Helium

usda should be incentivizing farmers

 

That comment about incentivizing farmers may be tongue in check. The Government is currently head over heels invloved throwing money at Agriculture. How much gets to the actual farmer is another matter!

U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) | GRANTS.GOV

(1) Ghana Poultry Project: US Department of Agriculture invests about $200 million - Business (28-9-21) - Bing video

Last years Department of Agriculture Budget = $354.4 Billion.

 

i was serious. i cali, the state incentivizes homeowners to remove grass and install xeriscape i believe.

the same could be done with drip irrigation in agriculture. or, higher water costs could be the incentive to reduce water use, much like gasoline and electric cars

 

I agree with using the higher water cost as the primary incentive. If I was large scale farmer, I would spend a lot of time minimizing my cost and increasing my harvest to maximize my returns. That is good business. People who don't do this will not be as successful as those who do.

In our small town every spring we have lawn care after lawn care company sending out brochures and knocking on the door to " take care of our lawn". I have a good size garden and 8 fruit trees on our lot. 2 peach, 5 apple and a cherry tree as well as blueberries, strawberries, blackberries and raspberries. I am a believer in organic gardening and the last thing I want is a 'perfect lawn' with the accompanying applications of herbicides, insecticides synthetic fertilizers etc. Our lawn is a natural mix of clover, grass etc that we keep mowed to about a 3 inch height. Our lawn is home to earthworms, bees, seed gathering birds, hummingbirds, butterflies etc.

Have never understood the attraction of a 'perfect lawn' the accompanying dollar cost as well as environmental damage. The fact someone would have to be incentivized to have a natural lawn is difficult for me to understand. You couldn't pay me to not be environmentally responsible.

We don't water our lawn, pay a lawn company thousands of dollars to make it 'perfect' and it does just fine year after year.

I might go the opposite direction and charge individuals an environmental surcharge for the 'perfect lawn' - fining them for the excess water it takes and fining them a fixed amount for the environmental damage they do by applying lawn chemicals. The collected fines could then be distributed to environmental groups and causes to mitigate the damages these perfect lawns are doing to the environment.

 

I was always mystified by water conservation efforts that required lawn removal, as if lawns required irrigation. Growing up in a rural drylands (but not desert) area, I was accustomed to lawns being green in the wet season, and a dormant brown in the dry season. No irrigation required, though it did need grasses that could tolerate long dry dormancy, just as the pastures and native grasslands did.

Of course, this practice is short of active xeriscaping, some have derided dormant grass as zero-scaping.

 

Many lawns are made up of grass species that aren't suited for the climate though. People have been installing temperate, four season lawns in places like Southwestern deserts. Then there are the people that want their lawn green the entire backyard season, which leads to watering grasses that are suitable for the environment, but would be going dormant normally.

So, like most of the time, regulations have to handle to 'lowest common denominator'. Sensible solutions, like drought tolerant grass that goes brown, get excluded because people can't handle nuance in groups.

 

i think lawn seed was local way back in the day. it suited the climate and did fairly well. but with the development of different strains for athletic turf, constant marketing hype and peer pressure, people gradually wanted that for their yard.
i was watching a golf tournament in vegas over the weekend. you'd never know it was the desert. of course, downtown vegas is no bastion of water conservation

 

guys look at this business service

California's #1 Lawn Painting Service - Featured on Good Day Sacramento - Home (xtremegreengrass.com)

 

Home Depot here carries a seed mixture developed by Penn State for the region.

The mixtures from the brand names might be designed to sell the complimenting fertilizers.

 

Speaking of California water ...

California lawmakers mull buying out farmers to save water

Some lawmakers are thinking of taking about $1.5 Billion from the state's $100 B surplus, and buying up some agricultural senior water rights, without or without the associated land.

I like the concept. If done intelligently, this could be quite helpful and valuable, though there are numerous ways to squander it too. But at the "average price of $7,500 per acre foot", that is only 200,000 acre-feet. It seems like a rather large multiple of the total annual value of the crops it can produce.

The article has a blunder: "A typical household uses 1 acre foot of water each year." That is an absurdly high 892 gallons per day, which is close to the state-wide per-capita usage when including all agricultural uses too.

My household runs roughly 0.05 acre-foot per person per year (45 gallons/day), including garden drip irrigation in a typical summer. With last summer's heat, we were high at 0.054. Our best a few years back was 0.036.

Separately:
State Agencies Recommend Indoor Residential Water Use Standard to Legislature

"The Department of Water Resources (DWR) and the State Water Resources Control Board (State Water Board) have submitted a report to the Legislature recommending that urban water suppliers achieve an indoor water use efficiency standard of 55 gallons per capita per day by 2023, declining to 47 gallons per day by 2025, and 42 gallons by 2030 and beyond. If adopted by the Legislature, the standards recommended by DWR and the State Water Board would be implemented at the water supplier level and would not apply to individual customers.

... The report notes that the current statewide median indoor residential water use is 48 gallons per capita per day, and that a quarter of California households already use less than 42 gallons per capita per day."

Some years ago I heard of some communities averaging far above 100 gpd, due mostly to yard irrigation. While some other large communities had already pushed their averages down to around 40 gpd, well before the current requests to save water.

 

I had an chem intern project in college years ago looking at pyrophoricity of iron sulfide, so I know that word. Studied the oxidation. Did not know about the concrete issue. Story of my career, my boss felt since iron sulfide was found in nature, it must not be pyrophoric (spontaneously igniting). So I prepared a small batch of pure iron sulfide and it burned. Never could get on the good side of my bosses.

Just as they were talking about Helium shortage a few months back, our local Walmart had shelf full of helium tanks $20 for balloons.