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How a Solar Revolution in Farming Is Depleting Groundwater

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Re: How a Solar Revolution in Farming Is Depleting Groundwater

#111

Post by contravariant »

cutemonster wrote: post #101
contravariant wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd see what the Dutch water suppliers have to say about it, pumping up ground water and managing the water table is kind of their thing.

Apparently pumping up, yes, managing, less. See this comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39732506 > ... ground water shortages. Reason: farmers like irrigating their land (much of it below sea level) with ground water because it is cheap ...

It should be noted however that this shortage is happening because the water suppliers are refusing to pump up more water than is sustainable. This is rather different from the free-for-all depicted in this article, and is in fact what I mean by managing the ground water.

Re: How a Solar Revolution in Farming Is Depleting Groundwater

#112

Post by BurningFrog »

throwup238 wrote: post #65
cameldrv wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading about how in the Soviet Union, there were places they were irrigating with brackish water and how they were now infertile. The obvious conclusion was that the Soviet economic system was busted to permanently destroy land for some temporary gain.

The American equivalent is the dust bowl. The ancient equivalent is the desertification of Mesopotamia. Etc. etc. Humans are bad at long term thinking.

We've been farming for 10,000 years, and the vast majority of farm land is still fertile.

Re: How a Solar Revolution in Farming Is Depleting Groundwater

#113

Post by lettergram »

itsanaccount wrote: post #54
lettergram wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually argue the opposite zooming out. Zooming out our trajectory is up and to the right, like a hockey stick. Almost on every level. We’ve done that with all these disasters that have always happened. Almost like we can innovate or something

Technocrats on this site are very fond of your argument, so fond that I stored the reply I saw years back when someone else said the same thing. There is no monitoring dashboard for the planet. News articles like this are your warnings. There is no innovation to be had that fixes global aquifer levels. >>> Original Mathusianism should be distinguished from neo-Malthusianism, in that the latter does at least have some…

Bacteria cannot produce new ways to obtain resources, we can. Quite literally we’ve developed ways to grow food in space. We will be fine.

Re: How a Solar Revolution in Farming Is Depleting Groundwater

#114

Post by LinXitoW »

cutemonster wrote: post #102
j-pb wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bigger issue is that 1/3 of crops are used as animal feed. No matter how water efficient they are, you still need 10x as much of them for the same amount of calories. It'd be much easier and have a bigger impact to just go plant-based.

I've read about that, related to farmers shopping down the rain forest in Brazil (to grow beans for hamburger cows). But I don't think it applies to poor development country farmers? It's not as if the farmers in India are feeding cows and everyone feasts on hamburgers. And in Yemen, they're growing that qat drug (not meat)

They are, more and more. They richer a country becomes, the more they demand meat and animal products, the more they overconsume resources relative to provided calories/protein.

And who cares about India, when we're already screwing ourselves over well enough: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23655640/colorado-river-wa...

70% of the water used from the Colorado River (which is slowly losing water) is used for crops, and 80% of that is used for feed production. But let's stop taking so many showers, that'll fix the issue.

Re: How a Solar Revolution in Farming Is Depleting Groundwater

#115

Post by rqtwteye »

BurningFrog wrote: post #112
throwup238 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The American equivalent is the dust bowl. The ancient equivalent is the desertification of Mesopotamia. Etc. etc. Humans are bad at long term thinking.

We've been farming for 10,000 years, and the vast majority of farm land is still fertile.

We have not been farming for 8 billion that long. The scale of what’s happening right now is unprecedented.

Re: How a Solar Revolution in Farming Is Depleting Groundwater

#116

Post by LinXitoW »

clooper wrote: post #30
khaki54 wrote: post #22

[flagged]

Do you work on a farm or do you just consume their output? Degrowth is obviously not the only option but if you have never worked on an industrial scale farm then you should do some more research before casting blame on people who are trying to educate you about the scale of the problem facing us. Resources necessary for intensive industrial farming are running out. Business as usual is not sustainable regardless of…

Well, because more and more farms are being bought up, making farms bigger and bigger, and reducing the amount of "hard working, honest small family farms" everyone likes to imagine they get their food from.

