This isn’t true where
i hail from (also, which parts of the midwest rely on sprinklers? I’ve only seen them in the west and southern plains. Maybe Kansas and the western Dakotas?
Residential and industrial use combined is still less than 1/2 of agricultural use of water in Arizona... Agriculture that still uses flood irrigation , where they flood a field with water.. instead of sprinklers or more efficient means..
https://www.arizonawaterfacts.com/water-your-facts
but yeah.. it's people and industry.
Do you know if things like sprinklers count as irrigation? I grew up spending a lot of time in Delaware which is tons of farmland, and I remember seeing lots of weird watering devices and sprinklers.
I was in the Central Valley the other week and asked my dad about these little tanks that had popped up on farms in the area. He told me they were part of new drip irrigation systems. So things are changing slowly.
Many of the old neighborhoods and a few remaining urban farms are flood irrigated in Phoenix. The small city park in my old neighborhood was also flooded once a week to keep the grass green all summer.
I attended high school in Phoenix in the late 1960s. There was a widespread irrigation infrastructure that consisted of gated ditches running throughout residential areas. This was way before drip irrigation or other water conservation measures were a thing.
These ditches were supplied with water on a scheduled basis. One watered one's lawn by shutting off your downstream neighbor's ditch gate and opening yours on schedule. After your hour or two of flooding, your upstream neighbor would do the same, leaving your deeply flooded yard to absorb the water. This was a 2 or 3 times/week thing.
It was horribly inefficient in terms of evaporation losses. About the only positive aspect I recall is socializing with our neighbors in the after-midnight hours that we usually drew for our turn at the floodgates.
I used to get so mad about people growing lawns here in Phoenix until I discovered that Burmuda grass will tenaciously grow with little irrigation, and that some kind of vegetation is better for water retention in soil than bare dirt.
As I mentioned in my longer comment elsewhere, Arizona is seismically stable, and fabs don’t need specialized structures when using advanced process nodes.
The biggest misuse of water resources and poor land management comes from our conventional, commercial farming practice. Healthy, living soil can do a lot ecologically including water conservation, but we farm in a way to continually deplete soil.
Changing how residential homeowners do landscaping can help as well.
> Farmers engineer their fields to drain excess rain water. That is part of the reason major floods happen along rivers more often than they used to.
Not everywhere. Western Kansas has water conservation districts with terraces plowed into fields. One of the reasons that reservoirs and ponds were low for so long.
This year, they are all full, due to the massive rainfall we've had.
This story reminds me of the central WA state where I grew up. They had a similar network of canals. It's the largest irrigation network in the US (according to the internet). Unlike the one in the article, most farmers in central WA aren't flooding their fields directly from the canals. Many of the farmers running at any sort of scale opt for a center-pivot (circle) to water their field. These machines end up being the most water (and labor) efficient way to water a field of 100+ acres.
I worked at for an irrigation supplier for a few years and got to see all the ins-and-outs of how these machines work. The supporting infrastructure is pretty impressive too. The pumps, pipes, valves, and electrical panels that drive these machines is an engineering marvel.
Brad Landcaster is growing a neighborhood of edible perennials using a fraction of the street runoff, out in Tucson. So we also end up with large structures for flood control.
Phoenix and Tuscon does get seasonal monsoons, but the infrastructure is largely designed to get rid of the water instead of letting it infiltrate the soil near where it lands.
And yes, the pools, golf courses, and lawns bug me too. Phoenix also has the worst tap water in the nation. Many residents, including me, get their drinking water from water and ice stores and water dispensing vending machines.
I just got back from touring Oregon and Washington and I got to see a lot of fascinating agriculture. Primarily hazelnut trees along with some berries other speciality crops and "hay."
The nut tree farmers need some help. They are spraying water scattershot to soak the ground. What's more is that they have the ground prepared as perfectly flat bare soil--I presume to make automated harvesting possible.
It looks like a lot of resources are allocated to this rather imprecise method of irrigation and as the droughts and heat persist I could see this failing to scale. It doesn't look like it scales very well even in good times.
I was wondering, given the very organized situation of the trees and ground, why are they not using direct or site-based (drip?) irrigation? It would definitely change the watering process from one of rolling and unrolling irrigation line and towing of sprinklers (water canons?) to one where you would automate water delivery via a network of lines with computers and have workers monitor and repair lines as needed.
The Pacific Northwest is known for its highly productive dryland farming, relying on natural rainfall patterns instead of irrigation or sprinklers, which also reduces costs. Consequently, there is a relative dearth of infrastructure for distributing piped water to the crops during a severe drought or heatwave.
reply