5 ms·

It will only get worse for the next generation as the aquafers are continuing to be depleted.

by giantg2 5mo ago

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
dakolli 5mo ago
we live in a closed greenhouse system, the water just doesn't just disappear and most of the Earth is covered in it. Plenty of countries completely rely on desalination already, I think we'll be fine. I'm much more concerned about everyone becoming a moron from using AI. edit: cloud seeding too.
- atomicnumber3 5mo ago
  The problem is that aquifers are really cool natural filters, and only refill as fast as groundwater moves through the soil. So they're a finite resource. Instead of depleting them, people who want to farm in deserts should probably start desalinating or whatever themselves instead of assuming subsequent generations will do it.
  - mothballed 5mo ago
    The government made it literally the only way to claim much of the land out west[]. They require that you come up with an agricultural land including plan for watering crops on that acreage in order to claim the land. And you're required to execute the plan to get the deed. In fact, this is the only remaining way I know of to more or less 'homestead' federal land in a way that results in a permanent deed. The rest of the homesteading type stuff was revoked back in like the 70s or 80s. [] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Land_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Land_Act
    - datsci_est_2015 5mo ago
      Is this relevant in 2026? Are people still claiming land via the 1877 Desert Land Act?
      - mothballed 5mo ago
        Yet it's still active. As a pure anecdote, I know of someone doing it right now. https://www.blm.gov/sites/default/files/Desert%20Land%20Entries.pdf https://www.blm.gov/sites/default/files/Desert%20Land%20Entr...
        JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
        Is this an opportunity that opened up with this administration? Or has the BLM been quietly processing these for the last century?
        mothballed 5mo ago
        AFAIK it's been available since the 1870s but after the 20s they clamped down a lot harder on ensuring you were actually irrigating it and had agricultural plans. I'm not sure if the BLM has relaxed their discretion under Trump.
      - tekla 5mo ago
        Do you think laws go away just because they're old? The Colorado River compact came into effect in 1922 and I'm almost surprised literal fist fights haven't erupted over it during the modern negotiations.
        datsci_est_2015 5mo ago
        I think laws become less relevant over time for many reasons. There are entire books written about silly and obsolete laws, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trenton_Pickle_Ordinance_and_Other_Bonehead_Legislation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trenton_Pickle_Ordinance_a... The age of a law or regulation is likely a strong indicator for its relevance in modern times, especially if it’s regarding something quite niche.
- pixl97 5mo ago
  This is by far the dumbest post in this thread by a mile. It's funny saying AI will make people dumber when you've obviously don't understand this issue in the first place. Food security is human security. When you take a huge percentage of a countries grow able land out because it stops raining then food proces go up, often dramatically. Desalination uses far more power than AI ever would.
  - hnthrow0287345 5mo ago
    And if we wait until large scale desalination becomes profitable, it will be too late to respond quickly without massive upheaval and deaths. This is where capitalism drives humanity off a cliff.
- Imustaskforhelp 5mo ago
  Plants require a ton of desalinated water and Animals who eat plants as such require desalinated water too. There are countries in middle east like UAE, Saudi arabia etc. which rely on desalination but they are relying it for the clean drinking water, not for the food generation. They import almost 90% of their food iirc. The amount of energy required to desalinate all water and the environmental impacts to get that energy would literally be quite catastrophic and I am not even sure if it would be even feasible and food prices would literally skyrocket or food would simply be produced even more less by magnitudes of order.
  - shagie 5mo ago
