irrigation

A massive farm in Central Valley, California, is teaming with Israeli water experts running the first ever experiment with drip irrigation for rice production in the U.S.

Growers along the South Platte River in Colorado are becoming more efficient water users and the outcome is the opposite of what most people would expect, says public broadcaster KUNC.

Weld County, just northeast of Denver, "is the epicenter of urban growth and changing land use in Colorado," says public broadcaster KUNC.

In the face of drought in California and the Plains, growers are looking for ways to make the thriftiest use possible from the scarce water supply, says Ensia, describing research on how to nurture crops without wastage.

Dry wells are a common problem in drought-stricken California, but the state has reservoirs, rivers and snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada.

Vegetable and fruit growers in the Salinas Valley on California's Central Coast "are actually thriving despite historically dry conditions - at least for now," says the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

The drought in California is creating an unexpected threat to the state's almond growers. Water drawn from wells on the west side of Central California is high in salt, says Valley Public Radio in Fresno, which could adversely affect crop yields.

America's almond craze - per-capita consumption doubled in the past seven years - "has come at a cost," says Bloomberg. Prices are up by $1 per pound from last year and growers feel the strain of the fourth year of drought in California, the largest almond producer.

Farmers lost a large portion of their livestock in the six districts of Nepal hit the hardest by earthquakes earlier this year, and half of the farming households lost nearly all of their stored crops of rice, corn, wheat and millet, says the Food and Agriculture Organization.

The Agriculture Department published an interim rule on Monday to require farmers to practice conservation in order to qualify for federally subsidized crop insurance coverage. The so-called conservation compliance requirement was one of the hardest-fought items in the 2014 farm law.

Rudy Mussi, who farms in the Sacramento Delta, "is not the California farmer you've been hearing about," says the NPR blog The Salt. "He is not fallowing all his fields or ripping up his orchards due to a lack of irrigation water."

Avocado farmer Nick Stehley is vigilant to chop down weeds on his farm in San Diego County in the southwestern corner of California. Weeds "can suck up a lot of water and he's protecting every drop of water he can. He's also removing trees and fallowing fields," says Capital Public Radio.

For farmer Cannon Michael, life "is almost exclusively focused on finding ways to overcome the drought, and in California, when it comes to saving water, there's no time to waste," writes Sena Christian in the online magazine Ensia.

With California headed for a fourth year of drought, the outlook for the growing season is grim. "But our situation is not hopeless," says Helene Dillard, dean of agriculture at UC-Davis.

The Interior Department says there will be no irrigation water for most farmers in California's Central Valley for the second year in a row, calling it "an unprecedented situation."

Some 55.3 million acres of U.S. farmland are irrigated, says the Farm and Ranch Irrigation Survey, drawn from USDA's 2012 Census of Agriculture.

From the Aral Sea basin in central Asia to the San Joaquin Valley of California, 20 percent of the world's irrigated land is degraded by salt buildup, says a study by United Nations University.