Evaporation on Farms in the U.S.
Evaporation plays a supremely key role in the agricultural business for farmers. The water to food relationship is majorly one-sided. The food produced on farms across the nation depends greatly on water because of its physiological nature. “The water people need for drinking is essential, but it is only about 0.01% of the water people require to produce their food.” You may ask yourself why water is such an essential part of food production. This is mainly a result of the physiological process called plant transpiration. In essence, “Huge amounts of water are evaporated constantly from pores on the surface of a plant's leaves.” This area of evaporation is part of the plant’s process of photosynthesis, or the manufacturing of energy from sunlight. Evaporation plays another key role for farmers’ crops in that it helps keep the plant cool in spite of heat, and evaporation also helps carry nutrients to each part of a plant.
Another key process for farmers across the nation is the process of evapotranspiration (ET), or evaporation and transpiration combined into one process. This comes into play when discussing crop yield because there is a directly proportional relationship between crop yield and transpiration. “It takes between 500 and 4,000 liters of evapotranspiration… to produce just one kilogram of grain.” This grain is then fed to animals for the production of meat, but to produce only one kilogram of meat takes between 5,000 and 15,000 liters of water. This is why people suggest that a vegetarian diet is much more water friendly. A vegetarian diet only requires approximately 2,000 liters of ET daily, while a high-calorie diet may require approximately 5,000 liters of ET per day. In terms of agriculture, approximately 4,000 liters of water are used per person per day, depending on how large the operation and how large the yield may be.
The two main sources of water used for crops are sources everyone is familiar with: rain...