There are very few words in the English dictionary that I dislike more than "drought". Droughts affect many lives in many different ways - mostly bad. The only positive thing I ever heard about droughts was from a AM 1500 talk personality many years ago who stated that droughts were good for the golf courses he used. Even though it cost the courses a fortune in watering just to keep the fairways in marginal condition, this talk jock liked the fact he could hit "burners" because the ground was so hard.
The simple fact is that droughts hurt and they hurt bad. Just from my situation alone, droughts affect my fishing as many the local lakes are very hard to launch into and out of; we will in a forest of pine trees and they can get tender dry; we have many gardens and 1 1/2 acres of sodded yard which requires much moisture. Now that is just my situation. Look at topographical map of the state of Minnesota and see how much or our land is dedicated to agriculture. The majority of farms that I have seen out state do not have irrigation and those that do pay a hefty price for this artificial rain.
When I am driving around greater Minnesota, it seems that many of the farms are without irrigation. For those farms who do not have irrigation, they leave having a good crop up to chance the same way farmers did a century ago. With all the progress we have made in agriculture with hybrids and better soil conditioning, the one thing that we still leave up to chance is moisture.
For those farms who do have irrigation that are watering from sunrise to sunset, I often wonder how much of that badly needed water actually gets into the subsoil to benefit the crops. Many times during droughts the air humidity in the upper Midwest can almost match the desert southwest. I would guess that a high percentage of that water goes into evaporation rather than irrigation.
One of the things I have thought about for years and would love to see as part of a "stimulus" from our government is building water farms. A water farm is a desalination plant that would be built in a place in the country that has available space and lots of sunlight. This is not new technology - it has existed for some time now. If we built a water farm in Death Valley, California, which is solar powered, we could convert sea water, pumped in from the Pacific Ocean, into fresh water and sell it as a commodity. Water would become like electricity - a utility.
We would then have to construct infrastructure to deliver this water to areas which need it and want to buy it. It would be similar to the pipelines in which we deliver oil and gas throughout the country. Water would be delivered to a farm, be metered and the cost of the water would become a cost of doing business to raise and deliver a crop. Because water would have a tangible value, we would by nature look to use it more wisely and not to waste it. The old style of irrigation would finally give way to more efficient drip irrigation for farms where it is practicable.
Water, water everywhere. With over 70% of the surface of our planet covered by water, there is no excuse to have the water shortages we have today. We have the technology to change this. With the concern about ocean levels rising, there is no chance that by using salt water (and lots of it) to be converted to potable water that we would negatively affect the oceans. Let us take this opportunity to finally put a dent into the damage that droughts can cause not only in this country, but also world wide by investigating and investing in water farm technology.
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