With the world’s population exponentially growing at an alarming rate (8.2 billion as of this writing, contrasted with 2.0 billion one hundred years ago), our planet is hungry. Food scarcity is fast becoming a destabilizing influence on the world stage and a hit to the pocket book for the average US consumer. Contrast the growing demand for food stocks against the growing scarcity of freshwater supplies and the world needs a little common sense and ingenuity.
Seventy percent of the world’s freshwater is used for agriculture production. In the arid western United States, that figure climbs to as much as 80%. So, what are the solutions?
In past articles, I’ve spoken (dare say ranted) about the lack of wisdom of growing cotton, rice, almonds, and other highly water intensive crops in arid regions suggesting incentives to grow those crops in less arid regions and incentivizing less water intensive crops in drier locales. Like the siting of water guzzling datacenters, location is important. People have said that I’m dictating what a farmer grows and that such encouragements would amount to government overreach, but the agriculture industry has long been intertwined with governmental mandates, crop subsidies, agricultural loan guarantees, and Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) assistance programs. Those programs are good. They’ve returned the investment many fold. They have benefitted the American farmer who the country relies on to put food on the table. I put the American farmer at the top of the list when I think of admirable occupations and am proud to say my son is a farmer.
Agriculture is in a state of transition, the likes of which we have not seen since the horrible days of the 1980s, when American farming teetered. With tariffs, trade wars (China, historically the largest purchaser of soybeans from US farmers has not signed any (zero) contracts this year for American soybeans), drought, and interest rates, how does the American farmer put food on everyone’s table?
The answers are many and complex, but I’ll stick to the issue I know, water. The Ogallala aquifer that supplies ag-water to much of the Midwest is declining. In areas that have suffered sustained drought such as the American west, water is often shorted while climate change has increased crop water demands, increased evaporation, and lengthened growing seasons.
Agribusiness has long been predicated on cheap water, intensive tillage, chemical fertilization, and monocropping. Farming has historically endorsed water conservation and increased efficiencies of transporting and applying water. Now it is beginning to endorse other techniques to get yields with less water. Enter regenerative agriculture. While forms of regenerative agriculture have existed since the days of the dust bowl, small farmers have endorsed it with dramatic results.
What is regenerative farming? The practice focuses on rebuilding soil organic matter to upgrade soil structure. This is done by winter cover cropping, mulching, rotational grazing and no-till farming. Some have equated it to creating a sponge. The result is that the soil structure is able to retain far more water providing drought resilience. Studies have shown that a mere 1% increase in soil organic matter can increase soil moisture retention by 20,000 gallons/acre.
In an era where every drop counts and every penny is watched by farmers, it holds the same hopes as water conservation tools such as laser leveling, drip irrigation, soil moisture sensors, and sub-surface application.