#Irrigation

[rebeccathenaturalist]

I really hope they can work the bugs out of this solution, because if it's done right, it'll really be a win-win situation. Less evaporation of water, and solar power being generated every day? Yes, please. We are smart, resourceful beings, and this is far from the most difficult problem we've had to address.

This is also a great example of how we can go back and fix mistakes of the past. We very, very rarely ever come up with technological solutions that take long-term effects on the environment into consideration, and so the way many things are designed often leads to some sort of damage, whether through manufacture, use, disposal, or all of the above. Retrofitting canals (which have been used in agriculture for thousands of years) will have benefits not only in the ways mentioned above, but also gets people thinking more about the impacts we make.

I'm hoping that this will lead to more new technology being developed in ways that already anticipate and account for negative impacts so that they avoid them in the first place, rather than having to engineer new solution many years down the line.

#solar power #solar panels #renewable energy #water #environment #irrigation #agriculture #green energy #conservation #technology #clean energy #science #solarpunk #hopepunk

[mindblowingscience]

Water scarcity and the high cost of energy represent the main problems for irrigation communities, which manage water for this end, making it available to agriculture. In a context of drought, with a deregulated and changing electricity market, knowing when and how much water crops are going to be irrigated with would allow those who manage them to overcome uncertainty when making decisions and, therefore, guide them towards objectives like economic savings, environmental sustainability, and efficiency. For this, data science and Artificial Intelligence are important resources.

Continue Reading.

#Science #Agriculture #Biology #Biotechnology #Irrigation #Water #AI #Artificial Intelligence

[ancientorigins]

Archaeologists have uncovered a sophisticated piece of civil engineering in China- a ceramic water drainage system dating back 4,200 years, still intact!

#water #irrigation #water system #China #ancient #history #ancient origins

[lionfloss]

Puquios

#Puquios #peru #rocks #stones #Irrigation #ancient #spiral #spirals #nature #Cantalloc

[probablyasocialecologist]

Some of the world’s largest investment banks, pension funds and insurers, including Manulife Financial Corp.’s John Hancock unit, TIAA and UBS, have been depleting California’s groundwater to grow high-value nuts, leaving less drinking water for the surrounding communities, according to a Bloomberg Green investigation. Wall Street has come to Woodville, wringing it dry. Since 2010, six major investors have quadrupled their farmland under management in California, to almost 120,000 acres in all, equivalent to a third of all the cropland in Connecticut.

[...]

This rush for water is an outgrowth of a decades-long bet on farmland by investors who see food cultivation as an asset class virtually assured of appreciating in a warming, more populous world. Globally, large investors and agribusinesses have snapped up about 163 million acres of farmland in more than 100 countries in the past 20 years. The land grab has given rise to a grab of an even scarcer global commodity: water. In a bid to ensure thriving investment portfolios, some of the world’s largest financial entities have amassed control over lakes, rivers and underground aquifers in places from California to Africa, Australia to South America, giving them outsize roles in managing an endangered resource that’s the basis of life on Earth. The trend has contributed to shifting hydrological patterns that stand to permanently disrupt communities’ access to fresh water. Local populations are paying the price in drained wells, high water bills and contaminated water supplies.

[...]

In the past decade, parts of the San Joaquin Valley have dropped as much as a foot per year, according to the US Geological Survey. Subsidence, as the sinking is called, has damaged bridges, canals and other infrastructure that will cost billions of dollars to fix, the state says. The aquifers themselves are irreparable. Many groundwater basins, when drained, never recover their former storage capacity, hydrologists have found. “Groundwater in California has been treated as an extractive resource—you pump and hope for the best,” says Graham Fogg, an emeritus professor of hydrology at the University of California at Davis. “Capitalism is driving this. Investors don’t care, because in 10 years they can make all the money they want and leave.”

