California
Related: About this forumIT’S TIME TO BE DROUGHT INTOLERANT
I collect rainwater and have drip irrigation at my home but this will never be enough until we get a handle on California agribusiness and their wasteful practices.
We also need to stop growing water-intensive crops in arid landscapes, period. Water is a scarce resource in California, and it should be allocated as such. Almonds have been sliced and diced repeatedly by the media lately for their water-intensive ways. But depleting the states desert aquifers to grow hay and corn to fatten cows also makes little sense, especially when you can raise cows in plenty of non-arid places, as this Slate article points out.
http://earthjustice.org/blog/2015-july/it-s-time-to-be-drought-intolerant
Cleita
(75,480 posts)seventies but nothing has been done because big agra is too powerful. Also the third most powerful Representative in Congress is Kevin McCarthy whose district is Bakersfield. We need to stop the corruption.
daleanime
(17,796 posts)JayhawkSD
(3,163 posts)The article you cite says that, "decades of irrigation have brought to the surface chemicals like selenium and arsenic." Partially true, but false as to vector.
The soil is contaminated by selenium and arsenic, and others, but it was not "brought to the surface" due to irrigation. It was present in the irrigation water in the form of salts in trace amounts, leached into the soil and continually built up in the soil because it never left. Irrigation water is not treated to remove impurities the way potable water is, and so irrigation causes salt buildup in the irrigated soil.
The solution is to either stop irrigating, or to periodically irrigate so heavily that the salts are flushed out of the soil. The latter used to be standard practice, but since water has become less plentiful it has been done less often, or not at all. So I would agree we should stop irrigating. If we don't have enough water to irrigate properly, we should not irrigate at all.