Water Supply and Demand Are Totally Out of Whack

Will we run out of water? No. Freshwater is a product; we can even make it. Like every other must-have product, it may become scarce, but it will always be available – for those who can afford it. The better question is how to use, make, and distribute freshwater with maximum efficiency.

The freshwater market is an intricate blend of business, technology, and politics, and improving freshwater availability offers unlimited opportunities to invest for impact. 

(This is the first part of a three-part series on water: how we use it today, how we can use less, and how we can make more.)

Aliens See a Blue Planet

Interstellar aliens cruising past Earth would see a blue planet 71% covered by water. They’d scan our oceans, see that 97% of Earth’s water is salty, and correctly figure that the intelligent lifeforms building satellites and cities are based on salty water. 

Stir a teaspoon of salt into a pint of water and take a gulp: it’s nasty, and about as salty as our blood. (More accurately, 9gm per liter. For the 96% of humanity who do not live in Myanmar, Liberia, or the USA, I’ll use metric measures for the rest of this essay.) Ocean water is four times more salty; we will die of thirst if we drink it. 

Three percent of our blue planet’s water is fresh and drinkable, but two-thirds is locked away in polar ice. Our lives rely on a scant one percent of Earth’s water: freshwater in our lakes, rivers, and underground stores. One percent: the number screams out a supply problem. 

Natural freshwater supply is limited; what about demand? These aliens regularly tour our solar system to watch humans progress. They’d definitely talk about our exploding freshwater use. 

“Supply and demand are out of whack. Wonder how they’re going to handle it?”

“Yup. More humans, more food, more industry, same water.”

“They’ve had nukes for 78 years and still exist, they can figure out water.” 

“Probably. How do they grow their food? Get closer. And this time, turn on the cloaking device and don’t wave at the space station, ok?”

Supply and Demand Are Out of Whack

Four billion people, over half of our fellow humans, now endure extreme freshwater scarcity for at least a month a year. Millions die. 

The U.N. predicts half of humanity may soon face water scarcity, and by the end of the decade 700 million people could be displaced by lack of water.

Lack of water will soon drive a tenth of the world’s population off their land. They will head for where taps always flow, the most developed nations; coastal patrols and border walls won’t hold them back. 

We’re draining Earth’s groundwater. Over the last 70 years, farms and households in America’s High Plains have drained 9% of the Ogallala aquifer, their primary freshwater source, pulling water up 9X faster than nature replenishes it. 

Even towns in California, the wealthiest state in the planet’s most prosperous nation, resort to trucking in bottled water because their wells have run dry. 

Some experts predict that by 2030 the gap between freshwater supply and demand will hit 40%. 

We have no choice. We have to reduce freshwater demand and increase freshwater supply. It’s a problem, which means it’s an opportunity for innovation. 

Global Freshwater Demand Breakdown

Agriculture is by far our greatest freshwater use. We humans have to eat, and growing food always comes first. Because geography, climate, culture, and freshwater sources differ drastically across the globe, so does freshwater demand. It’s what business calls a highly fragmented market. 

The United States, with the world’s highest GDP, uses 40% of its freshwater for agriculture and 47% for industry. Generating electricity is an industrialized nation’s hallmark, and 38% of the USA’s industrial water goes to cooling power plants (1). 

Dry, landlocked Niger, whose national $14B GDP is less than the total agriculture revenue of California’s Kern and Fresno counties, uses 91% of its freshwater to grow food and just 1.5% for industry. 

When looking for ways to reduce demand, you must get granular and look at each region and crop. It’s impossible to cover every case, but exploring some key scenarios reveals the wide range of freshwater challenges and solutions. 

Let’s start with where I grew up, California’s Central Valley. 

Where I Grew Up

Hot, arid, and brimming with rich soil, the Central Valley is Earth’s most valuable farmland. Water, stored high in the Sierra Nevada’s icy keeps, rampages as whitewater rapids in rivers like the American and Merced until it is captured and tamed by great dams near the Valley’s floor. From there, the California State Water Project, among humankind’s most audacious claims to exert control over nature, herds water in pipes and canals to quench fields bringing forth almonds, grapes, tomatoes, melons, maize, alfalfa, and over 250 other crops. 

Some of that water comes here, the Los Banos Main Canal. 

