Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Amanda Peck" <ap615@hotmail.com>]

The amount per flush sounds way way way too high.  Don't think that's the 
amount a standard toilet tank holds--maybe three gallons--less than five, 
certainly.  Lower flow toilets are now mandated.  Composting toilets are 
certainly available.

People around here do feed hay to their cattle in the wintertime, and in the 
summer when it hasn't rained.  The area generally gets enough rain to make 
at least one hay crop in the fields that the cattle aren't grazing right 
then.  So there's not much irrigation of hay fields.  But that may be 
because people don't sell much hay.  There IS a farm the next county over 
where I've seen the irrigation sprayers going at noon on a bright summer's 
day--putting the water in the air to evaporate.

It's probably true that our water comes straight from a river, not from a 
well.  But particularly on the Ogalalla aquifer, it may be more than our 
grandchildren will wish we had consumed.

I've read somewhere that the water usage for alfalfa irrigation in 
California is  the biggest use of water in the state.  Not sure if that's 
true, but....

Even if it isn't, it's still true that irrigation water also has to be 
counted as water used in raising the cows.
............
Ryan Albringer wrote (snipped into nothingness--including another part I'm 
replying to):
Considering these figures per unit produced, it is a drop in the bucket 
compared to the average toilet consuming something like 20 or 30 gallons of 
potable water per flush.