Kind: captions
Language: en
[Music]
i'm walking into the
farmer's market at the ferry building in
san francisco on this lovely saturday
morning
we're going to talk to some farmers
about drought how it's affecting them
and what the public needs to know
you know we're all under rationing now
and it's only
july the creek is really really low
this year has been the hardest year in
the past decade and
we have only yielded around 20 of our
crops
well it's just the sheer quantity of
water that it takes to grow
stone fruit it takes to grow apples it
takes to grow almonds
and i think the quantity is just
something that you know the normal
you know city dweller has no concept of
a lot of the
customers have seen an increase in
prices they don't really understand that
our whole
life and farm relies on the weather and
when there's no rain
then we have less product and just to
barely stay afloat
definitely fearful for the future of
farming
so you've just heard farmers annabelle
emily molly and adam
talk about how they're struggling in
these dry times but it's not just the
bay area it's
all through the western half of the u.s
almost all of arizona is dealing with
drought with more than half of the state
facing exceptional drought conditions
the largest reservoir in the united
states is running on empty
lake mead behind iconic hoover dam is at
its lowest level in nearly 90 years
that means water shortages higher fire
risks
farmers in parts of new mexico say they
are being asked not to water their crops
100 percent of california is now in a
drought and if you could believe it
it could get even worse it's hot and dry
and much of the western us is
experiencing a historic mega drought
now there's a couple questions we gotta
ask like how are scientific innovations
helping us adapt
to and prepare for droughts like this
one particularly their effects on our
food supply
also who's especially vulnerable and how
does
all this affect those of us who don't
live in drought-prone areas
because guess what it does this is nova
now where we use
science to quench your curiosity as we
explore
all these headlines i'm alok patel
[Music]
my time at the farmer's market helped me
see even more starkly
how this mega drought can affect our
food security
so even if there's no drought where you
live it impacts
all of us and in this world of
smartphones smart assistance and gps
navigation
can smart techs save our food from
drought
and farmers aren't the only ones
thinking about this issue
some really concerned and tech savvy
teens are rolling up their sleeves too
so i live in the central valley in
california
when we're hit with a drought and being
an agricultural
focused area it really affects us like
yeah my name is john estrada i'm
16 years old my name is arya chan i'm 18
years old
arya lives in new jersey i go to india
every year
because my grandparents and a lot of my
family live there and
um when you're driving through there
there's
massive feels that they have problems
with
feeding everybody when you see that
these fields
that you know have all the potential to
solve these problems or just sitting
with wilted plants but
their lack of really advancements in
their irrigation has
prevented them from being able to
efficiently use their water
and therefore keep reserves of their
water so
john and arya are budding scientists
they won top awards in this year's
regeneron international science and
engineering fair
with a set of impressive projects to
address farming's drought issues
here's john again one of the biggest
issues in farming is
it's almost guesswork when to water your
plants it's like
you could try to water your plants based
on how you
think your plants are doing the problem
with that is once you start seeing the
telltale signs of drought stress in
plants
it's already too late your yield is
affected so what i'm hoping to solve
is to prevent over watering implants but
to also
prevent a loss in crop yield john's
project
improves on existing tools to track
plant thirst with a special camera and a
new measurement model
essentially what my project does is uses
pixel by pixel
measurements from the canopy
temperatures of the plants
and then it uses red green and blue
light wavelengths
and as well as soil moisture data and
these are used to create
an artificial intelligence model that
will predict
drought stress this model is one he
developed the ai drought assessment
model
that's ai as in artificial intelligence
which is
computer simulating human thinking but
faster and more accurately
and john just calls it ada for short
it's easier
and he found that his ada model is just
as accurate as the current standard at
measuring drought stress
the crop water stress index but because
john's approach uses more direct
indicators from the plant it can alert
you to drought stress
more quickly so you can adjust your
irrigation even earlier
also to take his measurements john built
a robotic arm
kind of cool the robotic arm was used
so that every time i took a picture it
would be at the same exact
spot the same exact distance from the
plant so
my measurements were completely accurate
there was no margin
for error so the more accurate your
measurements are of drought stress the
better you can assess how thirsty the
plants are
and the less water you waste arya
developed his own approach to address
this same problem in developing
countries
where technological and financial
resources are more limited
instead of the farmer having to make
their
own adjustments and use their intuition
to figure out how much water they think
each plant should be given um really
computer should be deciding that
so he'd have a drone fly around taking
measures of crop health
and then send that over to a computer to
analyze which then tells farmers how to
customize their water use
there's a term for the kind of
innovations john and arya are working on
precision agriculture that means
applying advanced technologies to target
your farming practices
more effectively like drone surveillance
or artificial intelligence
yeah that's what the kids are into these
days when i was in high school