    The middle east tends to import hay and food for their livestock from other countries rather than growing it locally. https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/commodities/forage-and-hay https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/commodities/forage-and-hay https://wits.worldbank.org/trade/comtrade/en/country/QAT/year/2023/tradeflow/Imports/partner/ALL/product/121410 https://wits.worldbank.org/trade/comtrade/en/country/QAT/yea...
    - Tangurena2 5mo ago
      Alfalfa/hay uses so much water that cultivation of it is banned in Saudi Arabia. They import large amounts from the US - basically we're exporting water.
- vel0city 5mo ago
  Desalination isn't really much of an option for deeper inland and much higher than sea level areas. Tell me, which ocean is Dodge City KS going to pull from?
  - ChrisRR 5mo ago
    Global warming will bring the sea to them
    - vel0city 5mo ago
      Dodge City is at ~1,500ft ASL. If the ocean is anywhere near there, Tulsa OK would be under some 800 feet of ocean. The Great Lakes will have also been flooded by the oceans, as they top out at ~600ft ASL.
- HelloMcFly 5mo ago
  The energy required to transport water from the coast to our major agricultural areas would be astronomical, and the resulting brine waste would create its own environmental crisis. If we get to a point where we're forced to bypass natural water cycles entirely, our native ecologies will have already collapsed. At that point, we'll be trying to engineer our way out of a total ecological apocalypse as masses starve in bread lines.
- dopa42365 5mo ago
  and desalination is so efficient/cheap at scale already that it barely affects water prices in those countries (less than 10% already, further shrinking every year as methods improve)
- shagie 5mo ago
  > Plenty of countries completely rely on desalination already Let's take Kansas... the largest producer of wheat in the US. https://www.statista.com/statistics/190376/top-us-states-in-wheat-production/?srsltid=AfmBOoodNF3dqIkb5oSV_luqpgiiTFXNyNZsTmch18flkq5jVzVD-c2V https://www.statista.com/statistics/190376/top-us-states-in-... Kansas wheat crop down 38% from last year https://youtu.be/QjrhAXzEGDc https://youtu.be/QjrhAXzEGDc Kansas cannot run on desalination plants ... there's no salt water. The gulf coast of Texas is 1000 miles away. While aquifers do regenerate (Groundwater levels in the Kansas High Plains aquifer see first overall increase since 2019 https://kgs.ku.edu/news/article/groundwater-levels-in-the-kansas-high-plains-aquifer-see-first-overall-increase-since-2019 https://kgs.ku.edu/news/article/groundwater-levels-in-the-ka... ) I'm going to point out that news article has seven years of declines previously. The aquifer that Kansas draws upon is the Ogallala Aquifer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer ) and you can see the rate of depletion at https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/national-climate-assessment-great-plains’-ogallala-aquifer-drying-out https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/nation... - there are spots in Kansas where the groundwater dropped by 150 feet from before it was tapped with deep wells to 2015. Yes, most of the earth is covered by water. Getting that water to Kansas and Nebraska and North Dakota, however, is a problem.
  - NDlurker 5mo ago
    We didn't get much snow in ND over the winter. Hasn't rained much this year either
    - shagie 5mo ago
      If you can find climate data... for example, in Wisconsin 2012 our snowfall looked like https://www.aos.wisc.edu/oldsco/clim-history/stations/msn/msn-sts-2011-12.gif https://www.aos.wisc.edu/oldsco/clim-history/stations/msn/ms... and the overall water year precipitation chart was https://www.aos.wisc.edu/oldsco/clim-history/stations/msn/msn-rts-wyr-2012.gif https://www.aos.wisc.edu/oldsco/clim-history/stations/msn/ms... PBS program on the 2012 drought - https://www.pbs.org/video/wpt-presents-wisconsin-drought-2012/ https://www.pbs.org/video/wpt-presents-wisconsin-drought-201... And what the fields looked like ... http://www.wcwcw.com/feature96.html http://www.wcwcw.com/feature96.html (also has a national map, and all of Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, and Illinois were in bad shape - Wisconsin looked pretty good by comparison in that map). If you've got similar data for ND... (digging) https://www.ndsu.edu/agriculture/sites/default/files/2026-05/April2026Climate_0.pdf https://www.ndsu.edu/agriculture/sites/default/files/2026-05... page 2 has the precipitation chart. North west ND looks bad.
- andsoitis 5mo ago
