Adenovirus type 4
Animal and human influenza (including H5N1 and H1N1)
Bacteriophage MS2
Feline calicivirus
Hepatitis A & B (HAV)
Herpes virus type 1
HIV-1
Human Norovirus (Norwalk)
MS2 virus
Murine Norovirus
Orthopoxvirus
Poliovirus type 1
Poliovirus type 2
“Moving water is the most complex and artful thing we do as farmers.” –Danny Merkley
Synopsis
California Roundtable on Water and Food Supply Recommendations to shift thinking and spur appropriate action to balance the water needs of both farms and aquatic ecosystems.
Recommendations
1. Create a Stronger Knowledge Base
2. Improve Support Mechanisms for Growers
3. Move Toward Outcome- Based Policy and Regulatory Frameworks that Foster Agricultural Water Stewardship
The agricultural use of water in a manner that optimizes agricultural water use while addressing the co-benefits of water for food production, the environment, and human health. Agricultural water stewardship is premised on the notion that water management decisions cannot be made in isolation of the ecological, social, and economic context. It emphasizes whole-farm, place-based approaches that recognize the role of agriculture in the local watershed, and of local biogeographical conditions such as soil type, soil ecology, topography, and terrestrial and aquatic ecology in water management decisions.
Think of what your supper table might be like if water was not used to irrigate crops. Do you think you could survive very long without heaping servings of eggplant, beets, brussels sprouts, and rutabagas? Irrigation water is essential for keeping fruits, vegetables, and grains growing to feed the world’s population, and this has been a constant for thousands of years.
Throughout the world, irrigation (water for agriculture, or growing crops) is probably the most important use of water (except for drinking and washing a smelly dog, perhaps). Almost 60 percent of all the world’s freshwater withdrawals go towards irrigation uses. Large-scale farming could not provide food for the world’s large populations without the irrigation of crop fields by water gotten from rivers, lakes, reservoirs, and wells. Without irrigation, crops could never be grown in the deserts of California, Israel, or my tomato patch.
Irrigation has been around for as long as humans have been cultivating plants. Man’s first invention after he learned how to grow plants from seeds was probably a bucket. Ancient people must have had strong backs from having to haul buckets full of water to pour on their first plants. Pouring water on fields is still a common irrigation method today—but other, more efficient and mechanized methods are also used. One of the more popular mechanized methods is the center-pivot irrigation system, which uses moving spray guns or dripping faucet heads on wheeled tubes that pivot around a central source of water. The fields irrigated by these systems are easily seen from the air as green circles. There are many more irrigation techniques farmers use today, since there is always a need to find more efficient ways to use water for irrigation
When we use water in our home, or when an industry uses water, about 90 percent of the water used is eventually returned to the environment where it replenishes water sources (water goes back into a stream or down into the ground) and can be used for other purposes. But of the water used for irrigation, only about one-half is reusable. The rest is lost by evaporation into the air, evapotranspiration from plants, or is lost in transit, by a leaking pipe, for example. Read more
WASHINGTON (AFP) – The Environmental Protection Agency has asked local US communities to test more carefully for hexavalent chromium, a probable carcinogen.
After preliminary health studies, the EPA opted Wednesday to class the chemical known as chromium-6 as one likely to cause cancer in humans when ingested over the course of a lifetime.
It adopted a rule of a maximum 0.1 milligrams per liter (100 parts per billion), and urged managers of water systems with their source in ground water be tested two times a year, versus four times a year for systems with surface water sources.
“EPA’s latest data show that no public water systems are in violation of the standard,” the agency said in a statement.
Still, a private US environmental group has found that drinking water in many American cities contains hexavalent chromium, The Washington Post reported last month.
The study by the Environmental Working Group — the first nationwide analysis measuring the presence of the chemical in US water systems — found hexavalent chromium in the tap water of 31 out of 35 cities sampled.
Of those, 25 had levels that exceeded the goal proposed in California, which has been aggressively trying to reduce the chemical in its water supply.
Hexavalent chromium has long been known to cause lung cancer when inhaled, and scientists recently found evidence that it causes cancer in laboratory animals when ingested. It has been linked to liver and kidney damage in animals, as well as leukemia, stomach cancer and other cancers.
A widely used industrial chemical until the early 1990s, hexavalent chromium is still used in some industries, including chrome plating and the manufacturing of plastics and dyes. The chemical can also leach into groundwater from natural ores.
The chemical compound was first made famous in the hit 2000 Hollywood movie “Erin Brockovich” about the eponymous environmental crusader.
Water pollution and water shortages pose the most serious problems. They cause health ailments, damage agriculture, jam up hydroelectric dams, interfere with manufacturing and limit urbanization. As aquifers dry up, soil erodes, turning an area the size of Connecticut to desert every year. The resulting dust storms add to the country’s already horrendous air pollution. Beijing’s preferred solution to the problem is a massive south-to-north river diversion project. Odds are, that will make matters worse, draining water from already overtaxed southern supplies.
