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Acre feet is how water is sold and talked about in agriculture.
by jonknee 11y ago
Acre feet is how water is sold and talked about in agriculture.
- duskwuff 11y agoThey're especially useful in agriculture because rainfall, and crop water consumption, are typically measured in inches of water. (Which is really a kind of "cubic inches (of water) per square inch (of land)", but the units cancel out.) So if you know the net water requirements of some crop given the climate, and you know how many acres of land you intend to grow it on, acre-feet are a natural, easy-to-calculate unit to measure the water supply needed.
- sampo 11y agoYou also need to know that 1 foot (30.48 cm) is 12 inces (2.54 cm).
- jonknee 11y agoWhich everyone reading the New Yorker surely does.
- freehunter 11y agoWhich everyone in the US knows. Even very uneducated people.
- sampo 11y agoI am from Europe, educated (PhD, if it matters), and I had to look it up. That's why I left the comment, to help others.
- freehunter 11y agoNo offense, but it's an article in the New Yorker about an issue in California. Your comment makes about as much sense as if you had said "yeah but you need to know that California is a state in the US". Europeans might not know it, but the target audience of the article certainly does. It's not exactly an extra bit of knowledge you need to learn, it's something you already know.
- alwaysdoit 11y agoWhich is fine, but presumably the majority of the New Yorker's audience is not in agriculture.
- jonknee 11y agoNor am I, but I know about acre feet from the thousands of articles that have been written about various droughts and agriculture water usage. It's also pretty easy to deduce on your own.