After a conversation with my sister-in-law, Dawn, about how much water is wasted through our everyday domestic activities, I was curious -what percentage does that use account for in the grand scale of things? Half? One quarter? Ten percent? As it turns out, according to a 2005 report from the USGS, domestic water use accounts for only one percent of overall water use in the United States. Thermoelectric production is the largest drain at %49, while irrigation accounts for 31% of U.S. water use.
This surprising fact got me thinking about the center-pivot-irrigation systems spread across the vast majority of the agricultural landscape in the U.S., the use of which results in a mosaic of circular formations hemmed in by the endless grid of Midwestern and Western land allocation.
The center-pivot systems used to be set up with a deep well drilled in the center, or pivot location, which would pump water up from an underground aquifer and then spray that water in a controlled fashion around that point, resulting in the even irrigation of crops in a circular plot. Marvelous hydrodynamic devices, the irrigators were driven by the pressure of the water themselves, so that the product being delivered was also the force by which the delivery mechanism itself functioned. Most modern center-pivot systems are now either hydraulically or electrically driven.
The pursuit of agricultural efficiency runs head up against the imposition of the grid. I thought I had seen somewhere the idea of allocating center pivots in honeycomb plots, which would result in a more efficient system with more land covered. However, such a system would also be intrinsically more convoluted to navigate through (no more straight roads through).
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