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>Eventually, irrigated farming in Arizona and Nevada may become a thing of the past. Why is there irrigated farming in Arizona?? It's a desert!
by airza 4y ago
>Eventually, irrigated farming in Arizona and Nevada may become a thing of the past.
Why is there irrigated farming in Arizona?? It's a desert!
- irrational 4y agoWhy is there a large city (las Vegas) in the middle of a desert?
- cardiffspaceman 4y agoBecause there was a little town in the middle of the desert, and it got popular.
- TylerE 4y agoThis is a fairly recently development too.. in 1940 it had a population of only 8000.
- hyperhopper 4y agoBecause nobody was there to make laws against having fun. And people want to have fun so more people went there.
- formerkrogemp 4y ago> Because nobody was there to make laws against having fun. And people want to have fun so more people went there. What a libertarian and HN explanation. Quelle surprende.
- carapace 4y agoA murderous gangster named "Bugsy" thought it would be a good idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugsy_Siegel#Las_Vegas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugsy_Siegel#Las_Vegas
- njarboe 4y agoDeserts are great places to live and found a civilization if you have access to water. See Mesopotamia and Egypt for example
- irrational 4y agoEgypt wasn’t a desert when it was founded. It became a desert later on as the climate changed and the region got hotter and drier. Mesopotamia isn’t a desert either. It’s called the Fertile Crescent. It is surrounded by desert, but so is everywhere else if you travel far enough.
- imoverclocked 4y agoTheir soil is extremely fertile. You can grow just about anything, even cotton, given enough water. Edit: grammar
- mikewave 4y agoSounds like they should just start digging up and selling the soil, no?
- moralestapia 4y agoIf you didn't meant this as sarcasm, this is pretty much the worse thing you could do.
- mikewave 4y agoI'm no farmer, but I'm all ears! If you have dry useless soil and can't water it, does it not have some residual value as an export product? I suppose this is assuming that there's not going to be water in the future, and that you just want to extract whatever use there is left from an area before giving it over to desertification.
- moralestapia 4y agoSoil, and topsoil in particular, is an extremely valuable and non-renewable resource. When land becomes barren it could take 100s of years to regenerate, or it may never do, as in this case this is a desert and for this process to happen you need a continuous stream of biomass and microbes doing their stuff. If they did this, in a couple years they still wouldn't have water, and now they'd also wouldn't have land to pour the water onto, so they will end up in an ever worse state than now.
- stewarts 4y agoWhile not worthless, as there would still be nutrients present. A good bit of soil quality comes from the microorganisms within it.
- 4y ago
- lesuorac 4y agoI suspect at some point it'd make more sense to pump (hopefully via gravity) water to a location and farm then it would to transport food.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- HWR_14 4y agoBecause too many water rights were assigned 100 years ago, and if the farmers stop using it, they'll lose the water rights. So they grow alfalfa in the desert to use up the water so they can keep the water rights.
- capableweb 4y agoI'm guessing this is the source for that: https://youtu.be/jtxew5XUVbQ?t=512 https://youtu.be/jtxew5XUVbQ?t=512
- HWR_14 4y agoI mean, that is a source, but it was pretty well reported before that. Although I thought they assigned too many water rights because they measured in a period of flooding. John Oliver is the first time I heard that they knew it was a lie at the time.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoToo many rights doesn't really capture the phenomenon and issue. Water rights were never assigned in the west on a need basis. They were assigned to keep track of who who owns what, like land or mineral rights. In that sense, they work just fine, we know and have a framework for determining who owns the water, and who gets nothing when there isn't enough. The issue is when people want water and don't like the answer of buy someone's rights.
- katbyte 4y agoisn't the issue that there is let’s say 40,000 units of water rights for 20,000 units of actual water, so there is no possible way for everyone to get their “water rights” and all the water in the river and ground will be used to the detriment of the environment and ability for the aquifers to supply it. Works for a while and then now all the waters gone, ooops.
- 4y ago
- mythrwy 4y agoBecause people need to eat! Yuma, Arizona is the winter salad bowl of the United States (and probably Canada). Great conditions for growing greens in the winter. Dry (lower insect and disease pressure), warm in the winter, lots of sun. And, used to be plenty of water.
- abruzzi 4y agoLots of reasons, but one of the big ones is a year round growing season. It’s never so cold that you can’t grow, so over the course of a year the same field may host four or five crops. The other big ones is that it started when there was a reasonable flow of water, and not very many competing interests. I love a couple miles from the Rio Grande, which in the past was wet year round, but now it has water maybe 5% of the time (it was stored in Elephant Butte lake, but now that’s down to historically low levers like everything else in the southwest.