As a boy, I would ride my bike to a spot about 200 meters up the right bank in this picture and fish for catfish while listening to Lon Simmons’ melodious baritone call San Francisco Giants baseball games on the radio. But I knew the canal’s true purpose wasn’t recreation. It was dug for agriculture, the giant supporting everyone in town.

The Valley’s crops yield about $37 billion in annual revenue and provide an estimated 25% of the United States food. 80% of the world’s almonds grow in Valley orchards. The United States’ top five milk-producing counties are also there. With less than 1% of U.S. farmland, the Valley supplies 8% of the nation’s agricultural output by value and 40% of its fruits, nuts, and other table foods.

The thirsty industry consumes far more freshwater than the Sierra Nevada provides. 30% of the Valley’s irrigation comes from groundwater. This puny 1% of the nation’s farmland chugs 20% of the United States’ total groundwater draw. 

Not only are household wells running dry, but the relentless groundwater draw is sinking the land. This location, about 30km from my old fishing spot, dropped two meters in just 28 years.   

Until the early 1900s, the Valley boasted the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River, Lake Tulare. Farmers diverted river flows to feed a rapidly growing nation, and Lake Tulare dried into 2,000 square kilometers of fertile farmland. Tulare County is America’s top milk producer. 

But the farmers never truly tamed nature. Every 30 years or so, after sustained torrential rains as in 2023, Lake Tulare reappears like Brigadoon to tease us with the fleeting hope of water abundance, only to disappear in a mist of evaporation and the rumbling of diesel pumps. 

Water is the political issue in the Central Valley. Along I-5, the arrow-straight asphalt causeway binding the Valley’s 705 kilometers from North to South, farmers paint their views on wooden billboards: 

“Fire Pelosi” (Former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi)

“Is Growing Food Wasting Water?”

“Congress-Created Dust Bowl”

“(California Governor) Newsome: Stop Dumping Our Water and Jobs in the Ocean!”

“Build More Dams: Stop Man-Made Drought”

Kern County, the Valley’s southern end, was the USA’s agriculture revenue leader at $8.3B in 2022. Its top crop is water-thirsty almonds, and its U.S. Representative is Kevin McCarthy, the current U.S. House Speaker and second most powerful elected official in the United States. 

Like every water-stressed region, water challenges in my boyhood home can seem intractable. But don’t overthink it: the solution is using less freshwater and making more. The question is how. The opportunities are enormous.

Use Less Freshwater, But How?

Agriculture, a $5 trillion global industry is not an evil monster. Growing food takes water, and 20% of the average human’s freshwater intake comes not from beverages but from fruits and vegetables. The last time I checked, there are few hunter-gatherers among Earth’s 7.9 billion people. Unless we become digital consciousnesses uploaded on the Web, growing food will remain humanity’s highest-priority water use.

We have two basic options for using less freshwater to produce our food.

Option One: use less freshwater to grow what we’re eating now. That’s the focus in the rest of Part I. 

Option Two: eat different foods. That topic, and the start of how we can capture and create more freshwater, comes in Part II.

Use Less Freshwater to Grow What We’re Eating Now

A farm is a nutrition factory. The inputs are labor, sun, nutrients, and water, and the output is nutrition in the form of meats, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and grains. 

Quick aside: why are there farms in deserts?   Sunlight is a core farm-as-food-factory input. Deserts in Arizona and near-deserts like Kern County have tons of year-round sun, little freezing, and no tornados or hurricanes. With just seven inches of annual rainfall, Alfalfa farmers in central Arizona grow twelve annual alfalfa cuttings, while their upper Michigan peers, drenched with 24 inches of rain, manage only three cuttings in their short growing season. It makes sense that sun-drenched Kern County, with only 5.5 inches of annual rainfall, delivered that whopping $8.3B in agriculture output in 2022.   People have lived in deserts since the beginning of civilization. Freshwater may be hard to come by there, but deserts can be hugely productive farmland.

Big Opportunity: More Efficient Irrigation

Irrigation systems are production line equipment in our farm-as-nutrition-factory.

Ancient civilizations, such as the Sumerians in Mesopotamia and Egyptians along the Nile River, built canals, ditches, and dams to channel. Well-designed qanats, built millennia ago in Iran and elsewhere, still deliver water to farms and villages.

Such historic methods can be inefficient because of seepage, evaporation, and runoff. But water’s mass requires substantial energy for movement, where gravity excels over human or animal-powered pumps.