  > Plenty of countries completely rely on desalination already There are only 3 countries that do: Bahamas, Maldives, and Malta. Other countries that depend heavily, but not completely: Qatar, Kuwait, UAE.
  - downrightmike 5mo ago
    Qatar, Kuwait, UAE. And these guys rent out tons of farmland in the USA to grow crops because they can flood irrigate and get five crops of alfalfa a year to feed their livestock. Desal isn't useful for anything but a stop gap
- 8note 5mo ago
  huh? we live in an open system at any scale except the whole universe and even that is gaining energy the earth is slowly losing both hydrogen and oxygen, and has tons of energy coming in from the sun into the scale of a field, or a state or a country or a continent, theres very obvious flows of the water cycle introducing water via rain/snow, and removing it via evaporation, seepage, and rivers. the only closed system is if you make one of those wine fermenter biospheres, and even there its open to energy coming in via light the second law will keep applying
bell-cot 5mo ago
Yes - but at current rates, it won't take anything like an actual generation to get substantially worse.
mikey_p 5mo ago
Is anyone actually irrigating wheat?? Edit: I'm being downvoted because someone found a source that says 3% of winter wheat in Montana is irrigated. My point still stands, while yes some percentage of wheat is irrigated it is extremely uncommon.
- pragmatic 5mo ago
  No.
  - burnerburner000 5mo ago
    [dead]
- tdb7893 5mo ago
  It seems like most significant agriculture extension programs have advice for irrigating wheat, so presumably someone is doing it, even if it isn't common. If drought is reducing yields significantly I wonder if the amount is going to start growing. E.g. https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/considerations_for_raising_irrigated_wheat https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/considerations_for_raising_irr... https://extensionpubs.unl.edu/publication/ec731/2009/pdf/view/ec731-2009.pdf https://extensionpubs.unl.edu/publication/ec731/2009/pdf/vie... https://ucanr.edu/blog/uc-small-grains-blog/article/irrigation-wheat-and-other-small-grains-drought-year https://ucanr.edu/blog/uc-small-grains-blog/article/irrigati... https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/considerations_for_raising_irrigated_wheat https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/considerations_for_raising_irr... https://waterquality.colostate.edu/documents/factsheets/00556.pdf https://waterquality.colostate.edu/documents/factsheets/0055...
- shagie 5mo ago
  https://kswheat.com/david-leonard-put-wheat-under-pivot-win-kansas-irrigated-wheat-category-2022-national-wheat-yield https://kswheat.com/david-leonard-put-wheat-under-pivot-win-... > Leonard’s operation near Goodland is a diversified operation with a mix of dryland and irrigated acres in addition to a small cow-calf operation. Encouraged by his PlainsGold seed rep, he entered the yield contest for the first time in 2022. His entry came from a field planted to certified seed wheat that followed pinto beans, which provided some moisture profile. > “Our soil will hold about 1.8 inches of moisture per foot,” Leonard said. “So, if we have six feet of subsoil, we have some gas in the tank. We had some of that last year, but we don’t have that this year.” > From planting until harvest, the field only received 6.2 inches of moisture, so Leonard pumped another 10 inches of water to help the wheat crop along. He also furtigated nitrogen through the pivot to further boost yields. The widespread drought conditions last growing season meant it was too dry for even the weeds to grow, so he did not apply any fungicide. --- https://api.mountainscholar.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/9a987bd3-5641-4f0d-be95-7943ae648268/content https://api.mountainscholar.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/9... Page 6: > The four major grain crops grown in Kansas (corn, soybean, grain sorghum and wheat) have experienced upward trends in yield (Figures 7 – 10). Corn yield has had the most dramatic increase for both irrigated and dryland production with irrigated corn yield improvements of approximately 2.5 bushels/acre for the each year of record, This result is more than twice the dryland rate of 1.1 bushels/acre. The average irrigated yield increase is 0.59 bu/ac, 0.60 bu/ac and 0.31 bu/ac for soybean, grain sorghum and wheat respectfully. Irrigated yield increase trends have been larger than for dryland. Page 8 figure 10 shows the yield trends for wheat - both irrigated and dryland since 1974.

