One is pulling water from floods and pumping it back into aquifers.
I think that it can just flow in rather than requiring pumping, from what little I’ve read. (Maybe you were just using the term loosely.)
The second is the development of new water supplies via desalination.
I am gung-ho on more desal, but this is probably not going to be cheap enough to make agriculture competitive. The cost is irrelevant for drinking water and not that big a deal for residential usage as a whole.
To some extent, reducing residential draw on water sources that agriculture wants to use will benefit agriculture, but farmers have been unsustainably pulling from aquifers for a long time. Like, a part of the problem is that the goose that has been laying the golden eggs for them is running out of steam. It’s not just a binary “no water”. You keep drilling deeper and then using the extra energy to pump water up from deeper and deeper, so costs keep rising.
Spain does massive expanses of plastic greenhouses to reduce moisture loss with their agriculture. We don’t. We could do that; it’d cost agriculture something.
Poniente Almeriense is one of the seven comarcas in the Spanish province of Almería in Andalusia, established in 2003.[1][2] It is sometimes known as the “sea of plastic” (Spanish: Mar de plástico), due to the numerous greenhouses that cover the area.
Future of tomatoes amid CA drought: Hydroponic farming?
Tomatoes grown in greenhouses use 90% less water than ones grown outdoors. Why isn’t it catching on in drought-stricken California?
Because yes, hydroponics are catching on, but they don’t make financial sense for all growers yet. Samantha Watson with Sunrise Organics in Santa Barbara says greenhouses are a big investment.
“At the size that we are, they’re very expensive,” she says. “We deal with a lot of wind in our community as well. So you could spend days building them, pay your whole crew, and then you get a bad wind and you’re like, ‘There goes the greenhouses.’”
It might be possible to pull more water from way up north, too.
It looks like the California State Water Project doesn’t currently draw from the North Coast watershed.
There is some natural recharge of aquifers but the point of the new tech is to pump water out of flooded rivers to places where the water can flow into the aquifer more quickly. If this was done on a widespread basis, it could allow aquifer recharge at a much larger rate than natural infiltration.
The issue with pumping water south is that it has mainly come from the Sacramento Valley and Delta regions where water is already somewhat scarce, and likely to become more so in the future. Snowmelt from the Sierras is declining rapidly and we don’t have enough space to store all the spring runoff–but see the groundwater recharge idea above. The only place water is truly abundant in the state is the north coast, but the rugged topography up there makes the construction of aqueducts probably prohibitively expensive. And at that expense I think other options are just a better bet.
The greenhouse idea is interesting but I’m surprised they don’t overheat. Do they need a lot of energy to keep them cool in summer? Maybe if we have huge amounts of cheap solar this would be OK, since cooling would mainly be needed during the day. I know there are some crops grown in greenhouses already in CA but the scale is still small.
I think that it can just flow in rather than requiring pumping, from what little I’ve read. (Maybe you were just using the term loosely.)
I am gung-ho on more desal, but this is probably not going to be cheap enough to make agriculture competitive. The cost is irrelevant for drinking water and not that big a deal for residential usage as a whole.
To some extent, reducing residential draw on water sources that agriculture wants to use will benefit agriculture, but farmers have been unsustainably pulling from aquifers for a long time. Like, a part of the problem is that the goose that has been laying the golden eggs for them is running out of steam. It’s not just a binary “no water”. You keep drilling deeper and then using the extra energy to pump water up from deeper and deeper, so costs keep rising.
Spain does massive expanses of plastic greenhouses to reduce moisture loss with their agriculture. We don’t. We could do that; it’d cost agriculture something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poniente_Almeriense
https://www.kcrw.com/shows/greater-la/stories/drought-hydroponic-tomatoes
It might be possible to pull more water from way up north, too.
It looks like the California State Water Project doesn’t currently draw from the North Coast watershed.
There is some natural recharge of aquifers but the point of the new tech is to pump water out of flooded rivers to places where the water can flow into the aquifer more quickly. If this was done on a widespread basis, it could allow aquifer recharge at a much larger rate than natural infiltration.
The issue with pumping water south is that it has mainly come from the Sacramento Valley and Delta regions where water is already somewhat scarce, and likely to become more so in the future. Snowmelt from the Sierras is declining rapidly and we don’t have enough space to store all the spring runoff–but see the groundwater recharge idea above. The only place water is truly abundant in the state is the north coast, but the rugged topography up there makes the construction of aqueducts probably prohibitively expensive. And at that expense I think other options are just a better bet.
The greenhouse idea is interesting but I’m surprised they don’t overheat. Do they need a lot of energy to keep them cool in summer? Maybe if we have huge amounts of cheap solar this would be OK, since cooling would mainly be needed during the day. I know there are some crops grown in greenhouses already in CA but the scale is still small.