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["Marie McHarry" <mmcharry AT dtnspeed.net>]

I got the following from the New Scientist (but can't send the whole article
because I'm not quite ready to put out the $200 or so that a subscription
costs). Still the first two paragraphs are thought provoking.

Where I live, we've had several years of drought that have affected various
areas to various degrees depending on soil composition. In areas with sandy
soil, crops fail without irrigation. Fortunately, the underlying aquifer
(the Mahomet aquifer) in the local county most dependent on irrigation is
adequately recharged at this time (though it was severely stressed in the
1988, a year when even continuous irrigation yielded a seriously damaged
crop).

Where I live, we have 30 feet of clay underlying a couple of feet of decent
loess, so row crops do okay and so do gardens with careful practices. To
have a garden, however, I must irrigate to a certain extent. The last few
springs have been so dry that I've had no asparagus without pouring water on
the bed.

We are now on the leading edge of global warming, and I'm wondering what
developments will do to precip patterns. This winter has been seriously dry,
so we aren't making up for a dry summer. My well still has water, but I'm
not stressing it much -- I use it during the winter just to fill a couple of
50-gal tanks for the livestock, and the tanks only need filling every second
to third day.

Marie


"Our demand for water has turned us into vampires, draining the world of its
lifeblood - what can we do to prevent mass global drought and starvation?
BY CONVENTIONAL measures, Jitbhai Chowdhury is a model farmer. He uses
organic manure and natural pesticides. He grows fruit trees round the edge
of his alfalfa fields and tends his dairy cattle with care. Every day he
produces 25 litres of milk which he sends to a collection point in the
nearby village of Kushkal in Gujarat, India, for delivery to the state
dairy. It's because of people like him that India isn't starving. 

But for all its virtues, Chowdhury's 2-hectare farm is sowing the seeds of a
global disaster. To grow the fodder that he needs to feed his cows, he is
entirely dependent on irrigation water pumped from deep underground. Over
the course of a year, his small electric pump sucks twice as much water from
beneath his fields as falls on the land as rain. No wonder the water table
in the village is 150 metres down ..."