> Most crops are grown with this thing called "rain" and without any supplemental water. Using just rain means they are part of the natural transpiration and pr

> Most crops are grown with this thing called "rain" and without any supplemental water. Using just rain means they are part of the natural transpiration and precipitation cycle, so their unnatural water usage is 0. Funny thing about rain, it comes from these things called "clouds", not the internet variety, but the type that blocks the sun. Places with the perfect amount of both sunlight, rainfall, humidity and temperature all year round is extremely rare (you may also be familiar with the concept of seasons). Places with year round sun don't tend to have much rain (looking at you California), places with year round rain don't tend to get sun. There are of course exceptions to this, rainforests come to mind, but to farm there you need to remove the forest, which reduces the amount of rainfall (less water is evaporating from trees and foliage) plus all the other issues that come with deforestation. Additionally farming has negative impact on the local water cycle, farmed land significantly increases surface runoff, contaminating local water sources with fertiliser and suspended dirt. All in all, even using water falling from the sky isn't "free" from an environmental perspective. We should be focusing on making more food with less environmental impact worldwide, not returning to the Victorian approach of digging up and mechanising land, environmental impact be damned.