Experiments May Prevent Water Wars

The ability to lessen the amount of water needed for agriculture would greatly reduce the possibility of international conflict and that's very important to US and world national security.

The Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M. have been experimenting with a method that uses roughly only one-hundredth the amount of fresh water needed to grow forage for livestock and this may leave much more water available for human consumption. As a byproduct, it may also add formerly untapped solar energy into the electrical grid. 42 wireless sensors are being installed in a hydroponic greenhouse under the supervision of the National Nuclear Security Administration's Sandia Labs because, as Ron Pate, a lab researcher says, ?EUR??,,????'??Disputes over water are possible, if not likely, causes for war in the 21st century.?EUR??,,????'?? Underground water supplies are dipping lower and lower because of increased pumping for agricultural use in many third world countries such as China, India, the Middle East and Mexico-not to mention the American southwest. Conventional farming methods in dry regions lose huge amounts of water through evaporation and over-absorption by soil. Preliminary indications are that hydroponic greenhouses in New Mexico could reduce the current 800,000 acre-feet of water to 11,000 acre-feet of water to produce an equivalent amount (dry weight) of livestock forage and do this on less then 1,000 acres instead of 260,000 acres. In addition to avoiding soil salination, hydroponic greenhouses do not require high-quality arable soil.