It will only get worse for the next generation as the aquafers are continuing to be depleted.

by giantg2 5mo ago

It will only get worse for the next generation as the aquafers are continuing to be depleted.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

dakolli 5mo ago

we live in a closed greenhouse system, the water just doesn't just disappear and most of the Earth is covered in it. Plenty of countries completely rely on desalination already, I think we'll be fine. I'm much more concerned about everyone becoming a moron from using AI. edit: cloud seeding too.

atomicnumber3 5mo ago
The problem is that aquifers are really cool natural filters, and only refill as fast as groundwater moves through the soil. So they're a finite resource. Instead of depleting them, people who want to farm in deserts should probably start desalinating or whatever themselves instead of assuming subsequent generations will do it.
- mothballed 5mo ago
  The government made it literally the only way to claim much of the land out west[]. They require that you come up with an agricultural land including plan for watering crops on that acreage in order to claim the land. And you're required to execute the plan to get the deed. In fact, this is the only remaining way I know of to more or less 'homestead' federal land in a way that results in a permanent deed. The rest of the homesteading type stuff was revoked back in like the 70s or 80s. [] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Land_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Land_Act
  - datsci_est_2015 5mo ago
    Is this relevant in 2026? Are people still claiming land via the 1877 Desert Land Act?
    - mothballed 5mo ago
      Yet it's still active. As a pure anecdote, I know of someone doing it right now. https://www.blm.gov/sites/default/files/Desert%20Land%20Entries.pdf https://www.blm.gov/sites/default/files/Desert%20Land%20Entr...
      - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
        Is this an opportunity that opened up with this administration? Or has the BLM been quietly processing these for the last century?
        mothballed 5mo ago
        AFAIK it's been available since the 1870s but after the 20s they clamped down a lot harder on ensuring you were actually irrigating it and had agricultural plans. I'm not sure if the BLM has relaxed their discretion under Trump.
    - tekla 5mo ago
      Do you think laws go away just because they're old? The Colorado River compact came into effect in 1922 and I'm almost surprised literal fist fights haven't erupted over it during the modern negotiations.
      - datsci_est_2015 5mo ago
        I think laws become less relevant over time for many reasons. There are entire books written about silly and obsolete laws, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trenton_Pickle_Ordinance_and_Other_Bonehead_Legislation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trenton_Pickle_Ordinance_a... The age of a law or regulation is likely a strong indicator for its relevance in modern times, especially if it’s regarding something quite niche.
pixl97 5mo ago
This is by far the dumbest post in this thread by a mile. It's funny saying AI will make people dumber when you've obviously don't understand this issue in the first place. Food security is human security. When you take a huge percentage of a countries grow able land out because it stops raining then food proces go up, often dramatically. Desalination uses far more power than AI ever would.
- hnthrow0287345 5mo ago
  And if we wait until large scale desalination becomes profitable, it will be too late to respond quickly without massive upheaval and deaths. This is where capitalism drives humanity off a cliff.
Imustaskforhelp 5mo ago
Plants require a ton of desalinated water and Animals who eat plants as such require desalinated water too. There are countries in middle east like UAE, Saudi arabia etc. which rely on desalination but they are relying it for the clean drinking water, not for the food generation. They import almost 90% of their food iirc. The amount of energy required to desalinate all water and the environmental impacts to get that energy would literally be quite catastrophic and I am not even sure if it would be even feasible and food prices would literally skyrocket or food would simply be produced even more less by magnitudes of order.
- shagie 5mo ago
  The middle east tends to import hay and food for their livestock from other countries rather than growing it locally. https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/commodities/forage-and-hay https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/commodities/forage-and-hay https://wits.worldbank.org/trade/comtrade/en/country/QAT/year/2023/tradeflow/Imports/partner/ALL/product/121410 https://wits.worldbank.org/trade/comtrade/en/country/QAT/yea...
  - Tangurena2 5mo ago
    Alfalfa/hay uses so much water that cultivation of it is banned in Saudi Arabia. They import large amounts from the US - basically we're exporting water.
