If you’ve gotten the chance to take our iPhone app—Waterprint—for a spin, you are probably aware that many of your favorite foods and beverages have rather large water footprints: due, in part, to the amount of water required for agricultural irrigation. Case in point: wine.
As you may or may not know, our homebase of Santa Barbara neighbors one of California’s most-celebrated wine regions: the Santa Ynez Valley. Vintners in the valley must make judicious use of the limited water resources at their disposal, and when questioned about their irrigation techniques, they are happy to discuss their conservation efforts. Nevertheless, on average, one glass of wine comes with the relatively high water footprint of 32 gallons (beer, for example, is slightly lower, at 29 gallons per glass).
As we explain in Waterprint, the water footprint totals of foods and beverages are calculated by combining the actual water in the product with all the virtual water embedded in every action associated with the cultivation, collection, and delivery of that item. The cultivation and exportation of food brings with it a variety of embedded water costs, including those associated with the byproducts created by food cultivation (agricultural runoff for example), as well as the items and actions necessary for the production and distribution of food, including insecticides, fuel required for transportation and the manufacture of the item’s packaging.
All this talk of the imbedded water costs behind agricultural irrigation brings me to a new irrigation project recently launched in another of California’s wine producing regions: Paso Robles. As reported by Western Farm Press, in an area east of highway 101—identified as the “Estrella-Creston Area of Concern,” an irrigation-monitoring project has been established with the goal of estimating the regions average annual irrigation water use. The hope is that having precise use numbers will help with future planning and regulatory decisions.
The study will be conducted using data loggers and pressure switches to record when irrigation systems are being used and how much water is being flushed through those drip lines and/or sprinklers. Rainfall data will also be collected over the course of the three-year study, which is being conducted with the complete cooperation of area vintners.
So what do you think? Is there a point at which agricultural and municipal water use meet? What responsibility do water purveyors have to track and monitor local agricultural water use? Is there a way to bring these two competing interests together to map out a better water resource management plan for water-scarce regions like California’s wine country?
To learn more about water footprints, go to www.waterfootprint.org/.
To download our free iPhone/iPad app, go to waterprint.net.
To learn more about the Paso Robles study, go to www.vineyardteam.org/search/search.php?query=battany&search=1