The West now in its third year of a historic
drought. According to the US Drought Monitor, 95% of
the region facing abnormally dry conditions.
The western United States is entering dangerous
territory. Afflicted by a megadrought so severe it
is the driest two decades in at least 1,200 years.
Reservoir levels have plummeted.
We've seen worsening wildfires in states like
California, Arizona and Oregon.
And with climate change, these extremes are going
to continue.
And the problem isn't isolated to just the U.S.
Globally, the United Nations predicts a 40%
shortfall in freshwater resources by 2030.
We're seeing a third of our arable land has been
lost in just 40 years.
21 out of our top 30 something aquifers are now
at critical levels.
No sector has felt the impact more than
agriculture, which takes up 70% of the world's
freshwater.
Irrigation is by far the biggest user of water here
in California.
Agriculture is notorious for using a large amount
of the state's water.
California is the largest agricultural state in the
U.S. It produces foods that we cannot shift to
other parts of the country or the world
because of the unique Mediterranean climate.
Devin Wright experienced firsthand the challenges
of the water crisis.
When he planted an 80-tree orchard on his
property. He quickly depleted his groundwater
supply.
I was trying to manually irrigate my crop and
sometimes just make mistakes and leave my
water running. I would run my well dry and very
quickly realized, wow, you can't make a mistake
when you're irrigating or else you could quickly run
out your water. And that kind of woke me up to the
bigger issue. Well, this is happening everywhere.
But improvements in irrigation efficiency and
the integration of technology could help turn
the tide in managing an increasingly scarce
resource.
Those are preparing themselves for a new type
of agriculture.
Ag and tech are going to go hand in hand going
forward.
The current drought started in 2020 and has
quickly escalated to one of the worst in recent
history.
The American West is currently in a
megadrought. Scientists estimate that it's going
to become worse over the course of the next few
years.
Climate change has exacerbated drought
conditions in places like California, Nevada and
Arizona.
The current drought has caused a tremendous amount
of damage, especially to the Colorado River.
Water levels in the Colorado River have neared
their lowest point ever.
The Colorado River is a major water resource
depended on by the Southwest, supplying 40
million people across seven states and Mexico.
The Colorado River has essentially been a
lifeline for the Southwest, and it's been
critical throughout history for agriculture,
for development and for sustaining human life.
But reduced snowpack in the Rockies has caused
levels to drop severely, impacting reservoirs at
Lake Mead and Lake Powell.
Since 2000, we can clearly see the impacts of that in
the diminishing storage in Lake Mead and Lake
Powell. And those are the two largest reservoirs in
the United States. Both of them are now at record
lows.
As the decline in water supply continues, the
shortages and forced cutbacks across states
that we saw for the first time last year are only
going to increase.
The impact of these cuts is not isolated to just
the west. Dwindling water supply could have
devastating consequences for the nation's food
security.
A prolonged drought in the U.S.
Will not just reduce the income of local farms in
Arizona, but it's going to create much tighter
supply and increased food prices potentially for
consumers across the country.
In California, drought is a normal part of its
climate, but trends show it is becoming more
frequent and for longer stretches of time.
The state has started to take some measures to
reduce water usage.
In July 2021, Governor Newsom asked residents to
voluntarily reduce usage by 15% and in Southern
California, outdoor watering bans have gone
into effect. And while these conservation efforts
could be helpful, it is unlikely to move the
needle in a meaningful way.
In normal water years, agriculture and the
environment use roughly equal amounts of water,
and urban is a lot less.
Being down in the 10 to 15% range.
So when you're told to take a quick shower or not
wash your car, honestly, these are rounding errors
just to the amount of water that's used in food
production. And the absolute worst offenders
are kind of old school irrigation techniques of
flooding systems.
For centuries, farmers have relied predominantly
on flood irrigation.
This is the most wasteful in terms of water usage.
However, in recent years, farmers have started
adopting more efficient methods.
Sprinkler irrigation has increased significantly.
What's even more interesting is the growth
in micro irrigation, which was almost 0% in the
mid-seventies and it's now almost 10%.
