IT’S TIME TO BE DROUGHT INTOLERANT

[SHRED]

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.

For starters, we need to stop irrigating certain areas of the Central Valley. Farmers there have abandoned their fields because decades of irrigation have brought to the surface chemicals like selenium and arsenic, making the soil toxic. Yet Gov. Brown recently proposed building two giant water tunnels beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta that will “deepen the ecological mess” by guaranteeing more water from northern California is poured on the toxic land. (Read more about why the tunnels are a bad idea.)

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 state’s 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]

1. These problems in the Central Valley have been known since the

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]

2. Has to be addressed....

[JayhawkSD]

3. one small correction

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.