In the 20th Century, particularly after World War II, petrol-powered engines tapped into the vast solar energy stored as fossil fuels to transport freshwater across challenging terrains. However, the final delivery to plants didn’t significantly advance from ancient techniques.

Furrow and flood irrigation still dominate farming because it’s cheap and low-tech. Estimates range from 85%to 95% of the globe’s irrigated fields using this method. It’s only 50% efficient, half of the water runs off or percolates below crop roots. 

Petrol-powered pumps also made farm-scale sprinkler irrigation possible. Well-managed field sprinklers eliminate runoff, and keeping water in lines until final delivery minimizes evaporation. Capable of over 80% water efficiency, massive center-pivot sprinklers sweep around hundreds of hectares of otherwise marginal lands painting lush green clock faces of food crops. 

Every Drip Mattered in Israel

There are even more efficient solutions. 

“One day in the middle thirties, I happened to pass near the fence of Abraham Lobzowski’s house and saw there a tree some ten meters high, much taller than any other tree along this fence.”~ Simcha Blass (2)

Israel is mostly desert; freshwater management is a vital issue. What Simcha Blass, one of Israel’s great water system innovators, found that day was a tiny leak in a water pipe near the tree’s base. He correctly reasoned the tree was getting small, but regular water drips close to its roots. Water was well-spent, and the tree, rarely encountering water stress, focused its resources on growing and towered above its peers. 

Fast-forward twenty-five years to the early 1960s. Blass, then in retirement and having access to an array of plastics created during and after the war, had the time and materials to refine his concept: drip irrigation. 

The concept is straightforward. Plastic tubes to carry water, “drip lines,” are laid along each crop row. Plants are aligned with emitters, sometimes tiny nozzles and sometimes precise-diameter holes in the drip line. Water pumped into the drip line then trickles out to each plant. 

Drip drives irrigation efficiency to 95% by applying water directly in the root zone in small, controlled amounts. It also significantly improves crop growth and therefore yields, as in the case of Simcha Blass’ tree. In California’s Central Valley, almond growers have used drip to improve water efficiency by 33% since the 1990s. 32% of California’s agricultural acreage uses drip systems, including 48% of all irrigated lands. 

Even Drip for Rice

Rice, which claims 10% of global arable land, is a semi-aquatic plant that typically needs to be submerged in water for the first few weeks of growth. Standing water also inhibits weeds and pests that attack young roots and shoots. 

When you see a production process that has stayed the same in 50 or 100 or, in the case of rice paddies, thousands of years, there’s probably a good opportunity for innovation. Netafim, an Israel-based drip irrigation leader, has introduced systems for irrigating rice with drip irrigation and no flooding. Farmers testing the solution are reducing water use by 70% while increasing yields. 

Netafim is the original drip irrigation enterprise. It launched in 1965 by signing the first commercial licensing agreement for drip irrigation with Simcha Blass. 

Since drip’s debut nearly 60 years ago, inventors have tailored other types of micro-irrigation for specific situations. 

• Low-pressure emitters: Low-pressure emitters are similar to drip emitters but operate at a lower pressure. Farmers use them for crops sensitive to high pressure, such as strawberries.
• Trickle irrigation is a type of drip irrigation that uses a series of small holes to deliver water to the roots of plants. Its most common use is row crops like maize. 
• Micro-sprinklers are small sprinklers that release a fine mist of water. It works best on crops that need abundant water, such as vegetables. 

So, the global freshwater solution is easy: convert the 95% of all those flood-irrigated hectares to sprinklers, drip, or other water-miserly methods, right? Pop the champagne! 

Yeah…No. There are huge barriers, mainly cost and technical support. Take India as an example. India has 20.6% of the world’s irrigated land, more than twice as much as the United States, but 82% of its farms are small, marginal operations. These smallholders don’t have the means or the incentive to invest in pumps, pipes, filters, timers, sensors, installation, and maintenance for such highly-efficient water systems. Power grids are frequently fragile or inadequate. Irrigation failure causing crop failure jeopardizes a smallholder’s entire livelihood. 

