Perennial Crops: New Hardware for Agriculture........Perennial grains, legumes and oilseed varieties represent a paradigm shift in modern agriculture and hold great potential for truly sustainable production systems .In addition to identifying and developing perennial food crops, The Land Institute also conducts ecological intensificationresearch in order to put those crop plants into diverse mixtures called polycultures that mimic the benefits found in native and natural ecosystems. Why Perennial Crops.....Perennial plants do not have to be reseeded or replanted every year, so they do not require annual plowing or herbicide applications to establish. Whereas to successfully grow annuals, farmers have to suppress or kill the vegetation (weeds) chemically or mechanically that compete with crops for sunlight, nutrients, and water, especially when the crops are seedlings. This soil disturbance has caused significant amounts of soil carbon loss (which ends up in the atmosphere as CO2), soil erosion, nutrient leakage, and changes in soil organisms.  Perennial crops are robust; they protect soil from erosion and improve soil structure. They increase ecosystem nutrient retention, carbon sequestration, and water infiltration, and can contribute to climate change adaptation and mitigation. Overall, they help ensure food and water security over the long term. Many fruit, forage and some vegetable crops, including fruit trees, alfalfa, grapes, asparagus, and olive trees, are perennials that have been grown for thousands of years. The Land Institute is working to add perennial grains, legumes, and oilseed crops to the list.          https://landinstitute.org/our-work/perennial-crops/

IS VERTICAL FARMING A WASTE OF TIME AND MONEY? UNEQUIVOCALLY NOT AND HERE’S WHY........Now, anyone who has ever dabbled in CEA (controlled-environment agriculture) – of which vertical farming is a subset – will understand empirically that the degree of achievable success in growing certain plants within indoor environments oftentimes exceeds that which can be achieved in an outdoor garden or farm. This is because a CEA facility permits you can create the most favorable environment possible for any indoor-appropriate plant to flourish. This benefit is derived without nighttime halting growth, without colder seasons substantially limiting annual crop yields, and without the destructive or limiting effects of high winds, excessive rain, drought, pests, moulds, and fungus. No, vertical farms won’t feed the entire world, but one would be hard-pressed to determine that the model doesn’t work well.  “The vertical farming model was proposed with the aim of increasing the amount of agricultural land by ‘building upwards,’” writes University of Melbourne engineering researchers Kurt Benke and Bruce Tomkins in Future Food-Production Systems: Vertical Farming and Controlled-Environment Agriculture. “In other words, the effective arable area for crops can be increased by constructing a high-rise building with many levels on the same footprint of land.”Think of the possibilities of such a system: without external influences like pests, bad weather, poor soil, and even a lack of acreage being a concern, vertical farms can grow food anywhere, in any climate, and in any country, provided they are connected to a source of power and have access to some water (because of the recycling of greywater and less evaporation, hydroponic/aquaponic systems only require 10 percent of the water used by traditional agriculture). These systems can be set up within cities, right next door to the people, communities, restaurants, and grocery stores they feed, thereby eliminating food miles (the distance farmed food has to travel to reach the plates of consumers) and providing a reliable source of fresh, nutritious food that was still growing that very morning. In an article chapter published on Clean Metrics, titled Food Transportation Issues and Reducing Carbon Footprint, the authors write: “Transportation is the largest end-use contributor toward global warming in the United States and many other developed countries. Transportation has a significant impact within the food and beverage sector because food is often shipped long distances and not infrequently via air. Pirog et al. (2001) report that nearly half of all fruit sold in the United States is imported, and that produce grown in North America travels an average of 2,000 km (1,200 miles) from source to point of sale. Dr. Foley claims that prime American farmland is a far better investment than vertical farms, both in terms of food production and future economic value. But traditional farming’s arable land requirements are too large and invasive to remain sustainable for future generations. With the ever-so-rapid population growth rates, it is expected that arable land per person will drop about 66 percent in 2050 in comparison to 1970, according to the 2017 study by Benke and Tomkins.  One also needs to consider the environmental impacts of traditional farming as they relate to CO2 emissions. When you take land from nature and turn it into a mass production farm such as those we see across the United States, you destroy the ability of that land to absorb carbon from the atmosphere as it once did when it was covered with trees and indigenous vegetation. Moreover, in order to expand traditional farmlands, indigenous land needs to be razed of its vegetation, displacing countless species of birds, animals, and essential insects in order to set up an unnatural ecosystem where only one or two crops are planted. This is what’s happening in the Amazon and large-scale deforestation is one of the greatest tragedies of our time. The overall consequence of this kind of farming is a myriad of negative environmental influences, from soil erosion and exhaustion to excessive carbon emissions from the transport of food all over the country (if not to other countries entirely) and increased atmospheric warming due to changing land surface type. In short, we need other solutions and indoor vertical farming is an intelligent one that is already making a significant difference in cities and communities around the world.                 https://www.globalaginvesting.com/vertical-farming-waste-time-money-unequivocally-not-heres/           