Micro irrigation systems such as drip and
micro-sprinklers are some of the most efficient
methods available today.
With flood irrigation, you can only irrigate maybe
once or twice every two weeks.
But with micro-irrigation, you can
irrigate every day. You can inject the fertilizers
in your irrigation water.
You keep the water away from the plants, and so
you minimize diseases.
And so they figured they could produce higher
yields on 20 or 30% less water than they used to.
In some places, the adoption of these systems
has been strong.
Tomatoes used to be predominantly flood
irrigated. They are now close to 90% subsurface
drip irrigation.
But drip irrigation systems are expensive,
often costing upwards of $3,000 per acre.
Instead, many farmers have opted for more
affordable sprinkler systems.
The most popular method now in the U.S., which is
over 50% or around 50%, is sprinkler irrigation,
specifically center pivot irrigation.
And the investment for the farmer is much lower
per unit of land.
For farmers, water management has always been
a challenge. The impact of recent droughts have
only made things worse.
I was in Arizona this year and I met with several
farmers. I was driving through farming
communities outside of Phenix and was seeing
miles of unplanted land and dried up canals and
dead cotton fields.
It was a very desperate situation and it's been
heartbreaking for farmers whose families have farmed
this Arizona desert land for generations.
In the last couple of droughts, we've seen
about, rough number, half a million acres of land
fallowing. And that's in the context of irrigated
acreage in California being a little less than 9
million acres.
A lot of farmers in Arizona facing water cuts
have followed their land.
Some farmers have switched to less
water-intensive crops because farming in Arizona
is very water intensive and other farmers are
actually trying to pump more groundwater, which is
a controversial practice.
During previous droughts, many turned to groundwater
as a crutch to lean on.
When we had these multiyear droughts, what
farmers would do if they got zero allocation
surface water, they would well, groundwater was sort
of an insurance policy that they would go to.
But over reliance on slowly replenished
underground aquifers have created a whole new set of
problems.
Places like Central Valley, the salad bowl of
the United States, sunk 28 feet because of our
overuse of groundwater.
Then, of course, you have breakdown in
infrastructure. Canals starts to collapse,
bridges collapse, floors collapse.
With little alternatives for more water, the focus
has intensified in better managing the resources we
do have. Several are working to tackle the
water use efficiency issue with more advanced
irrigation systems.
U.S. based Jain builds and manages smart
irrigation systems on farms.
An Israeli company, Netafim, which invented
modern drip irrigation technology, is developing
even more efficient drip systems.
And one startup is hoping to make a difference by
merging the Internet of Things with drip
irrigation.
Lumo is a series of internet-connected smart
valves, and the system gives growers easy access
to irrigation, automation, tracking and
reporting so they can quickly and easily access
precision irrigation. The most important thing is
they can automate those valves. Today, a lot of
farmers are out there turning them on and off
manually. That saves them a lot of cost, and it also
allows them to be very precise about the amount
of water that they're distributing. It is
powered first and foremost by a battery and
solar. It has a computer inside that is connected
to a valve, as well as some sensors, think like a
flow meter. They stay connected to the cloud.
We can allow our farmers to access them through a
mobile app or a web app.
We queued up a block, so we just do that here by
saying, okay, we want to go block two, we pick 30
minutes, we queue it, but now it's got a 30 minute
run. That's it, hit the schedule and now it's
running and these lines will all fill up.
And then we're tracking that flow through here.
Total remote control, which is a real big
benefit. We've saved easily 30% of our water
that we were using for irrigation simply by
removing some of the manmade error.
We think that's really valuable to the farmer,
but we also think that's going to become really
valuable to other stakeholders like
communities, governments, water boards, irrigation
districts, because they're all asking, How
much water are we using?
And they don't know. They just have to estimate.
It's currently testing its second-generation model
with a small pilot program. One user, Kurt
Beitler of Bohème Wines, has six valves to water
his six acres.
We saw an opportunity to try some of this tech on
one of my vineyard blocks and it's really been
wonderful. The biggest improvement with Lumo for
my farming operation has been the convenience and
precision with how we're irrigating.
