A main factor contributing to doubt about dire predictions of ecological doom is that the claims are sometimes nonsense. The public is wary of all pronouncements because so many are obviously false. If you have knowledge of any issue you will hear claims you know to be false, which plants seeds of doubt about claims made in other fields that you may not be able to debunk. If they lie about this then they may be lying about that.

This press release from Cornell is an example.

In a world plagued by shortages of water, three facts stand out in an analysis by Cornell University ecologists: Less than 1 percent of water on the planet is fresh water; agriculture in the United States consumes 80 percent of the available fresh water each year; and 60 percent of U.S. water intended for crop irrigation never reaches the crops.

Water is redistributed rather than consumed. Farmers sometimes drain land, turning swamp into farmland, and sometimes irrigate making the desert bloom. The issue isn't consumption of water, it's land use. There are places where the net benefit to society would be greater if the swamps were not drained, left instead to support wetland ecosystems and provide flood control, water purification and wildlife habitat. There are also places where the net benefit to society would be greater if the deserts were not irrigated, either leaving well water in the ground or letting rivers run to the sea so that delta wetlands are refreshed with water and sediment.

Is river water consumed when it flows to the sea? It's a silly question because the idea of water consumption is silly. Is ground water consumed when left in the ground? In most cases ground water too ends up, after a time, in rivers and flows to the sea. It's just a slower and more circuitous route than surface flows. It's only in special cases that ground water is fossil water that has been underground for eons, left over from a time when the climate in the area was very different.

Their report in the October 2004 journal BioScience (Vol. 54, No. 10, "Water Resources: Agricultural and Environmental Issues") names farmers as "the prime target for incentives to conserve water." The report is particularly critical of irrigation practices in the United States, where subsidized "cheap water" offers scant incentive for conservation.

"Part of the problem is the decision by farmers on what to grow where," says David Pimentel, a Cornell professor who led nine student ecologists through an exhaustive analysis of research conducted at other institutions and government agencies. "We learned, for example, that to produce wheat using irrigation requires three times more fossil energy than producing the same quantity of rain-fed wheat. The next time you make a sandwich, think about this: One pound of bread requires 250 gallons of water to produce the grains that go into the bread."

Cheap water isn't the issue, cheap food and fiber are the issues. Agriculture is subsidized in myriad ways. If the cost of water or any other input such as fuel rises farmers will be compensated so that they can continue to produce. Increased input costs do motivate farmers to adjust their methods. They may skimp on flood irrigation in dryland fields to reduce tail water, the water that flows off the field rather than soaking in. This is a fools game since it fails to flush soil salts away and in time turns the soil into alkaline desert unable to grow anything. Or they may switch to drip irrigation, and contribute to the ever increasing problem of "plasticulture", the pollution of farm land with residues of plastic, and contribute to the growing plastic pollution stream from manufacture to disposal in land fills. The energy needed for plasticulture, cradle to grave, is even more of a concern that the energy used to irrigate.

Thirsty Agriculture
Estimated liters of water required to produce 1 kilogram of food

Crop	Liters/kg
Rice	1,600
Wheat	900
Potatoes	630
Broiler chicken	3,500
Beef	43,000

This fantasy table, precise but inaccurate, is only an expression of the researcher's agenda. It is misinformation. For each food type mentioned they have selected the cultivars and conditions that yield the highest water numbers and presented them as if they were realistic accounts of the world. They are not. For example, there are many cultivars of rice, both dryland and flooded paddies, and there is wild variation in production of seed, some putting more energy into root, stem and leaf while others produce more seed.

An even better example of misinformation is beef. They use the consumption of nearly mature cattle in feed lots being grain fattened during the last weeks before slaughter and cite the water used to grow the grain as if the cattle consumed it. For the vast majority of their lives and most of their weight gain cattle aren't fed a grain diet, they eat grass. And since they are slaughtered as soon as they reach full growth their whole lives are spent as calves consuming far less than adults. Their mothers, who aren't slaughtered but live as mature animals, aren't fed grain since it isn't useful, they aren't being fattened, they are on a far lower maintenance diet not a growth diet. If that grain wasn't subsidized it wouldn't be grown and cattle would eat the grass growing in idle corn fields. People don't need more grain, they have so much now that it is making them unhealthy.

We need to look at the whole agronomic system, consider economy as well as ecology, to see how to improve. Thoughtless advocacy of the sort engaged in by Pimentel and Cornell makes things worse rather than better. Water is not consumed. It either flows to the sea or evaporates. Very little is permanently stored in underground aquifers. In every case it leaves the land surface to cycle into the atmosphere and return again as rain. The issue is how we choose to manage the water that falls. Do we want to grow food and fiber or would we rather have instream flows and wetlands? It's our choice, one we make indirectly in most cases.

One way to think about wise water use is to consider water sheds, the land area in which all water ends up in the same place, such as the tributaries that feed a river system and eventually flows to a water body such as the sea. When water is diverted from a watershed through large hydraulic projects and transported long distances there is a dramatic effect. A classic example is the diversion of water from the Owens valley of California hundreds of miles southwest to Los Angeles where it irrigates lawns, fills swimming pools and supports industry. Los Angeles bloomed and the Owens valley withered, turning into an alkali desert. What was once productive farm land died along with the whole ecosystem. One desert was created and another was turned into an oasis. Is it wise? Do we value one more than another? Clearly we do since we paid for it. We bought the farmland as well as the rights to the water and shipped it away to the city.

Some dispute the wisdom of that choice and seek to engage in the time dishonored activity of political control of the economy to pick winners. Similarly, Pimentel's table implies that we should choose potatoes rather than beef since it takes less water and so he wishes to fiddle the price of water to skew the system toward potatoes. Do potatoes and beef have the same value? How is value determined? Is it nothing but liters/kg or even liters/calorie? No, it isn't. It's a very complex judgement that we can discover through markets. People seek products and producers provide them. Both the price and the quantity are dynamically determined.

Previous attempts to fiddle the system as Pimentel desires have distorted those markets. Subsidy for grain produced a glut that we invent uses for since it is so cheap. We stuff ourselves to the point of poor health, ship it to other countries, feed it to animals and even ferment it to make fuel. We literally have grain to burn yet we pay farmers to grow more of it. If we are concerned about the environment - water, topsoil, pollution and biodiversity - this isn't a very useful tune to fiddle. Will fiddling with the price of water change that? Sure, but not in useful ways since the grain is still subsidized and techniques to reduce water use will result in saline land and a plague of plastic.

What would happen if all subsidies were simply stopped? That's easy, agricultural collapse and starvation. It took us 50 years to screw up our agronomic system this bad and it will take a long time to unscrew it. To do so we have to look at the whole system and gently unpick the knots into which it has been tied by wankers like Pimentel. A combined effort to provide the public, and so the discovery machine of markets, with useful information while gradually removing market distorting regulations and supports will allow a more rational use of land and water to emerge and the health of the planet and its inhabitants to improve. Even people.

» Just Ducky from Crumb Trail
A new M&M rant, Quack Science, whinges about the way misinformation from environmental advocacy distorts society and leads to poor decision making. A main factor contributing to doubt about dire predictions of ecological doom is that the claims are so......[read more]
Tracked: October 21, 2004 02:58 PM