The Central Valley Agricultural Coalition Essay Research — страница 3

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extracting the salt from it, and using it for drinking, showers, and other freshwater purposes. Some say that desalinization wastes money and is not as cost effective as other solutions. When the United States was trying to research it, it was not cost effective at the time and was a waste of money when not necessary. Only Florida and Saudi Arabia (that I am aware of) uses desalinization plants. One of the main reasons for this is because Saudi Arabia is a very wealthy country. They also do not have clean water mostly because of dryness, but also because of Saddam Hussein using oil pollution as a weapon of war. The United States started researching it in the 1970?s but soon lost interest on the subject because of the great oil crisis. It is becoming more popular though because it

uses less energy per unit of water treated, which equals less money. Four decades ago, desalinization took twenty-five energy units to produce one unit of drinking water. Using modern technology and techniques one hundred water units can be made from one unit of energy. As you can see, it can be feasible because of new technology. The costs of this depend on many things and could be savior for L.A. The average cost is $6 per 1000 gallons of water a day that is pretty much delivered to your ?door? (or bathroom). An average house uses 1000 gallons of water per day with a cost of $6 per day for desalinized water. The advantage of this compared to gray water (sewage water) is that it is potable (drinkable) and it can be put into the main drinking pipe, and a new pipe does not have to

be built. The interesting part about this is by the time L.A. transports water out of Central Valley (including the building of new pipes and cannels) it would cost about the same to put desalination project into L.A., interesting. Our third proposal involves the Central Valley conserving more water. In this paragraph we are talking about crops other than high water consuming crops such as rice, the fourth largest water consuming crop. Rice needs to be grown in virtually a manmade lake becasue of how much water it takes up and how it is grown. Now what some farmers still do is called ?flood irrigation?. This is a total waste of water because it allows the crops to be sitting in at least an inch of water. The earth the crops are growing in absorbs some of this water, but the rest

of the water is evaporated or taken off and is called tail water. Some would say that the water that is tail water that is not evaporated or soaked up by the ground could be re-used for other agricultural purposes. This is not accurate because of the chemicals that are used in fertilization. These chemicals are mixed in with the water and this causes the tail water that is washed away from the fields to be poisonous for other agricultural purposes and not reusable. Therefore, instead of farmers irrigating their fields by flood irrigation, let us irrigate the farms with overhead or sprinkler irrigation. Using this system, we can monitor the amount of water that is used to water the plants and conserve that water for other uses besides irrigation like drinking water. The cost of

this depends on how big your farm is. A typical 160-acre farm takes $60,000 to put a sprinkler system in this farm. This increases the water efficiency (from flood irrigation) from 60% to 75% (meaning in flood irrigation, 60% of the water put on the crops soaks in, and in sprinkler, 75% of the water is used by the plants). Therefore, if farmers used flood irrigation on this farm, you would use 700 acre-feet to irrigate it, and if you used sprinkler, you would only have to use 595 acre-feet of water it (an acre-foot is how much water is in one acre of land one foot deep). Our fourth proposal involves L.A. conserving water. Instead of having, big lawns with a lot of plants and flowers that take up a lot of water, L.A. should have desert landscaping to conserve water that can be

used elsewhere. In that desert landscaping have cactuses, rocks, and plants that are adapted to the desert environment. The typical cost of a half an acre front yard would be between twenty and thirty thousand dollars. Now this cost would include a rock garden, fine dirt, and two different types of cactuses. This might seem more expensive, but in the end the zero landscaping pays for itself, because you do not have extensive water bills and saves money. L.A. is a desert. Don?t you remember that it was a little settlement that looked like New Mexico? Since Los Angeles was a desert (once) and, lawns in that area would need more water than in a wetter area like Florida anyway. Lawns take up so much water for irrigation, that it is a waste of water that can especially be used for