#california #water #wall street #agriculture #irrigation #groundwater #emphasis added

[cognitivejustice]

A 2,000-year-old Sri Lankan hydraulic system uses natural features to help harvest and store rainwater. In a rapidly warming world, it is providing a lifeline for rural communities.

Each April, in the village of Maeliya in northwest Sri Lanka, Pinchal Weldurelage Siriwardene gathers his community under the shade of a large banyan tree. The tree overlooks a human-made body of water called a wewa – meaning reservoir or "tank" in Sinhala. The wewa stretches out besides the village's rice paddies for 175-acres (708,200 sq m) and is filled with the rainwater of preceding months. 

 Tank cascades are receiving new attention as climate change is projected to increase both Sri Lanka's drought and flood risk (Credit: Zinara Rathnayake) 

Siriwardene, the 76-year-old secretary of the village's agrarian committee, has a tightly-guarded ritual to perform. By boiling coconut milk on an open hearth beside the tank, he will seek blessings for a prosperous harvest from the deities residing in the tree. "It's only after that we open the sluice gate to water the rice fields," he told me when I visited on a scorching mid-April afternoon.

By releasing water into irrigation canals below, the tank supports the rice crop during the dry months before the rains arrive. For nearly two millennia, lake-like water bodies such as this have helped generations of farmers cultivate their fields. An old Sinhala phrase, "wewai dagabai gamai pansalai", even reflects the technology's centrality to village life; meaning "tank, pagoda, village and temple".

But the village's tank does not work alone. It is part of an ancient hydraulic network called an ellangawa, or "tank cascade system". As such, the artificial lake at Maeliya links up with smaller, man-made reservoirs upstream in the watershed. Together with their carefully managed natural surroundings, these interconnecting storage structures allow rainwater to be harvested, shared and re-used across the local area.

Constructed from the 4th Century BC up to the 1200s, these cascade systems have long helped Sri Lankan communities cope with prolonged periods of dry weather. "As most of the country is made up of crystalline hard rock with poor permeability, it induces runoff, " says Christina Shanthi De Silva, senior professor in agricultural and plantation engineering at The Open University of Sri Lanka. "Our forefathers built tank cascades to capture this surface runoff," she explains, preventing it from being washed away into rivers and, ultimately, the sea.

Such knowledge has since been passed down the generations. In a laminated box file, Siriwardene carefully safeguards a map his father, the village head, drew of Maeliya's cascade. There are nine tanks in this particular cascade, his father writes. A copy of another handwritten booklet documents the tanks' history and the folk poems that villagers sang in gratitude for its continuous water resource.

#solarpunk #solar punk #jua kali solarpunk #indigenous knowledge #community #informal economy #sri lanka #irrigation #cascades

[bumblebeeappletree]

Permaculture instructor Andrew Millison journeys to South India to film the ancient water management system of the Cholla Dynasty in the Cauvery River Delta. We visit multiple structures within the state of Tamil Nadu including the Kallanai Dam, the Ranganathaswamy Temple, and numerous smaller check dams which split the Cauvery River into a vast delta which is the rice-basket of South India. This ancient design when seen as a whole actually creates the largest inland water body in the entire country of India.

Digital Map Animation:

https://www.pearlriverecodesign.com/

Shubo Biswas of GreenGood Labs:

https://www.greengoodlabs.com/

Steve Borgia's absolutely epic hotel in the Cauvery Delta:

https://indecohotels.com/indeco-swami...

Post Production by Meenarts.com

[email protected]

Drone Credits: Gopinath, @cymatics.in.

#Andrew Millison #solarpunk #permaculture #india #water #irrigation #river #Cholla Dynasty #Cauvery River Delta #Cauvery River #Tamil Nadu #Kallanai Dam #Ranganathaswamy Temple #Youtube

[sillysally13]

why is mic check actually so stressful istg I never know what to say but I have to just keep talking and I always end up repeating the hydraulics monologue like 5 times hhjfjkhghj

#hydraulics little sally? #oh ya know hydraulics! #hydration #irrigation #or just plain old laundry #seems to me that with all this talk of water shortage #and drought and whatnot we might spend some time on those things too #after all a dry spell would affect hydraulics too you know #theater kid #theatre kid #urinetown #urinetown musical #little sally #musical theatre #theatre #theater #sillysallyspeaks

[downfalldestiny]

Irrigation 💦 !.