We've safely reduced excess use of our water by
at least 20%.
It might be as much as 30 or 40%.
Bohème has its system programmed to
automatically irrigate at night.
We take great effort to irrigate in the nighttime
so we get greater uptake and utilization of the
water by the vines.
And for specialty growers such as Butler's Vineyard,
the precision system offers greater control
over the growing conditions.
With optimal use of water.
We're optimizing our finished wine quality.
So this is one more very valuable tool in the
overall project.
Others have sought to completely reimagine how
we approach farming altogether by bringing
crop cultivation indoors.
We felt that we needed a more sustainable
alternative, a solution that we call climate
adapted. And so what we do is we've developed our
own kind of advanced robotic greenhouses.
Iron Ox, a San Francisco startup backed by Bill
Gates breakthrough energy venture, is growing leafy
greens at facilities outside of Gilroy,
California, and Austin, Texas.
Gilroy, California that's been operational for three
years, sold out with different greens, herbs,
things like that. And so the idea is to be able to
grow any crop, including we have strawberries,
tomatoes, and cucumbers in the pipeline.
Our new facility outside of Austin, Texas, that's
going to be about 100 x bigger at full scale by
next year.
The company is utilizing robotics, plant science
and hydroponics to optimize the growing
process.
With hydroponics, we're able to apply water and
the exact amount of nutrients directly to the
roots of the plant. And enter things like water
reclamation and other parts in the future, we
can actually recycle that water to use less and less
water over time, even in drought-stricken states.
Square Roots is another indoor farming startup
that is utilizing vertical farming.
It currently has five commercial-scale farms
across the Midwest and in New York City.
We just had to kind of reimagine how to grow
plants at commercial scale in cities.
Inside the farms, we have the perfect climate for
growing the plants. We'll go from seed to harvest in
28 days, which might be almost twice as fast as
what you can do in an outdoor field.
It is also using hydroponics to help
minimize water waste.
A ton of research studies out there that will show
that a well-tuned hydroponic system will use
about 90% less water than the equivalent outdoor
farm.
For now, the company is growing salads, herbs and
microgreens and selling in the local communities
where it's deployed farms. It is working to
expand that to include crops such as turnips,
eggplants and more. Researchers are exploring
a number of projects that could also help farmers.
At the University of California Davis, Ali
Pourreza started a lab to research new monitoring
and sensing technologies to help growers save
water.
The focus of this lab is to provide data driven
decision support tools for growers when they want
to make some critical decisions about how and
when to irrigate or fertilize.
One of his projects is focused on analyzing crop
yield, helping farmers identify areas that are
underperforming.
And then we manage each zone differently.
That would help us reduce waste in application of,
for example, fertilizer or water or pesticide, and
also to optimize the crop production.
Isaya Kisekka oversees a group that uses computer
simulation models to improve efficiencies on
farms.
With these computer models, you can start to
ask, What if scenarios?
What if I have this amount of water?
I can simulate or project how much yield I'm going
to expect. As they make irrigation decisions
through the season, they see what impact those
irrigation decisions are going to have on their
production goals.
But despite the potential impact of these new
technologies, adoption is still moving slowly.
Some think it could take government incentives and
regulation to push more efficient conservation
tools into mass adoption.
I think government can play an important role by
introducing some incentives for growers
that they adapt smart farming practices and
technologies.
You need policy and technology together to
solve the water challenges in agriculture.
Both together, I think we can go a long way.
As the industry adapts to the ongoing drought, there
will be no one size fits all approach.
We're not going to get to this kind of next
generation of farming with an incremental
solution, I think is going to require, to be
clear, multiple solutions.
I think by the end of this decade it would be a very
pretty established practice to use
technology, to use some automation, to use the
data in a more practical way in agriculture.
I think it's exactly this kind of technology that in
fact will be the solution to a potential water
crisis or shortage of water.
If farmers have access to technology that will help
them better utilize the water, we could have a
very significant impact as a whole on net usage in
the state.