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A comment on Epic Drought in West Is Literally Moving Mountains. Parent comment

Re:Epic Drought in West Is Literally Moving Mountains by radicality on Friday August 22, 2014 @08:32AM (#8211785)
How can one get that 20-25 gallons of water figure?

I don't know much about agriculture/life-cycle of water, but say you water your rice field – then some of the water is absorbed by rice so that it can grow, but the rest clearly must stay in the ground, evaporate, and then come back down as rain, no? How does a serving of rice then use up 20-25 gallons of water?

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Re:Epic Drought in West Is Literally Moving Mountains by monort on Friday August 22, 2014 @08:45AM (#8211821)
According to this table you need 2500 liters of water per 1 kg of rice:

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/jan/10/how-muc...

25 gallons per serving seems to be underestimated.

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Re:Epic Drought in West Is Literally Moving Mountains by maxerickson on Friday August 22, 2014 @01:34PM (#8213073)
In this context, "use" means something like "remove from the predictable supply".

So if you don't have any rainfall, you have to remove 25 gallons from your source to grow the rice.

Groundwater replenishment and rainfall would already be counted as part of your predictable supply.

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