Name: How changing water supply is reshaping agriculture
Uploaded: 2022-07-08
Duration: 6 min 50 s
Description: As crops dry out due to climate change, desperate farmers are turning to technology and policymakers for help.

As crops dry out due to climate change, desperate farmers are turning to technology and policymakers for help.

How changing water supply is reshaping agriculture

Environment

this past weekend, friday saturday and sunday was 105108104. Anything that's alive and outside is just being dehydrated as you stand there and watch it even if a plant was standing in in water, the root system cannot uptake the water as fast as it's being dehydrated out of the lead. Yeah, I'm Cody Carson, I am a row crop farmer, uh run some cattle and I have, I grow a lot of crops. I've often said if it's legal and ethical and might make a buck, I've probably tried to grow it at some point. I've been in the Texas panhandle all of my life. We have been in a little bread basket uh that has been a very profitable and and very efficient part of agriculture for the last 50 or 60 years. But what I have known all of my adult life is coming to an end in a rapid change. The limited irrigation is totally restructuring how I farm and then you stack the drought on top of it over the last two or three years. And it has, has been a real eye opener for a lot of us. When I look at what I have done for most of my adult livelihood, it was based on having an adequate amount of irrigation water. And we used to have general rains every spring. You could count on rains every spring, the last several years, there's been nothing average about it with growing population increasing climate variability and growing water demands worldwide. Fresh water supplies are being stressed options or providing safe, clean, reliable water supply will require the adoption of innovations of various sorts. There's a lot of things we now know about how to manage water today, that we didn't know even just a couple of decades ago, we can replenish our groundwater basins to collecting rainwater, we can reuse wastewater. The technology is there, but we need to make sure that the public is confident there is a consensus that at least climate variability seems to be becoming more common, particularly in areas like the southwestern United States. Many scientists expect that we will see longer and more intense periods of drought. What we need is a sense of urgency to bring people together to plan and have the foresight in terms of water supply options further. We also need to have a dialogue about how we use the water. Do we need to have large lawns in residential communities? Or can we think constructively and realistically about more drought tolerant landscape arrangements that are aesthetically pleasing but are more appropriate to the kind of climate we live in. But we need to really expand some political capital and thinking long term about the fact that we want to manage this resource in a way that will ensure that our grandchildren don't have to worry about these problems If this drought continues on. I don't see any recovery. I don't see any light at the end of the tunnel anyway to change what's happening. The people in these small black communities are going to have to reevaluate and rethink what we've done for the last 50 years is not sustainable and and we're going to have to transition That next phase of growth is happening from the mechanization side. If you look at at crop production for the last really 25 years, we are significantly increasing the amount of of things that we are able to harvest from the land with less inputs. When we are able to specifically apply the right amount of pesticide, the right amount of fertilizer and the right amount of water to a very specific plant for a very specific area of a field. Were able to get a whole lot more production out of that particular acre with even less production. The fundamental technology that has led to this is when tractors can drive themselves. When tractors understand where they are in a field using GPS technology, it sort of opens up a lot of different things. When we begin to talk about some of the water specific related issues, there is a growing movement to put sensors into the soil so you can determine what the actual moisture needs are. So, as those irrigation systems are going through the field, they're able to specifically apply the right amount of water only where it's needed and not where it's not needed, that conserves water that conserves fuel that prevents runoff and all the positive things that come out of knowing exactly what what you're applying at the right time in the field. So when a farmer is able to in real time use their tractor and your tractor is able to collect that data. What's going to be able to come out of that integration of data and technology to really produce a lot more crops on the same amount of acre in our goal to be long term viable. I have currently shifted my cropping strategy to what I deem as being long term viable or sustainable. Good for me, financially, good for what fits the climate of my geographical region and good for the soil and the environment in the long term, not just maintaining the soil, but hopefully regenerating the soul. We have to remember that we are all in this together. Water problems are not problems that are limited to certain groups, where they're caused by certain sectors. All of us have to work together to figure out a way to manage are constrained and overstressed water supplies and we need to be prepared to make some changes in our behavior so that from a prudential standpoint, there will be an adequate amount of water for all of us and for all of our grandchildren. Okay. Yeah, yeah.