Supplying European farmers with guano would involve transporting large quantities of excrement across the Atlantic, a project that understandably failed to enthuse shipping companies. Charles Mann, in his fascinating 1491, on the slow uptake in Europe of the South American innovation of mining for fertilizer from Peru’s 147 guano islands. Poop jokes notwithstanding, the 19th …
How to really march against Monsanto: The problems in agriculture aren’t related to particular technology. They are related to what we, as a society, have valued. What we value (either in making law or making purchases) drives what farmers grow and thus why Monsanto is so successful. The full item is worth reading.
Given that I’ve got farming on the brain, our recent Amtrak trip across the western United States was fascinating. The train goes through a lot of farm country, I guess in part because there is a lot of farm country in the western United States. We saw strawberries in Oxnard, the metastasis that is California’s …
At dinner the other night, one of the people at the table commented about the risk we face when the Ogallala Aquifer, beneath the great plains, runs out, which he’d heard would happen in 20 years. Without taking action now to begin regrowing the native grasses needed to hold the plains in place, he’d heard, …
Continue reading ‘Why “when the Ogallala runs out” isn’t the right way to think about this’ »
Visiting a farm recently, I was reminded that business people for whom water is an input think about water conservation differently than city folk like me. For a given amount of water available, the farmer wants to grow and sell as much food as possible. So it should not be surprising to see water conservation …
Continue reading ‘water conservation diaries: it’s about making more food’ »
Hannah Holm of the Water Center at Colorado Mesa University argues that agricultural water conservation doesn’t really save water: When water is diverted from a stream and put onto the land, part of that water is taken up by plants, part of it evaporates, and part of it makes its way back to the stream. With …
Given my profession, I’m incentivized to freak out about drought. If I thought it wasn’t a big deal, I’d have to find something else to write about. But in darker moments, I wonder if I’m overdoing the freakout. Chris Austin’s writeup of Ellen Hanak’s comments at this week’s California water bond hearing raise the question …
The Jevons Paradox would suggest that our new solar panels would give me an easy comfort about using more electricity. And yet, ever since we gathered two weeks ago with the installers and the electric company guy in the ritual of turning them on and watching the meter run backward, I have been obsessed with …
Continue reading ‘my education in economics: an anti-Jevons anecdote’ »
Nearly every time I give a talk on water (which seems to happen frequently lately – wonder if I’ll be less popular as a speaker once the drought ends) I get asked about desalination. It is, as Bettina Boxall noted in a recent LA Times story, the stuff of dreamers: “an inexhaustible, drought-proof reservoir in …
The “broken windows fallacy” is the economic argument that spending money on X is of intrinsic value because of the jobs created, regardless of the value of the thing being done. The reference to broken windows is the argument’s reductio ad absurdum – hire one person to break a bunch of windows, and a second …