my science project was swabbing random
parts of the skull to see how much
bacteria i could grow
but to be fair i didn't have the robots
and drones to play with so
it's a little different now imagine just
what kind of precision agriculture you
could come up with if you had a super
computer
which brings us to our next guest hello
everybody my name is caillou guan
i'm a blue waters associate professor at
university of illinois at ubana
champaign
i read that your grandfather wanted you
to be an astronaut
that's true that's a that's a true story
so my chinese name is kaiju
and literally that means to develop the
universe
um and then my grandpa really hopefully
you know he give me that name because he
want me to be an astronaut
i was always very grateful and it's
inspiring
well guan is not an astronaut he's an
ecohydrologist
studying how plant growth interacts with
the environment
he does his research in the so-called
corn belt of the midwest
and it's a fitting name because
one-third of the world's corn and
soybean is produced there
so he might not be working in space but
he's teamed up with the folks who do
i'm working with nasa and i got a lot of
honors and awards for nasa focusing on
our planet
he's one of the very select few who gets
to use blue waters
for his research that's the name of one
of the biggest supercomputers
ever built at any us university why do i
need to use a supercomputer to address
a crop problem we actually use satellite
remote sensing data
that you collected from the space a lot
of them from by nasa
or european space agency the remote
sensing data he's talking about are from
super high resolution images
showing detailed information about
farmlands
millions of gigabytes of data from
multiple satellites that have been
looking down at earth
and recording the conditions of crops
combined with data collected on the
ground
it's a gigantic data set one you need a
supercomputer for
we also use models to do simulations
at individual farm level and then in
champaign county which is where i
located at this moment
there are tens of thousands of fields
just in one county
multiply this by thousands of counties
in the nation
in the corn belt and then so it's a
millions of fields that are required to
be calculated
so this is precision ag on steroids
how does crunching all this data work to
help farmers
well you could analyze a field then
you'd come up with a targeted
prescription for your field under
different conditions
for exactly how much say fertilizer to
use and when and where to apply it
that save you money but also protect the
environment by reducing greenhouse gas
emissions
from fertilizers so all this gonna help
farmers at the field scale we enable
that
precision practice on the ground
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guan's team is now testing better ways
to irrigate based on a finer
understanding of the way drought
affects plants you know traditional way
of defining drought
is based on the amount of rainfall and
then
the amount of the soil moisture in the
on the ground
but there is also a very important
component
that sometimes has been understudied and
overlooked
if the atmosphere become very dry
when the atmosphere is dry it sucks
water out of the plant and the plant
needs more water
but plants have a clever way of
regulating themselves through tiny pores
on their leaves
called stomata and then so plant
has the ability to adjust if the
atmosphere is very dry
then the model is smart enough they tend
to close their stomata
and by doing so plants reduce
the water use but that has a side effect
because this the model is also well
planned to get the co2 in to grow
for photosynthesis getting less co2
means less photosynthesis
which is how plants make the food they
need to grow that
impact seems to be more directly related
to the loss
of the yield and that's one more way
climate change is bad news
because the hotter it is the drier the
atmosphere
causing more stressed out plants the
good news is
this new understanding of drought allows
guan's team to develop
even more precise approaches to managing
crops water needs
now this may sound counterintuitive but
guan's research has found that sometimes
even when atmospheric dryness is high
soil moisture can still be relatively
normal
in those situations the traditional
irrigation solution may not
ask you to irrigate because they only
measure things based on the soil
moisture
threshold but with atmospheric dryness
plants are going to actually respond um
by using more water
we suggest that to put more water into
the system
in those cases and then the similar
condition is that when soil moisture is
actually relatively
low but the atom's fuel is not very dry
the plants then won't be so thirsty and
in those cases
the irrigation amount can be actually
reduced than before
so by factoring in the atmospheric
dryness along with soil moisture
we can design smarter irrigation systems
you can actually
save water by 10 or even further and
without
sacrificing your crop yield this could
be a
smarter way to both reduce water use but
also help
you know crop fight drought this all
makes sense
but as you can imagine precision
agriculture technology isn't something
you can just go
walk into a shop and buy like another
piece of machinery
so scientists like guan are working with
farmers groups to make this tech
more widely available to what extent
is this already happening in farms right
now like so what extent are all the
technologies we're talking about
being employed if you think about
irrigation
just as an example um probably only five
percent
farmers uh have a sensor on the ground
uh and then you know probably only about
20 to 30 percent of the farmers have
some you know guidance
from you know some irrigation companies
so in
the equipment companies majority of the
farmers still
depend on the weather forecast or their
neighbor
suggestion or their neighbors action to
make their decision
so in other words that there is a wide
space
for improvement so even though the
so-called ag tech development
it's kind of booming right now farmers
