It seems obvious that encouraging farmers to switch over to more efficient irrigation techniques should help tackle our planet’s growing water shortage. Obvious, but not necessarily correct, according to a study of farming in the parched US Southwest.
Drip irrigation, which trickles water onto plant roots, requires about half as much water as flooding an entire field. Yet if farmers switch entirely to the new technique, they would end up extracting even more water from the environment than they do now, says Frank Ward of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.
Ward studied both types of irrigation in the…
