Would organic farming help here? Seems like there are studies [1] showing nitrate leaching is less with it. Probably reducing cattle/chicken counts too, as those shit pits are a big source of it. 1 - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01678...
The problem is that organic farming can only feed 2 and a half families. It's not a feasible way to live unless you already have the privilege of wealth or alternate sources of income.
2.5 families per what? Acre? Farm? Pond? I'm gonna need a cite on this one.
For further reading on aquifers I highly recommend https://www.edwardsaquifer.net It's run by a scientist in Texas and has an amazing wealth of information on the aquifers of Texas. I never thought I would find a subject like this interesting until I read this guy's site. Texas has been managing aquifers for a long time, there's a rich history behind their management, and reading about this stuff has been the only wa…
There's also this guy who purchased a plot of land in the middle of nowhere, West Texas who's trying to terraform it into a forest. No idea how feasible it is, but interesting to watch! https://www.youtube.com/@dustupstexas
Just subscribed! Very cool channel. Although his latest video outlining some of his experience with migrants in the desert is extremely heart wrenching. It's nice to see it from his perspective, as just another guy.
So farmers engineer land so that heavy rain will run off into streams, rivers, and ultimately cause flooding someplace in Iowa. This is of course to prevent flooding the fields and drowning crops. Then they pump ground water to water crops when there isn't enough rain. What we need is a way to store the runoff and get it into the ground. This would likely require some land use, and a bit of money to set up, for littl…
Cisterns and lakes are not exactly new. The issue is that you need to take somebody’s land to do it, and no one wants to be the one to lose so everyone else wins.
Interestingly this is also happening at the micro level in urban areas with bioswales the size of parking spaces.
Phoenix is the same way. They do a really good job managing water supplies - for aquifers in particular (PHX sits on top of an underground lake) they use huge 'ponds' to let the water soak back into the aquifer.
We have to. Arizona is at the bottom of the water rights agreement among the states drawing from the Colorado River. I see a lot of water harvesting structures here, often in the form of parks and greenways.
Yeah - but PHX doesn't really rely on the Colorado as much as the rest of AZ. We also have the Salt and Verde rivers which is a luxury a lot of other parts of the state don't have...
And we're back down to 1950s level of water usage due to less agriculture. Other parts of AZ don't have that reduction in usage, and have to try to do more with less
Phoenix is the same way. They do a really good job managing water supplies - for aquifers in particular (PHX sits on top of an underground lake) they use huge 'ponds' to let the water soak back into the aquifer.
>> They do a really good job managing water supplies - for aquifers in particular Yes, except for some very bad deals allowing great tracts of land to be sold and leased at below-market rates to Saudi companies without charging or monitoring water use. They grow forage crops like alfalfa that are banned or restricted in Saudi because of excessive water requirements, and ship the crops back to their cattle there. It h…
That's not PHX though... PHX is lucky/planed well enough not to be in the same predicament a lot of the state is. We have 2 additional sources of water besides the colorado, our water consumption is down because of less argiculture, and the underground lake seems to be holding up pretty well.
Granted, the rest of the state is constantly having to do more with less
Owning property with a pond has it's own issues. In many of those farms run off can be detrimental. We have a 3/4 an acre pond and while we don't farm anywhere near it, the few springs that feed it all touch a lot of farm lands. So far we're lucky, but just a quarter mile down the road, our neighbors have a pond that won't sustain life, which we suspect is due to runoff from their crops. There's also the issue of exc…
Would organic farming help here? Seems like there are studies [1] showing nitrate leaching is less with it. Probably reducing cattle/chicken counts too, as those shit pits are a big source of it. 1 - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01678...
Organic farming is typically done just like "conventional" farming but with pesticides derived from a plant instead of oil.
Permaculture, OTOH, would make a difference. With robotics it may even become reasonable in cost.
Unfortunately it’s illegal to dig ponds on your property without a permit and the appropriate water rights in some areas. There’s a whole field of law around water rights and these sorts of permits, it’s really wild. You need an engineering plan with the expected evaporation rate and then need to describe how you’d replace the water you took from some downstream, more senior rights holder.
Which states? I think this is heavily dependent on the size of pond, size of waterway you’re impeding and the jurisdiction.
The greenhouse coefficient of water vapour is, pound-for-pound, about one hundredth that of CO2. There's also no meaningful amount of water that can be sequestered, given there's about 10^18 tonnes of it in the world's oceans.
It may be still more efficient to pump water underground. Isolating CO2 is very energy intensive, for the same amount of energy we may isolate 100x more H2O. Sometimes it even condenses spontaneously! There is also huge amount of natural CO2, single vulcano eruption... It is about reducing green house gas emissions generated by humans. And there are many artificial lakes, fields and forests that generate huge footpri…
Ignoring all the other problems with that, there is also nearly 100x more water in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, and roughly 10000x more water in the oceans than the atmosphere. Do you expect sequestering H2O to have a significant impact on the amount in the atmosphere before you dry up the oceans, whence it is evaporating?