California farmers are planting solar panels as water supplies dry up

Re:California farmers are planting solar panels as water sup... by KirinDave on Thursday August 01, 2019 @11:15PM (#20590459)

The cracked soil is a feature of being a desert, and since the entire point of this is that it's unsustainable to irrigate a desert that far from a major waterway, there isn't much to be done in the long term about what species thrive. That's the wages of climate change.

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Re:California farmers are planting solar panels as water sup... by hedora on Thursday August 01, 2019 @11:38PM (#20590520)

This area didn’t start out as desert. It is some of the most fertile (remaining) land on earth. (Like the Sahara used to be.)

It also currently, but unsustainably, produces a large fraction of all food on earth.

Here’s an article from 2012 with some anecdotes if numbers aren’t your thing: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/magazine/californias-cent...

Here is a table of crops: https://republicans-naturalresources.house.gov/newsroom/docu...

(it doesn’t seem to include exports, so the numbers are low-balled)

It is clearly being over-farmed, but the solution to that is crop rotation and letting the fields periodically go fallow.

Blanketing it with solar panels is likely irreversible.

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Re:California farmers are planting solar panels as water sup... by KirinDave on Friday August 02, 2019 @01:36AM (#20590841)

I'm quite aware of how much food California produces. I'm also quite comfortable with California not overfarming and just, you know, letting the rest of the country stop producing subsidized corn.

I can't help but feel like it's a subtle contradiction to propose that without constant watering the soil in California will crack up and vanish and that's not going to happen with crop rotation but will happen with crop rotation (as if many farms in California aren't already forced to do this because of the nature of our groundwater).

Are you also opposed to orchards? They're full of solar panels that make fruit rather than electricity.

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