"Hey yeah, farmers should invest in irrigation equipment, it'll eventually pay for itself."
Sure, but we're totally ignoring water rights here. If your state has Appropriative rights, you can't just start watering fields without the government getting involved. In that case, you can't actually get new rights anymore, which has created a new market. I had to purchase mine from a winery nearly a decade ago and I STILL don't officially have rights yet.
In the midwest there's no water shortage (the Mississippi and Missouri are not going to get exhausted), but it's relatively expensive, for now, to pipe that water onto corn to protect against a drought every 1 of 5 years.
> Last month, record low water levels in the Mississippi River backed up nearly 3,000 barges — the equivalent of 210,000 container trucks — on America’s most important inland waterway. Despite frantic dredging, farmers could move only half the corn they’d shipped the same time last year. Deliveries of fuel, coal, industrial chemicals and building materials were similarly delayed throughout the nation’s heartland.
> This critical river and its tributaries — responsible for transporting more than $17 billion worth of farm products and 60 percent of all U.S. corn and soybean exports annually — has been stricken by drought since September, amid a time of global grain shortage and soaring food prices. While water levels will recover modestly this week, thanks to some upstream rain and snow, the long-term forecast remains dry.
> the Mississippi and Missouri are not going to get exhausted
I feel like you are playing dumb here. No amount of agriculture will meaningfully lower the river level. That's the point in question. That's what I'm saying.
> The Lower Mississippi River Basin (LMRB) is an internationally-important region of intensive agricultural crop production that relies heavily on the underlying Mississippi River Valley Alluvial Aquifer (MRVAA) for irrigation. Extensive irrigation coupled with the region’s geology have led to significant aquifer decline.
> Groundwater depletion is a serious concern in Mississippi and worldwide. Agricultural crop production in the Mississippi Delta requires irrigation, and that water use has led to severe groundwater depletion. Converting crop land to forests through afforestation can conserve water resources, improve water quality, and mitigate river floods.
Aquifer != river. The overuse of aquifers is common knowledge. The commenter is making a narrow point about the river. I would like to see a response directly speaking to their concern, not something that is adjacent and common knowledge.
Yes. And as a point of reference for the scales involved:
> Since major groundwater pumping began in the late 1940s, overdraft from the High Plains Aquifer has amounted to 332,000,000 acre-feet (410 km3), 85% of the volume of Lake Erie. [1]
> The Mississippi River passes more than 240 million acre-feet annually at the proposed point of diversion, 30 miles south of Cairo, Ill. During the current flooding, more than 4 million acre-feet per day are flowing at that spot… [2]
The water in the Mississippi river could each year replace all 80 years of overpumping of the aquifer. So with 1-2% water diversion (like I said, not exhausting the river), you could easily substitute that volumetrically. For 5% you could massively irrigate the midwest.
These are truly massive rivers. People in the west don't understand how enormous they are compared to the Colorado and other western rivers.
Well it should be ... interesting ... when issues around water rights and management start being a thing in places that just don't have them right now. E.g. nobody speaks about this stuff here in Ontario, there's just ... water everywhere ... and I imagine it's the same in Wisconsin or Ohio and so on, which are still largely in the Great Lakes Basin to some degree.
Sure, but we're totally ignoring water rights here. If your state has Appropriative rights, you can't just start watering fields without the government getting involved. In that case, you can't actually get new rights anymore, which has created a new market. I had to purchase mine from a winery nearly a decade ago and I STILL don't officially have rights yet.