Drought issues are in the news again.
This time it is about California, the story which prompted this article will follow at the end.
A desert is a place that gets less than 10 inches of precipitation a year. By that definition I do not live in a desert as we get 12 – 13 inches of water a year…in Wyoming, however I think that I can talk about water shortages after the many years of gardening here and my wife and I having been involved with the Master Gardener program quite a while now.
Most places, even many true deserts get enough rain fall to grow food IF it is managed properly. While the conventional wisdom is to build massive reservoirs to collect and hold water it is not the most effective use of the water which falls on our lands. One of the more effective ways to harvest and use water from the sky is to have MANY small catchment areas called swales. Swales are best described as shallow ditches on contour. Basically what they do is slow the water down as it runs off the land so that it will soak in and be used by the plants and help refill the underground aquifers for later pumping to houses. There are several other things to help with this such as mulching around plants and planting trees [preferably fruit bearing] along with shrubs to help stabilize the soil and prevent erosion.
This is best accomplished on an individual or small holding basis over much of the land. The biggest down side that I see to doing this is that there is no need for a large levi of taxes by centralized government. Oh darn ;]
As a prime example of this working is found on YouTube at Permaculture
Behind Greening the Desert with Geoff Lawton
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keQUqRg2qZ0
this is about 8 minutes long and is condensed from Permaculture Greening the Desert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keQUqRg2qZ0
folks if they can do this in the middle east desert WE can do it in the USA! ya think?
Here is the original article which prompted me to write this.
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It “should not be a crisis at all,” writes U.S. Representative Devin Nunes in a recent Investor’s Business Daily editorial. “Much of the media and many politicians blame the San Joaquin Valley’s water shortage on drought, but that is merely an aggravating factor,” claims the California Republican, whose congressional district is centered in the hydro-challenged area. “From my experience representing California’s agricultural heartland, I know that our water crisis is not an unfortunate natural occurrence; it is the intended result of a long-term campaign waged by radical environmentalists who resorted to political pressure as well as profuse lawsuits.”
Former Hewlett Packard CEO and presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina agrees. “Despite the fact that California has suffered from droughts for millennia,” she told Glenn Beck in April, “liberal environmentalists have prevented the building of a single new reservoir or a single new water conveyance system over decades during a period in which California’s population has doubled.”