Water Shortage In America

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Not only is the method Americans use to harvest water unsustainable, the way they prepare their farms for planting will also cause a lot of long term damages. As a matter of fact, with their tillage method and the type of crops they are growing, U.S. farmers are destroying the soil’s capacity to hold water within itself, which will render the land inarable in the future. In the northern Great Plains, conventional tillage, or the act of turning, stirring, and mixing topsoil to better prepare it for planting, has resulted in the decline of soil organic matter by 30% to 50% in the last 50 to 100 years (Baumhardt et al. 7). Conventional tillage destroys the soil by breaking it up to very small pieces, which made it so that they were easily eroded …show more content…
Some have argued that by continuing to distribute more water to farmers, the U.S. can resolve the drought in western United States. After all, it’s not like that the entire country is suffering from draught, so what’s the harm of channeling more water from one part of the country to another? Sadly, this approach had already been done, and it simply did not work. In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt approved many reclamation programs to build dams and canals to divert more water from the Colorado River to Southern California, which caused a detrimental effect on Southwestern ecosystems and did little to quench the thirst of South California’s farms (Burnett). One of the most important reason of studying history is to learn from the past, and as one can see from this example, the long term damage far outweighs the short term benefits. While the extra water did provide temporary relief to farmers in need, the effects didn’t last long, and it is literally causing the rivers to dry up. In fact, more than 70% of Colorado River’s water have been siphoned off for irrigation, and that has caused the water level to drastically decrease (Zielinski). If Americans continue to siphon away more water, it would not be hard to imagine that the river will dry up completely, causing catastrophic effects on local ecosystems and communities. The shrinking of the Colorado River is not an isolated incident by any means. It represents an unsustainable nationwide policy that treats water as an infinite resource, and this problem is only worsening. Many water basins in the Midwest, West, and Southwest are experiencing water shortages due to irrigation, and the water levels are projected to further decrease as runoff decrease and water use increase (Blanc et al. 16). Irrigation had already taken such a large toll on the country’s waterways, yet it barely helped farmers in the face of drought. It is time for the country to wake and and realize that it needs
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