 Earlier this month, federal officials declared an emergency water shortage on the Colorado River for the first time. The shortage declaration forces reductions in water deliveries to specific states, beginning with the abrupt cutoff of nearly one-fifth of Arizona’s supply from the river, and modest cuts for Nevada and Mexico, with more negotiations and cuts to follow. But it also sounded an alarm: one of the country’s most important sources of fresh water is in peril, another victim of the accelerating climate crisis. Americans are about to face all sorts of difficult choices about how and where to live as the climate continues to heat up. States will be forced to choose which coastlines to abandon as sea levels rise, which wildfire-prone suburbs to retreat from and which small towns cannot afford new infrastructure to protect against floods or heat. What to do in the parts of the country that are losing their essential supply of water may turn out to be the first among those choices. The Colorado River’s enormous significance extends well beyond the American West. In addition to providing water for the people of seven states, 29 federally recognized tribes and northern Mexico, its water is used to grow everything from the carrots stacked on supermarket shelves in New Jersey to the beef in a hamburger served at a Massachusetts diner. The power generated by its two biggest dams — the Hoover and Glen Canyon — is marketed across an electricity grid that reaches from Arizona to Wyoming. The formal declaration of the water crisis arrived days after the Census Bureau released numbers showing that, even as the drought worsened over recent decades, hundreds of thousands more people have moved to the regions that depend on the Colorado. Phoenix expanded more over the past 10 years than any other large American city, while smaller urban areas across Arizona, Nevada, Utah and California each ranked among the fastest-growing places in the country. The river’s water supports roughly 15 million more people today than it did when Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992. These statistics suggest that the climate crisis and explosive development in the West are on a collision course. And it raises the question: What happens next? Since about 70% of water delivered from the Colorado River goes to growing crops, not to people in cities, the next step will likely be to demand large-scale reductions for farmers and ranchers across millions of acres of land, forcing wrenching choices about which crops to grow and for whom — an omen that many of America’s food-generating regions might ultimately have to shift someplace else as the climate warms. California, so far shielded from major cuts, has already agreed to reductions that will take effect if the drought worsens. But it may be asked to do more. Its enormous share of the river, which it uses to irrigate crops across the Imperial Valley and for Los Angeles and other cities, will be in the crosshairs when negotiations over a diminished Colorado begin again. The Imperial Irrigation District there is the largest single water rights holder from the entire basin and has been especially resistant to compromise over the river. It did not sign the drought contingency plan laying out cuts that other big players on the Colorado system agreed to in 2019. Western states arrived at this crucible in large part because of their own doing. The original multistate compact that governs the use of the Colorado, which was signed in 1922, was exuberantly optimistic: The states agreed to divide up an estimated total amount of water that turned out to be much more than what would actually flow. Nevertheless, with the building of the Hoover Dam to collect and store river water, and the development of the Colorado’s plumbing system of canals and pipelines to deliver it, the West was able to open a savings account to fund its extraordinary economic growth. Over the years since, those states have overdrawn the river’s average deposits. It should be no surprise that even without the pressures of climate change, such a plan would lead to bankruptcy. Making a bad situation worse, leaders in Western states have allowed wasteful practices to continue that add to the material threat facing the region. A majority of the water used by farms — and thus much of the river — goes to growing nonessential crops like alfalfa and other grasses that feed cattle for meat production. Much of those grasses are also exported to feed animals in the Middle East and Asia. Short of regulating which types of crops are allowed, which state authorities may not even have the authority to do, it may fall to consumers to drive change. Water usage data suggests that if Americans avoid meat one day each week they could save an amount of water equivalent to the entire flow of the Colorado each year, more than enough water to alleviate the region’s shortages.                 https://www.propublica.org/article/40-million-people-rely-on-the-colorado-river-its-drying-up-fast?utm_id=36870&sfmc_id=4513373   

With record-breaking floods becoming the new normal, experts at the United Nations University (UNU) have developed a new tool that generates instant, accurate street-level resolution maps of floods worldwide since 1985. The free online World Flood Mapping Tool will help all countries, but especially those in the Global South, where flood risk maps are rare and often badly out of date. The work of UNU’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) in Hamilton, Canada, with support from Google, MapBox, and other partners, the tool lets users adjust variables to help locate gaps in flood defences and responses and to plan development of all kinds—for example, where to build or upgrade infrastructure, or develop agriculture. Users need only Internet access to get a flood map at 30-metre resolution—street by street level. A forthcoming version for more commercial uses, for example by insurance firms, will offer even more precise building-level resolution. UNU-INWEH says the main difference in the commercial version will be the resolution, since commercial applications require floods to be mapped at the sub-metre level. This level of accuracy requires significant investments in data procurement and computation power. But a publicly available tool is what’s known as an International Public Good, and this one is designed to support (primarily) developing countries. So nothing will be held back or modified in the public version to drive commercial users to the later version.  “Floods in the past decade have impacted the lives of more than half a billion people, mainly in low- and middle-income countries, and resulted in damages of nearly US$500 billion, roughly equal to the GDP of Singapore,” said UNU-INWEH Director Vladimir Smakhtin. “More recent floods worldwide have added to a fast-growing toll of upended lives, damage and deaths.”                                           https://www.theenergymix.com/2021/10/03/new-un-mapping-tool-provides-street-level-view-of-flood-risk/                                            AND.........WORLDWIDE FLOOD MAPPING TOOL......https://floodmapping.inweh.unu.edu/