The Sky Greens vertical farm in Singapore.
Credit: Edgar Su/Reuters
A couple of Octobers ago, I found myself standing on a 5,000-acre cotton crop in the outskirts of Lubbock, Texas, shoulder-to-shoulder with a third-generation cotton farmer. He swept his arm across the flat, brown horizon of his field, which was at that moment being plowed by an industrial-sized picker—a toothy machine as tall as a house and operated by one man. The picker’s yields were being dropped into a giant pod to be delivered late that night to the local gin. And far beneath our feet, the Ogallala aquifer dwindled away at its frighteningly swift pace. When asked about this, the farmer spoke of reverse osmosis—the process of desalinating water—which he seemed to put his faith in, and which kept him unafraid of famine and permanent drought.
Beyond his crop were others, belonging to other farmers, so that as far as the eye could see were brown stretches of newly harvested cotton plants.
When I think of […]
I’m currently writing a movie about the drought set in Bakersfield. Average annual rainfall there is 6.5 inches, so they can’t grow many crops without importing a lot of water. It would help a lot if California harvested the rain water that falls on the mountains on both sides of the valley, but we’ve treated that as waste water for a long time.