User “A” has some water rights that he or she would like to put to use for economic benefit, but with the current amount available and the current economics of the business in question, it’s just not penciling out. User “B” comes along offering to pay to put the water to an alternative use. What’s …
This open land on Albuquerque’s west side, a 20 mile drive from downtown but probably half of that as the crow flies, is getting a newly improved four-lane road and drainage. It’s currently home to a cluster of shooting ranges, the place where we turn our post-sewage plant poop into compost, and a small airport. …
[T]he traditional wooden fences of earlier American frontiers were simply not feasible in a landscape whose most distinctive feature was its lack of trees. Ranchers could of course get any amount of wood they needed from lumber merchants in Chicago and the Mississippi Valley – if they could afford it. Earlier fencing styles were so …
Continue reading ‘The importance of technology, barbed wire edition’ »
If you want a chance at beating a computer at chess, there is one simple way: Make the computer itself move the pieces across the chess board. For all the playing strength of the programs, the computer-driven robots that move the pieces don’t do such a great job. From Tyler Cowen’s fascinating Average Is Over, …
My name’s John, and I’m a water law junkie. I can’t get enough of Article III(d) of the Colorado River Compact. I love picking fights over the Upper Basin’s share of Mexico’s 1.5 million acre feet delivery obligation. I don’t care. I’ll argue either side. Just give me my fix. So I’ll happily stipulate that …
Continue reading ‘Brad Udall on the Colorado River and “the reality of the public”’ »
From the Telegraph: Water companies across a third of the country will be required to consider fitting all properties in their areas with a water meter and billing customers for every drop they use. Under the order, approved this week by Owen Paterson, the Environment Secretary, some family water bills could double. It follows warnings …
Continue reading ‘Latest conservation technology, the “water meter”, sweeps British Isles’ »
Supplying European farmers with guano would involve transporting large quantities of excrement across the Atlantic, a project that understandably failed to enthuse shipping companies. Charles Mann, in his fascinating 1491, on the slow uptake in Europe of the South American innovation of mining for fertilizer from Peru’s 147 guano islands. Poop jokes notwithstanding, the 19th …
How to really march against Monsanto: The problems in agriculture aren’t related to particular technology. They are related to what we, as a society, have valued. What we value (either in making law or making purchases) drives what farmers grow and thus why Monsanto is so successful. The full item is worth reading.
Given that I’ve got farming on the brain, our recent Amtrak trip across the western United States was fascinating. The train goes through a lot of farm country, I guess in part because there is a lot of farm country in the western United States. We saw strawberries in Oxnard, the metastasis that is California’s …
At dinner the other night, one of the people at the table commented about the risk we face when the Ogallala Aquifer, beneath the great plains, runs out, which he’d heard would happen in 20 years. Without taking action now to begin regrowing the native grasses needed to hold the plains in place, he’d heard, …
Continue reading ‘Why “when the Ogallala runs out” isn’t the right way to think about this’ »