https://kswheat.com/david-leonard-put-wheat-under-pivot-win-...

> Leonard’s operation near Goodland is a diversified operation with a mix of dryland and irrigated acres in addition to a small cow-calf operation. Encouraged by his PlainsGold seed rep, he entered the yield contest for the first time in 2022. His entry came from a field planted to certified seed wheat that followed pinto beans, which provided some moisture profile.

> “Our soil will hold about 1.8 inches of moisture per foot,” Leonard said. “So, if we have six feet of subsoil, we have some gas in the tank. We had some of that last year, but we don’t have that this year.”

> From planting until harvest, the field only received 6.2 inches of moisture, so Leonard pumped another 10 inches of water to help the wheat crop along. He also furtigated nitrogen through the pivot to further boost yields. The widespread drought conditions last growing season meant it was too dry for even the weeds to grow, so he did not apply any fungicide.

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https://api.mountainscholar.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/9...

Page 6:

> The four major grain crops grown in Kansas (corn, soybean, grain sorghum and wheat) have experienced upward trends in yield (Figures 7 – 10). Corn yield has had the most dramatic increase for both irrigated and dryland production with irrigated corn yield improvements of approximately 2.5 bushels/acre for the each year of record, This result is more than twice the dryland rate of 1.1 bushels/acre. The average irrigated yield increase is 0.59 bu/ac, 0.60 bu/ac and 0.31 bu/ac for soybean, grain sorghum and wheat respectfully. Irrigated yield increase trends have been larger than for dryland.

Page 8 figure 10 shows the yield trends for wheat - both irrigated and dryland since 1974.

It seems like most significant agriculture extension programs have advice for irrigating wheat, so presumably someone is doing it, even if it isn't common. If drought is reducing yields significantly I wonder if the amount is going to start growing.

E.g.

https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/considerations_for_raising_irr...

https://extensionpubs.unl.edu/publication/ec731/2009/pdf/vie...

https://ucanr.edu/blog/uc-small-grains-blog/article/irrigati...

https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/considerations_for_raising_irr...

https://waterquality.colostate.edu/documents/factsheets/0055...

No.

> Plenty of countries completely rely on desalination already

Let's take Kansas... the largest producer of wheat in the US. https://www.statista.com/statistics/190376/top-us-states-in-...

Kansas wheat crop down 38% from last year https://youtu.be/QjrhAXzEGDc

Kansas cannot run on desalination plants ... there's no salt water. The gulf coast of Texas is 1000 miles away.

While aquifers do regenerate (Groundwater levels in the Kansas High Plains aquifer see first overall increase since 2019 https://kgs.ku.edu/news/article/groundwater-levels-in-the-ka... ) I'm going to point out that news article has seven years of declines previously.

The aquifer that Kansas draws upon is the Ogallala Aquifer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer ) and you can see the rate of depletion at https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/nation... - there are spots in Kansas where the groundwater dropped by 150 feet from before it was tapped with deep wells to 2015.

Yes, most of the earth is covered by water. Getting that water to Kansas and Nebraska and North Dakota, however, is a problem.

The problem is that aquifers are really cool natural filters, and only refill as fast as groundwater moves through the soil. So they're a finite resource. Instead of depleting them, people who want to farm in deserts should probably start desalinating or whatever themselves instead of assuming subsequent generations will do it.

> Plenty of countries completely rely on desalination already

There are only 3 countries that do: Bahamas, Maldives, and Malta.

Other countries that depend heavily, but not completely: Qatar, Kuwait, UAE.

Desalination isn't really much of an option for deeper inland and much higher than sea level areas. Tell me, which ocean is Dodge City KS going to pull from?

and desalination is so efficient/cheap at scale already that it barely affects water prices in those countries (less than 10% already, further shrinking every year as methods improve)

This is by far the dumbest post in this thread by a mile. It's funny saying AI will make people dumber when you've obviously don't understand this issue in the first place. Food security is human security. When you take a huge percentage of a countries grow able land out because it stops raining then food proces go up, often dramatically.

Desalination uses far more power than AI ever would.

Plants require a ton of desalinated water and Animals who eat plants as such require desalinated water too.

There are countries in middle east like UAE, Saudi arabia etc. which rely on desalination but they are relying it for the clean drinking water, not for the food generation. They import almost 90% of their food iirc.

The amount of energy required to desalinate all water and the environmental impacts to get that energy would literally be quite catastrophic and I am not even sure if it would be even feasible and food prices would literally skyrocket or food would simply be produced even more less by magnitudes of order.

The energy required to transport water from the coast to our major agricultural areas would be astronomical, and the resulting brine waste would create its own environmental crisis. If we get to a point where we're forced to bypass natural water cycles entirely, our native ecologies will have already collapsed. At that point, we'll be trying to engineer our way out of a total ecological apocalypse as masses starve in bread lines.