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One of the largest potable water users in Half Moon Bay could soon benefit from the flush of a toilet. Years in the making, officials on the coast are getting closer to designing a recycled water treatment plant to reduce the amount of potable water being used for landscape irrigation. Instead of discharging millions of gallons of treated sewage into the ocean every month, recycled water would be used to nourish a local golf course.

Water infrastructure globally needs major improvements. Replacing US water pipes alone would cost at least $1 trillion over the next 25 years, according to the American Water Works Association. This, coupled with increasing water scarcity, demands a huge investment in water distribution systems. A new report from Navigant Research says smart water products and technologies will play a growing role in upgrading and replacing these aging systems.

 

California’s sewage treatment plants produce billions of gallons of wastewater every year, nearly all of it dumped into rivers or the Pacific Ocean like garbage. And this is how it’s done all over the U.S.and most of the world. But what if we began looking at treated sewage, instead, as a valuable resource? That’s what David Jassby and his co-authors Kurt Schwabe and Quynh Tran at the University of California, Riverside, did in a recent study published by the journal Environmental Science &Technology.

The ravages of drought and wildfire over the past couple years in California should be mitigated somewhat by help available through the 2014 Farm Bill. Val Dolcini, administrator of the Farm Service Agency (FSA) toured fire- and drought-damaged locations in California as part of a federal effort to ensure farmers have adequate risk management tools at their disposal. Dolcini, who several years ago was promoted into the lead FSA position after serving as California’s FSA director, spoke recently with Western Farm Press to share some of the programs available for California and Arizona growers.

 

As California works to improve its official accounting of water for a range of purposes, one major area lacking widely accepted quantification is the consumptive use of water for agriculture, particularly evapotranspiration (ET) from crops.  In the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, such estimates are important, along with other hydrologic flows, for a variety of water rights, operational, and regulatory purposes. Consumptive use is the proportion of water removed that cannot be reused elsewhere in a basin. For crops in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, this is mostly evapotranspiration.