#downfalldestiny #life #downfall #Irrigation #magic destinations #magical world #حياة #magic moments #agriculture #Cultivation #Water

[survivalsmartsblog]

Hydroponics offers numerous benefits, including water efficiency, space optimization, faster growth, higher yields, year-round production, reduced pest pressure, nutrient control, and environmental sustainability. By eliminating soil and delivering nutrients directly to plant roots, hydroponic systems optimize resources, increase productivity, and contribute to a more sustainable food system.

#survivalism #preppers #survivalist #bushcraft #offgrid #homestead #nature #hydroponics #sustainability #sustainable #self sustaining #pro360products #indoors #outdoors #irrigation

[sir20]

Drops of water all over the lens by sir20

#photographers on tumblr #original photographers #photography #Black and White #landscape #sir20 #landscapes #landscape photography #clouds #cloud #lens #road #water #irrigation #sprinkler #watering #bnw #b&w #bnw photography #noir et blanc #bianco e nero #black and white photography #blanco y negro #original photography #artists on tumblr #creators on tumblr #Photographie #fotografia #fotografie #fotografía

[mostlyclimatechangeweatherlog]

#sri lanka #farming #drought #irrigation #September #2023

[reasonsforhope]

“Over the last 40 years, small-holder farmers in Bangladesh have, using very simple methods, turned the dry Bengal Basin into one of the richest croplands on Earth where two to three rice harvests can be had per year.

They created a climate-resilient water system dubbed “The Bengal Water Machine” that has kept an underground reservoir topped up, even through extensive mechanized irrigation, by accumulating seasonal monsoon rains totaling a volume of 75 to 90 cubic kilometers of water... or if you’d prefer the figure in gallons, 23,775,484,712,233.00 (23.7 trillion).

This was found in a recent study, awaiting peer-review, that took one million water measurements from 465 separate wells between 1998 and 2018.

Compiled by Mohammad Shamsudduha, a data analyst and researcher at the Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London, it shows that humanity doesn’t necessarily need expensive science-fiction technology to ensure that cropland can remain irrigated if climate change corresponds to more intense droughts in the future.

That’s because The Bengal Water Machine is made up of nothing more than regular old wells dug less than 300 feet down, which increase the capture of the May-October Monsoon rains and prevent them from draining into the Bay of Bengal.” -via Good News Network, 11/30/22

#bangladesh #bay of bengal #monsoon #farming #irrigation #climate change #climate resilience #good news #hope

[ancientorigins]

The enigma of the Saint Croix Basin's stunning mile-high cliff in the Caribbean challenges conventional wisdom about our planet's history. From Galileo's telescopic revelations to the modern marvels of Google Earth, this incredible journey of discovery unravels the secrets hidden in the uncharted territories of the Caribbean seafloor.

The intriguing possibility that it served as a massive irrigation system for an unknown civilization's primary food-producing land raises questions about evidence for a forgotten civilization's monumental achievements. Google Earth's revelations defy conventional beliefs, prompting us to ponder the existence of a once-great civilization that has faded into the shadows of our myths.

#Caribbean #basin #irrigation #telescope #Galileo #google earth #Caribbean Sea #ancient #history #ancient origins

[actaecon]

Mexico

#matt mawson #mexico #sinaloa #water #irrigation

[nmnomad]

The oldest acequias in the U.S. are more than 400 years old, built to provide water for farming and ranching in areas occupied by Spain.

#New Mexico #NewMexico #agriculture #irrigation #history #thankafarmer #waterisprecious