vel0city 5mo ago
Desalination isn't really much of an option for deeper inland and much higher than sea level areas. Tell me, which ocean is Dodge City KS going to pull from?
- ChrisRR 5mo ago
  Global warming will bring the sea to them
  - vel0city 5mo ago
    Dodge City is at ~1,500ft ASL. If the ocean is anywhere near there, Tulsa OK would be under some 800 feet of ocean. The Great Lakes will have also been flooded by the oceans, as they top out at ~600ft ASL.
HelloMcFly 5mo ago
The energy required to transport water from the coast to our major agricultural areas would be astronomical, and the resulting brine waste would create its own environmental crisis. If we get to a point where we're forced to bypass natural water cycles entirely, our native ecologies will have already collapsed. At that point, we'll be trying to engineer our way out of a total ecological apocalypse as masses starve in bread lines.
dopa42365 5mo ago
and desalination is so efficient/cheap at scale already that it barely affects water prices in those countries (less than 10% already, further shrinking every year as methods improve)
shagie 5mo ago
> Plenty of countries completely rely on desalination already Let's take Kansas... the largest producer of wheat in the US. https://www.statista.com/statistics/190376/top-us-states-in-wheat-production/?srsltid=AfmBOoodNF3dqIkb5oSV_luqpgiiTFXNyNZsTmch18flkq5jVzVD-c2V https://www.statista.com/statistics/190376/top-us-states-in-... Kansas wheat crop down 38% from last year https://youtu.be/QjrhAXzEGDc https://youtu.be/QjrhAXzEGDc Kansas cannot run on desalination plants ... there's no salt water. The gulf coast of Texas is 1000 miles away. While aquifers do regenerate (Groundwater levels in the Kansas High Plains aquifer see first overall increase since 2019 https://kgs.ku.edu/news/article/groundwater-levels-in-the-kansas-high-plains-aquifer-see-first-overall-increase-since-2019 https://kgs.ku.edu/news/article/groundwater-levels-in-the-ka... ) I'm going to point out that news article has seven years of declines previously. The aquifer that Kansas draws upon is the Ogallala Aquifer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer ) and you can see the rate of depletion at https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/national-climate-assessment-great-plains’-ogallala-aquifer-drying-out https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/nation... - there are spots in Kansas where the groundwater dropped by 150 feet from before it was tapped with deep wells to 2015. Yes, most of the earth is covered by water. Getting that water to Kansas and Nebraska and North Dakota, however, is a problem.
- NDlurker 5mo ago
  We didn't get much snow in ND over the winter. Hasn't rained much this year either
  - shagie 5mo ago
    If you can find climate data... for example, in Wisconsin 2012 our snowfall looked like https://www.aos.wisc.edu/oldsco/clim-history/stations/msn/msn-sts-2011-12.gif https://www.aos.wisc.edu/oldsco/clim-history/stations/msn/ms... and the overall water year precipitation chart was https://www.aos.wisc.edu/oldsco/clim-history/stations/msn/msn-rts-wyr-2012.gif https://www.aos.wisc.edu/oldsco/clim-history/stations/msn/ms... PBS program on the 2012 drought - https://www.pbs.org/video/wpt-presents-wisconsin-drought-2012/ https://www.pbs.org/video/wpt-presents-wisconsin-drought-201... And what the fields looked like ... http://www.wcwcw.com/feature96.html http://www.wcwcw.com/feature96.html (also has a national map, and all of Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, and Illinois were in bad shape - Wisconsin looked pretty good by comparison in that map). If you've got similar data for ND... (digging) https://www.ndsu.edu/agriculture/sites/default/files/2026-05/April2026Climate_0.pdf https://www.ndsu.edu/agriculture/sites/default/files/2026-05... page 2 has the precipitation chart. North west ND looks bad.
andsoitis 5mo ago
> Plenty of countries completely rely on desalination already There are only 3 countries that do: Bahamas, Maldives, and Malta. Other countries that depend heavily, but not completely: Qatar, Kuwait, UAE.
- downrightmike 5mo ago
  Qatar, Kuwait, UAE. And these guys rent out tons of farmland in the USA to grow crops because they can flood irrigate and get five crops of alfalfa a year to feed their livestock. Desal isn't useful for anything but a stop gap
8note 5mo ago
huh? we live in an open system at any scale except the whole universe and even that is gaining energy the earth is slowly losing both hydrogen and oxygen, and has tons of energy coming in from the sun into the scale of a field, or a state or a country or a continent, theres very obvious flows of the water cycle introducing water via rain/snow, and removing it via evaporation, seepage, and rivers. the only closed system is if you make one of those wine fermenter biospheres, and even there its open to energy coming in via light the second law will keep applying

