link: parts of central Florida are still under record-high floods, days after the hurricane. https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/02296750/#par...

Water levels along waterways (such as the one you linked) will continue to rise maybe another week+ as water drains into the waterways. It takes time for "high" lands to drain their water, and all that water drains into waterways (such as the one you linked). iirc, after Irma a few years ago, it took almost 2 weeks for waterways to begin receding to normal levels.
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