adoption of the precision act technology
is still pretty low
and in brazil in other asian countries
or in africa
like the adoption rate about any
precision act
tools are extremely low at this moment
guan thinks governments could help by
offering incentives for adopting these
methods
but he thinks the technology itself
isn't quite ready for prime time
so i challenged guan to envision this
tool
i believe for seeing is believing
you know just imagine that if we have an
app in your in your iphone
that if you open the app
you can instantly see a field that you
are working on
you are able to see that field and you
able to look at the past
history of that field in the past
multiple years
and then also provide a few simple
information but easy to consume type of
information like
at this moment what's your crop stress
condition
and how much is because of the amount of
water in the soil how much is because of
the dryness condition in the atmosphere
you want to first build a trust like
they they know that
they are not looking at like something
made up illusion right
guan says if he had a magic wand he'd
give all farmers a special piece of tech
it would show them the unintended
consequences of all their past actions
on a loss of yield and harm to the
environment then it would give them
customized tools
to do better see our landscape
is changing towards a more
you know smarter and a more sustainable
way of managing the landscape i think
that's gonna be the ultimate goal for me
and and for a lot of my colleagues
making technology for coping with
drought accessible to those who need it
is one
thing but there are communities who are
especially vulnerable to drought
and they're doing their best to use the
tools they have indigenous peoples
throughout the world are more
susceptible
to climate change impacts when we come
back we'll hear from a water management
expert from the navajo nation
there are over 570 tribal nations in the
united states
and not all native americans have the
same language the culture and tradition
and for the navajos we
we don't dance for rain but we do pray
for rain
crystal tully cordova is based in rock
springs new mexico
and she's a principal hydrologist with
the navajo nation department of water
resources
in the water management branch and when
we think about indigenous people there's
a strong spirituality component
that is a part of our identity
[Music]
that's her introducing herself in the
traditional way of the navajo people
also known as dinet
i am of the bitter water clan born for
the tango people clan
my maternal grandfather's clan is the
yucca fruit strung on a line
and my paternal grandfather's plan is
the water that flows together
first of all that's beautiful thank you
for sharing that
you literally originated from a water
clan and you went on to become
a water researcher in hydrology
what's the significance of water for the
navajo nation
and the net philosophy there's a phrase
simply put in english it is water is
life
but when you think about the literal
translation
meaning water is our vitality it
provides our livelihood so it's
everything from
providing the medicinal plants that we
need providing nourishment for our
bodies
and a large portion of our bodies are
made up of water
the navajo nation is located in the
southwestern part of the united states
it's in the four corners region within
the area of arizona new mexico and utah
and it's the tribe with both the largest
land area and largest population in the
united states
you know i'm in california and we're
also facing you know kind of a
scary drought season what image comes to
your mind
when when i say the word drought the
landscape
so being able to see how continuous
drought over the
past 20 plus years has impacted the
navajo nation
evidence of this are definitely the
wildlife migration
impacts to water haulers as well as
public water systems
water haulers are people who don't have
pipe water in their homes
so they need to go to a water point to
collect their water in containers
to use for everyday tasks like hygiene
cooking drinking or taking care of pets
or livestock
it's important to have a water point in
your community because if you don't
then you then rely on unregulated water
sources and the navajo nation has had
legacy mining issues that have impacted
water and so it's important that
people have quality water that they know
won't be harmful to their health
because there are unregulated waters
throughout the navajo nation that have
high uranium and high arsenic
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as we've already heard lacking water can
really impact the food supply which is
already precarious for the navajo
the navajo nation is also a food desert
in addition to being like a high
mountain desert we only have 13 grocery
stores for an area
similar in size to west virginia and
when you think about that
it's pretty astonishing so therefore you
know
many of us have a desire to grow our own
food and produce and be able to can
and dry food so that we can prepare and
make it through the winter
although a lot of the navajo nation land
is arid they traditionally have grown
their own crops
the three sister crops that we continue
to grow and those are
corn beans and squash the corn
is a part of our ceremonies as well
the pollen from the corn are used for
prayers
but also the corn itself is are not only
used for consumption but also used for
things like
an earthen cake during a puberty
ceremony
when a navajo woman goes from a
transition of a girl to a woman
tuli cordova wants to make sure we value
traditional knowledge as well
for indigenous people we've been here a
long time
and we don't need science to be able to
tell us
that things are changing even throughout
my own time
i've noticed that change with regards to
drought to where
natural lakes that we used to see on the
top of the chiska mountain some of the
higher elevation areas in the navajo
nation
those lakes are no longer there they're
more
just natural depressions without holding
any water at all
to better understand drought we need to
understand the water cycles
