Agriculture's Drinking Problem

The industrial agricultural establishment would like us to save our worries for tomorrow. It being tomorrow, I thought I'd focus a lot this week on the resource depletion issues that threaten synthetic agriculture beyond its directly negative impacts on ecosystem diversity.

The threat, in fact, is that industrial food production is reaching the limits of its ability to do that which is its best selling feature: produce lots of food at minimal direct monetary cost. Its wasteful, negligent consumption of basic, raw materials necessary to growing food are running up against the sort of finite material limits that neoliberal economists and business magnates like to pretend don't matter.

Today, a couple readings on water scarcity from books that I highly recommend picking up when you get a chance:

... The most immediate and obvious problem associated with unnatural irrigation-based farming is that it requires a steady source of water but does nothing to replenish this source. In many places, depletion of underground aquifers, primarily from irrigation, far exceeds the natural rate of renewal. Thus, underground water reserves are shrinking. In the united States, this problem has become particularly acute in California and other agricultural sections of the West. "California is overdrafting groundwater at a rate of 1.6 billion cubic meters (bcm) a year, equal to 15 percent of the state's annual groundwater use," says [director of the Global Water Policy Project, Sandra] Postel. Well over half of the state's use is in the highly productive agricultural region of the Central Valley, which is the origin of about half of the fruits and vegetables grown in the United States.

... A typical irrigation scheme that applied 10,000 tons of water per hectare annually would simultaneously deposit between two and five tons of salt in the soil. In the United States, salt buildup affects about 23 percent of irrigated land - though in some areas a much higher portion of the land is affected. In fact, significant salinization is damaging about 35 percent of the irrigated land in California and nearly 70 percent of that in the lower Colorado River basin.

Eventually, unremoved salt buildup lowers crop yields, or, in extreme cases, renders the land completely sterile. Such is the case in parts of the San Joaquin Valley. "There are already thousands of acres near the southern end of the valley that look as if they had been dusted with snow; not even weeds can grow there," says [Marc] Reisner. "An identical fate will ultimately befall more than a million acres in the valley unless something is done." ...

- The Fatal Harvest Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture, edited by Andrew Kimbrell, in the Water section, by Mark Briscoe

As Briscoe highlights, societies based on irrigation, particularly irrigated deserts, all eventually overtaxed their farmland and failed. Egypt was the exception that proved the rule, until their creative use of the Nile's annual flooding was replaced by dam-based irrigation; they are now running out of the arable land long maintained by their ancestors.

The reason why irrigation on deserts works so well is that the general lack of rain leaves mineral nutrients (positively charged cations, if you want to get very technical) in the soil that would otherwise wash away in the rain in other climates.

Adding water to this desert equation can work very well, until you run out of water or the land gets ruinously oversalted. Both things are happening in the American Southwest. Nor is it just there.

Today, agriculture consumes 85 percent of the water used in developing countries, primarily for irrigation. Between the 1960s and 2000, irrigated farmland in the developing world doubled to 772,000 square miles. Wasteful irrigation projects have exacerbated water scarcity in the developing world and overpumping has degraded agricultural land. These industrial agriculture techniques have increased water pollution, clogged drinking water reservoirs with silt, and contributed to deforestation and loss of biodiversity.

... The [Green Revolution's] high-yield, water-hogging seed varieties replaced drought-resistant local crop varieties, such as millet, sorghum, chickpeas, lentils, and other pulses. This resulted in the drawdown of aquifers in water-scarce regions. by the 1980s and 1990s, agricultural projects in the developing world began to focus on building export capacity for commodities wealthy European and American consumers and agribusinesses found highly desirable. Cash crops were emphasized oer food productions - a major shift from the famine-fighting promises of the Green Rovolution's earliest proponents. ...

- Water Consciousness: How We All Have To Change To Protect Our most Critical Resource, edited by Tara Lohan, from Agriculture's Big Thirst, by Wenonah Hauter

One thing explained in the Water chapter of The Fatal Harvest Reader is the way prohibitive irrigation costs directly caused by dropping water tables drive agriculture towards export crop production. When well costs go up, producing food for local consumption is outcompeted by producing cash crops to be shipped to wealthier consumer markets.

As the land's productive capacity finally crashes, both the cash income to buy food and the local means to produce food in rural communities crash along with it. The results are expected to be very bad in areas where there simply isn't anywhere else for the subsequently impoverished populace to turn. To wit, our last selection:

... All that said, cities and farmers in the western hemisphere have been pikers compared to their counterparts in Asia. At the turn of the century, the overdraft of groundwater in India and China had reached 10 times the United States' deficit. Water tables beneath both countries' most productive grain-growing regions have dropped twice as far in three decades as the High Plains Aquifer has in five. As they fell, half of India's old hand-dug wells and even millions of new drilled ones stopped flowing; where owners of small farms had borrowed money to drill now-dry holes, social agencies reported a spate of farm suicides.

... Hundreds of millions of people who were lifted out of desperate hunger by the late 20th-century rush to irrigate now face dropping back. "In essence," wrote Australian author, engineer and groundwater expert Lance Endersbee, "there has been an artificial stimulus of food production in many countries where groundwater enabled [harvests] to be raised well above sustainable levels. Countries have been borrowing water on credit, and effectively borrowing food on credit, neither of which can be repaid. It means that the world is facing an even more serious food crisis."

In parts of India, where at least one farm in four relied on overtaxed wells, "groundwater supplies could be exhausted within the next five to 10 years," predicted Tushaar Shah, who heads a research station in Gujarat for the Stockholm-based International Water management Institute. "When the balloon bursts, untold anarchy will be the lot of rural India."

- Dry Spring: The Coming Water Crisis of North America, by Chris Wood

I'd like to have better news, but there really isn't much of a plan to do anything about this situation besides largely piecemeal attempts to reuse greywater, as enlightened as that may be.

Fixing the situation would require a shift towards a less irrigation-dependent agriculture, towards improving soil and increasing its beneficial insect and microbial load instead of turning it into a sterile growth medium, to finding the gems of knowledge in the older systems of agriculture that managed to continue on the same ground for millenia. And indeed, it's agriculture that needs to be reformed to fix the situation because it's by far the biggest water user.

(Photo credit: Snap® on Flickr.)