There is no reasonable difference between what "farmers" say and what Facebook says, or the Collection of sad landlords, or the conglomerate of weapons manufacturers for world peace. It's all the same lies to keep the cash cow going as long as possible to extract as much value from our planet before everything goes to shit.

If people did do research, they'd find out that the main, humonguous problem is animal agriculture. Whether it's water (https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23655640/colorado-river-wa...), land, energy or CO2e production, it's not anywhere close to sustainable to eat meat every meal, not even every day.

Re: How a Solar Revolution in Farming Is Depleting Groundwater

#117

Post by khaki54 »

clooper wrote: post #30
khaki54 wrote: post #22

[flagged]

Do you work on a farm or do you just consume their output? Degrowth is obviously not the only option but if you have never worked on an industrial scale farm then you should do some more research before casting blame on people who are trying to educate you about the scale of the problem facing us. Resources necessary for intensive industrial farming are running out. Business as usual is not sustainable regardless of…

The people that the article is complaining about are subsistance farmers that are so poor, that NGOs give them free solar pumps. Then this article makes them out to be some sort of water thieves. They are not the problem.

Conflating dirt farmers in Africa and industrial farms in developed countries is totally wrong. No, I don't think industrial farms should be able to overuse water resources that belong to everyone.

Re: How a Solar Revolution in Farming Is Depleting Groundwater

#118

Post by LinXitoW »

krmboya wrote: post #46
khaki54 wrote: post #22

[flagged]

Adding to this population growth in developed economies is projected to plateau then fall. This will reduce the pressure on natural resources needed to sustain the population. Humans are bad at predicting the future going by the record

That's irrelevant if the the resource usage is already far beyond what is sustainable. If you take on a lot of debt that you can't pay back every single year, claiming that you're going to stop taking on new debt is not the win you think it is.

In addition, resource usage grows when peoples lifes improves. So we don't need to have more people, we can just give more people basic rights and have economies like India grow. Their consumption of luxuries like meat is constantly rising, because more people can afford it.

An extreme example (from memory) is Ghana. One american uses as much CO2e as 200-ish Ghanans. Imagine a miracle happens, and we stop with the neocolonialism. Suddenly, Ghanans can afford the basics, and they use twice as much CO2e pP.

Re: How a Solar Revolution in Farming Is Depleting Groundwater

#119

Post by cutemonster »

LinXitoW wrote: post #114
cutemonster wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read about that, related to farmers shopping down the rain forest in Brazil (to grow beans for hamburger cows). But I don't think it applies to poor development country farmers? It's not as if the farmers in India are feeding cows and everyone feasts on hamburgers. And in Yemen, they're growing that qat drug (not meat)

They are, more and more. They richer a country becomes, the more they demand meat and animal products, the more they overconsume resources relative to provided calories/protein. And who cares about India, when we're already screwing ourselves over well enough: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23655640/colorado-river-wa... 70% of the water used from the Colorado River (which is slowly losing water) is used for crops,…

Thanks for the link, didn't know there's that much feed production in the US

Who cares about India -- hmm, doesn't ground water depletion have quite different consequences:

In the US, there'll be fewer hamburgers. While in India, people will starve, famines?

Re: How a Solar Revolution in Farming Is Depleting Groundwater

#120

Post by westurner »

westurner wrote: post #28
schneems wrote: post #13

I’m very naive in this space. What percent of water extracted makes its way back into the water table and how long does it take? I assume you lose some to the plant that is harvested and some to evaporation. But how much makes it back?

What are some solutions for water table depletion and how comparably sustainable are they? How much water is extracted from air by PV panels that output H2O, and what are the impacts? Do drilling and fracking consume lots of water and create holes through aquifers? Do holes in aquifers cause aquifers to drain out to lower chambers of the earth? Historically, people have moved to where the water is. Is there a subsurf…

I see videos of successful bund dig operations; digging half-craters to catch water apparently keeps the water from flashing off.

Tilling turns topsoil to dirt due to solar radiation.

No-till farming methods like residue mulching prevent soil depletion and retain water in topsoil; in order to create healthy soil as an output.

Hugelkultur is basically residue mulching and rainwater catchment.

Removing all of the trees reduces the level of water in the air and soil.

What sorts of agricultural machines can service bunds, raised beds, and hugelkultur mounds instead of rows?

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