first now earth's water is in constant
flux connecting the ocean
land and atmosphere now visualize this
water on the earth evaporates rises into
the atmosphere
cools and condenses into rain or snow in
clouds
then it falls again to the surface as
precipitation and collects in the ground
rivers lakes streams and the oceans
[Music]
in the navajo nation we do have some
perennial streams we have ephemeral
streams
perennial means a stream that runs year
round
and ephemeral is a stream that runs only
after precipitation
we have precipitation two times a year
in the summertime
as well as the winter the summer
precipitation also goes by a jazzier
name the north american monsoon
we're looking forward to the monsoon in
the navajo nation
it's pretty hot and dry so it's
important to have that understanding
that all water is connected
evapotranspiration contributes to
precipitation which
can contribute to the flows and
ephemeral and perennial streams while
also
helping recharge groundwater
with less precipitation stream flows
decline and the levels of water in lakes
and reservoirs decrease
when dry weather goes on and water
supplies are not refilled
an area enters what we know as drought
actually there are different types of
drought if you ever look up something
called a u.s drought monitor you can see
that there's different magnitudes of
drought
there's also different lengths of
drought the u.s drought monitor is a map
that shows parts of the country that are
in drought you've probably seen this map
being shown on the news
it's that map with yellow orange and red
blobs
and it uses five classifications
abnormally dry
showing areas that may be going into or
coming out of drought
and four levels of drought itself
moderate severe
extreme and exceptional you can check it
for free
at droughtmonitor.unl.edu and it updates
every thursday
according to the drought monitor 96 of
the navajo nation is experiencing
extreme to exceptional drought that's
basically
as bad as it gets so bone dry
that's also bad when we think about fuel
for wildfires
the navajo nation department of
emergency management
has coordinated their community's
response to drought since 1988.
they have a drought contingency plan
that combines long-term and short-term
mitigation strategies
it guides the navajo residents to be
proactive before a drought even begins
because of the large area and the
limited infrastructure it's difficult to
be able to do real-time data
because you know cell phones don't even
work in some areas
and we have individuals within the water
monitoring and inventory group be able
to drive
to 85 sites throughout arizona new
mexico and
utah to be able to evaluate the
month-to-month
variation of precipitation one thing
that frustrates me
and i'm going to guess that it
frustrates you as well is that when
we're
addressing the problem when it happens
that we're not necessarily being
preventative about it
and i think sometimes you know people
have a hard time identifying with a
problem that doesn't affect them
so like hey you know i don't feel
climate change i'm good and i don't
think it's real
there's no drought where i live yeah i
like to think about drought
like a bank account and so with each
precipitation event
it's like putting pennies into your
negative 100
or more account and we don't
have enough of those precipitation
events to get us
out of those severe and exceptional
conditions
now back to dr guan in terms of the
current mega drought in the west he has
a few ideas
the first government investment to
build some good infrastructure as well
as design
more sustainable water management and
water use
uh gonna really help you know the local
people to prepare
for me i can develop more technology to
help farmers to
gain more about one drop of the
irrigated water
you know you just try to make it make
irrigation more efficient
you you better use the water um and then
also better help
farmers to anticipate the drought such
that
local people have the response time to
really take some actions
with the relentless news about how our
planet is heating up and
drying out it's tempting to give into
despair
but when i listen to guan's excitement
about his work and his drive to come up
with solutions
i feel the optimism i get charged up i
was it's
it's a really really exciting time too
that the technology reached to the time
that enable
this generation of scientists to start
to
convert the imagination to become the
reality
to achieve a big thing for the humanity
i really i really believe so you know i
think
it's about the time and i also be proud
about being an
immigrant in this country and and so i'm
i'm chinese and
you know i uh i stand up for you know
asian community and so stop asian hates
you know that's very important yes
that's very important that's very
serious and i'm very proud about my
uh uh origin but at the same time i
think when we are talking about you know
these big problems about whole planet a
whole nature
there's no differentiation about where
you come from we should fight together
as human beings
[Music]
nova now is a production of gbh and prx
it's produced by terence bernardo ari
daniel
jocelyn gonzalez isabel hibbard sandra
lopez monsalve
and rosalind tordesillas julia core and
chris schmidt are the co-executive
producers of nova
dante graves is director of audience
development tsuki bennett is senior
digital editor
christina manan is associate researcher
robin kasmer is science editor
lorena lyon is digital production
assistant and devin robbins is managing
producer of podcast at gbh
our theme music is by the dj who makes
it rain with funky beats
dj kid koala i'm alok patel
we'll be back in two weeks which is
plenty of time for you to learn how to
use
less water you can start by taking
shorter showers and just avoiding baths
or turning off the water while brushing
your teeth shaving or doing dishes
maybe you should check your faucets
pipes or toilets for leaks or do less
laundry try installing a water meter
water your lawn only when it needs it or
try planting drought-resistant trees and
plants
we can all do better
[Music]
gbh