Dude, can you smell what you are shoveling?

Why don’t you come out here and show us how it is all done?

You wouldn’t last a single farming season here doing what you describe above.

Or better yet, How about you get those BOZOS in SF and SAC to stop FARKING with the Central CA water supply in the first place?

All over a non-indigenous fish.

FISH ARE FOOD…NOT FRIENDS.

I have a favor to ask.  Can you guys put quotations around “clean coal” whenever it is mentioned?  Otherwise, I think the phrase gains some unwarranted legitimacy.

Thanks

While we’re on the subject of water, I’d like to throw my 2 cents in.  I think that the real solutions to our water challenges lie in conservation, efficiency and on-site processing—much like electricity.
I see the majority of new ideas pertaining to the supply side and ignoring the demand side.  Most of our water usage occurs on farms.  A farmer can cut water usage to a small fraction of what was previously needed simply by using real compost and adding like a foot (or more) of mulch or interplanting a cover crop.  Obviously, adding that much mulch will not be compatible with every crop, but compost is universally applicable for any crop.  Agribusiness tends to favor the “farmer” who grows crops in dead dirt instead of living soil—this is why so much water, fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides are “needed.”  Cover crops can also be nitrogen fixers, meaning less fertilizers needed on the main crop, meaning less natural gas used to make fertilizers (not that you need to fertilize if you’re using compost!)  Compost holds about six times its weight in water and slowly releases it over time.  Where to get the compost?  Well, tons and tons of compostable material ends up in landfills every day.  Grocery stores throw out incredible amounts of produce that is only slightly blemished.  “Farmers” truck away tons and tons of agricultural waste that could be composted on-site.  (I’m putting “Farmer” in quotations when I refer to an agribusinessman, which is synonymous with “soil miner”—as opposed to a real farmer that works with nature, rather than against it).  Also, the commonly used sprinkler irrigation systems lose up to 70% of their water to evaporation.  With drip irrigation and heavy mulch or cover crop interplanting, the only water losses would be from evapotranspiration through the plants.  Then there’s compost tea and mycohrrizal fungi, further increasing any crop’s nutrient and water efficiency.

Then, there’s water usage in the built environment.  Again, we need compost, and lots of it.  As climate change progresses, our rainfall patterns are becoming more severe, dumping a greater amount of water in shorter bursts.  To deal with this, we need compost in our municipal, commercial and residential landscaping that soaks up that water like a sponge, filters it, and slowly releases it into the ground over time, thus replenishing our aquifers (this also prevents massive amounts of storm water runoff that results in raw sewage being dumped into our waterways).  This rainfall also needs to be captured with rainwater catchment systems.  These systems should be required by building codes, especially in arid or semi-arid climates.  This would also prevent huge amounts of storm water runoff.  Rebates should be given for residential and commercial constructed wetland systems that filter and release (or make available for reuse) greywater from sinks, showers and laundry.  Toilets should be water-free.  There’s no logical reason to shit in drinking water.  Composting toilets have existed for decades now and can be made very “hands off”  with incineration methods for the feco-phobic.  The non-incinerating composting toilets make a great compost that can be used for all the previously stated uses.  These techniques reduce the need for centralized water treatment plants (they can be much smaller cheaper to operate), allowing affordable wetland-type treatment with UV treatment on the back end (who needs carcinogenic chlorine?)   

All of these methods combined would give us more drinking water than we know what to do with, drastic reductions in water-related energy use, lower food prices, less strain on municipal budgets, healthier waterways (shrinking and disappearing “dead zones” in the ocean), replenished and unpolluted aquifers, riparian restoration (no diversion for needed for distant agriculture) and probably lots of other benefits I’m not thinking of.  All this would come at a fraction of the cost of massive centralized projects implemented near the point of disaster resulting from business as usual.  New technologies that promise cheap, energy efficient desalination or cheap, energy efficient condensation of water vapor in the air or cheap, energy efficient reverse-osmosis are not silver bullets.  Implementing these technologies without changing our relationship with water would be the same thing as installing many gigawatts of PV capacity to meet our energy needs while continuing to use energy as wastefully as we ever have. 

Ok, maybe that was a bit more than 2 cents.  More like a couple bucks.  It’s so interconnected though, that it’s really hard to just talk about one thing!

Anyone interested in learning about our water or clean energy companies in Fresno should give us a call at 559-292-9033 or send me an email at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

We have a venture forum scheduled for October 17th, and in March we will have a venture forum that will focus on water tech exclusively and will have international representation from water tech companies through our network of clean tech incubators.

Craig
Central Valley Business Incubator (The Claude Laval WET Incubator is one of our two facilities)

Dear greensolutions,
You obviously don’t understand the intricacies of farming.  My brother-in-law’s farming operation uses state-of-the art drip irrigation.  He farms in an irrigation that uses recirculation to not only reduce water use as well reduce the output of certain sediments in drainage water.  That is conservation in action.  Even with all these efforts, he could only plant 2/3rds of his land this year because WATER IS NOT AVAILABLE.

I’m tired of hearing that conservation is the answer.  It may be part of it, but the truth is tha CA is conserving so much that some cities are turning sewer water into potable water.  They call it “toilet to tap.”  Is that enough conservation for you?

Also, the idea that farming is the largest water user is completely false.  The largest water user in California is “environmential” i.e. letting it run out to the ocean.  Next is farming, followed by municipal use.

To be honest, I have a personal stake it Central California farming.  However, my concern goes farther than my personal business interests.  It has been projected by some that famers will get as little as 20% (or even less) than their water allotment for the year.  As the largest agricultural supplier in the world, I expect this is going to have an enormous impact on the prices of food world wide.  And its really too late to do anything about the next few years.  Its going to be ugly.  Food supply will dramatically drop.  Prices will jump.  Farmers will go out of business…  and the cycle wil compound.

Actions we take now will take time to be effective, but we need to start now.  The smelt problem is very aggravating.  They will go extinct eventually no matter what we do.  However, even if we write off the smelt as a lost cause, farming is still in serious trouble.  We need more storage and we need to start building now.

Yours truly,
Christina

Does anyone have any suggestions regarding the containment and purification of the rainfall we do get? I would like to own and run my own vineyard and organic farm one of these days, and considering the serious water shortage we will undoubtedly be confronted with, how can farmers utilize the natural rainfall and/or implement system of technologies to purify water that would be otherwise wasted.