Good progress with potatoes

Things have certainly become very busy on the farm since my last instalment. Here at North Paddock potato planting is well under way. The harsh winter has produced a good friable tilth and seedbeds are excellent.
We farm potato hills in the autumn using a Dammer-Diker. This is a great bit of kit. Sub-soiling legs travel down the centre of each hill, followed by bulking bodies forming the hills. A novel wheel then digs small divots in between each hill. In winter these help trap snowfall and increase moisture accumulation; during the season they assist with drainage and prevent irrigation run-off.
In spring we simply travel over the hills once with a packer to firm them up and break any remaining clods, and then they are ready for planting. A warm period of weather with temperatures as high as 26ºC has seen tubers going into lovely warm seed-beds.
The output and accuracy of our 6-row Spudnik planter is good; planting 60 acres a day (half a Pivot circle) and achieving 92% efficiency.
Good progress was being made until very suddenly the clouds appeared, snowfall started and all fieldwork subsequently ground to a halt. I write this column after a week of temperatures hovering around zero with regular snowfall. At least it will provide good moisture for emerging potatoes and good conditions for seeding grain and canola. I shall be patient and return to the hobby which occupies farmers all over the world - checking weather forecasts.

Water for farming

Most people may drink only two litres of water a day, but they consume about 3,000 if the water that goes into their food is taken into account. The rich gulp down far more, since they tend to eat more meat, which takes far more water to produce than grains.

So as the world’s population grows and incomes rise, farms will (if they use today’s methods) need a great deal more water to keep everyone fed: 2,000 more cubic kilometres a year by 2030, or over a quarter more than they use today.

Yet in many farming regions, water is scarce and likely to get scarcer as global warming worsens. The world is facing not so much a food crisis as a water crisis.

The solution, is more efficient use of water (Pivot Irrigation Systems) or, "more crop per drop”. Some 1.2 billion people, about a fifth of the world’s population, live in places that are short of water. Farming accounts for roughly 70% of human water consumption.

So when water starts to run out, as is happening in northern China, southern Spain and the western United States, among other places, farming tends to offer the best potential for thrift. But governments, whether to win votes or to protect the poor, rarely charge farmers a market price for water. So they are usually more wasteful than other consumers—even though the value they create from the water is often less than households or industry would be willing to pay for it.