85% to 95% of the globe’s irrigated fields do not use the most efficient irrigation. Find ways to address this enormous underserved market:

• Cost-reduce sprinkler, micro, and other efficient irrigation systems.
• Simplify those systems for higher reliability and minimal installation and maintenance know-how. 
• Drive micro irrigation systems to the limit: sensing and delivering precisely the right amount of water at just the right time to every individual plant on a farm. 
• Like Netafim, create ways to use highly-efficient irrigation systems with rice and other thirsty crops. 
• Deliver robust and high-integrity financing programs to enable less affluent farmers to afford more efficient water systems. 

Improving the lives of 8 billion people is a strong business premise. 

Big Opportunity: Same Plants, Less Water

We can also cut freshwater use in the farm-as-food-factory by building products, i.e., growing plants, that use less water to deliver the foods we like eating. It’s different from changing the world’s diet. More on that later. 

Humans have experimented with enhancing plants since the dawn of agriculture. Now, armed with cutting-edge tools like CRISPR gene editing, we possess a revolutionary capacity to fine-tune plant traits like drought and salt resistance. 

Humans Are Plant Breeders

This journey began with early agricultural practices, where natural selection and trial-and-error guided cultivating more desirable plants.

Over time, humans selected and saved seeds from plants with favorable traits to lay the foundation for intentional crop improvement.

The Egyptians and Babylonians documented methods of plant breeding and selection. The Ebers Papyrus, a medical text from about 1550 BCE, includes guidelines for selecting seeds and growing the best medicinal plants. 

Prolific Chinese inventor and agronomist Wang Zhen wrote in his 1313 “Book of Agriculture,”

“Cross-pollinate different varieties of crops to new, improved varieties.”

Thomas Jefferson, a plantation owner, and the United States’ third President, was a notorious botanical tinkerer. He experimented with everything from figs imported from France to salsify collected by Lewis and Clark. Jefferson wrote, “I am curious to select one or two of the best species or variety of every garden vegetable, and to reject all others from the garden to avoid the dangers of mixing or degeneracy.”

The world’s first seed-breeding company, Vilmorin, was founded in France in 1742. It continues to this day as Vilmorin & Cie with 750 employees. How many 280-year-old companies can you name? Improving crops is a forever-business where innovation never stops. 

Produce That Need Less Water

In the mid-20th Century, farmer-engineers in Israel used non-GMO breeding concepts similar to those employed by Jefferson and Wang to create less thirsty crop varieties in their water-scarce territory. 

They minimized parts of plants not heavily contributing to the grain or fruit. Short-stalk wheat is an example. “The stalk adds nothing to the wheat, so why waste water growing it?” noted accomplished plant breeder Dr. Shoshan Haran (3). Israeli plant geneticists bred tomatoes with fewer leaves and fruit growing close together – the more compact the plant, the less water required. 

As mentioned above, rice is a thirsty crop. How about engineering drought-tolerant rice? The International Rice Research Institute, IRRI, has invested in that goal for decades. 

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are transferring characteristics of plants that thrive in semi-arid regions to major crops like rice, maize, and soybeans. They bio-engineer plants to use less water. 

You’ll have a serious market if you can develop popular produce that grows with less water, whether you use old-school breeding or high-tech gene splicing. 

Global Challenge, Global Opportunity

Freshwater scarcity is a worldwide challenge. Humankind’s water journey began with ancient cultures, continues with our most innovative technologies, and will continue forever on Earth and any other that humans live on. Efficient irrigation methods can dent agriculture’s freshwater needs. Also, altering crops to thrive with less water is part of the solution. These approaches hold promise and can greatly benefit all 8 billion of us.

What Do the Aliens Think?

Back on the alien, ship our interstellar visitors want to learn more. 

“Decent start. Long way to go, though.” 

“Roger that. They’re in the ‘high-tech can solve anything” phase.”

“They all go through it, don’t they?” 

“Cruise by again. Let’s look at what they’re eating.” 

“Or not eating.”

“I wonder if they’re drinking, well, you know…”

What are your thoughts about water supply and demand?

Part 2: How does what we eat, and don’t eat, impact freshwater scarcity? 

References

• 1. United States Geological Survey. 2015. Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2010. Circular 1405. U.S. Geological Survey, Reston, VA. P.1 (https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1405/) 
• 2. Siegel, Seth M. “Let There Be Water.” St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2015. P. 55
• 3. Ibid, P. 69

Title Image:

Kanagawa oki nami ura

Katsushika, Hokusai, 1760-1849

Modifications made by Wilfredor

Public Domain