bell-cot 5mo ago

Yes - but at current rates, it won't take anything like an actual generation to get substantially worse.

mikey_p 5mo ago

Is anyone actually irrigating wheat?? Edit: I'm being downvoted because someone found a source that says 3% of winter wheat in Montana is irrigated. My point still stands, while yes some percentage of wheat is irrigated it is extremely uncommon.

pragmatic 5mo ago
No.
- burnerburner000 5mo ago
  [dead]
tdb7893 5mo ago
It seems like most significant agriculture extension programs have advice for irrigating wheat, so presumably someone is doing it, even if it isn't common. If drought is reducing yields significantly I wonder if the amount is going to start growing. E.g. https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/considerations_for_raising_irrigated_wheat https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/considerations_for_raising_irr... https://extensionpubs.unl.edu/publication/ec731/2009/pdf/view/ec731-2009.pdf https://extensionpubs.unl.edu/publication/ec731/2009/pdf/vie... https://ucanr.edu/blog/uc-small-grains-blog/article/irrigation-wheat-and-other-small-grains-drought-year https://ucanr.edu/blog/uc-small-grains-blog/article/irrigati... https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/considerations_for_raising_irrigated_wheat https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/considerations_for_raising_irr... https://waterquality.colostate.edu/documents/factsheets/00556.pdf https://waterquality.colostate.edu/documents/factsheets/0055...
shagie 5mo ago
https://kswheat.com/david-leonard-put-wheat-under-pivot-win-kansas-irrigated-wheat-category-2022-national-wheat-yield https://kswheat.com/david-leonard-put-wheat-under-pivot-win-... > Leonard’s operation near Goodland is a diversified operation with a mix of dryland and irrigated acres in addition to a small cow-calf operation. Encouraged by his PlainsGold seed rep, he entered the yield contest for the first time in 2022. His entry came from a field planted to certified seed wheat that followed pinto beans, which provided some moisture profile. > “Our soil will hold about 1.8 inches of moisture per foot,” Leonard said. “So, if we have six feet of subsoil, we have some gas in the tank. We had some of that last year, but we don’t have that this year.” > From planting until harvest, the field only received 6.2 inches of moisture, so Leonard pumped another 10 inches of water to help the wheat crop along. He also furtigated nitrogen through the pivot to further boost yields. The widespread drought conditions last growing season meant it was too dry for even the weeds to grow, so he did not apply any fungicide. --- https://api.mountainscholar.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/9a987bd3-5641-4f0d-be95-7943ae648268/content https://api.mountainscholar.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/9... Page 6: > The four major grain crops grown in Kansas (corn, soybean, grain sorghum and wheat) have experienced upward trends in yield (Figures 7 – 10). Corn yield has had the most dramatic increase for both irrigated and dryland production with irrigated corn yield improvements of approximately 2.5 bushels/acre for the each year of record, This result is more than twice the dryland rate of 1.1 bushels/acre. The average irrigated yield increase is 0.59 bu/ac, 0.60 bu/ac and 0.31 bu/ac for soybean, grain sorghum and wheat respectfully. Irrigated yield increase trends have been larger than for dryland. Page 8 figure 10 shows the yield trends for wheat - both irrigated and dryland since 1974.