Turning water into food | Bruce Bugbee | TEDxUSU

this is my globe I've had this globe for over thirty years to analyze the three-dimensional relationships among the continents and the water and the nation's political boundaries have changed over the decades but the fundamental relationships haven't changed like many Globes like this Mike Lopez raised mountains and I always thought those mountains were diminished on my globe so that make it easier to manufacture till one day I looked up the height of Mount Everest and the diameter of the earth and I got out my micrometers to check how much these were diminished and to my amazement they were embellished they're considerably embellished it was a very disturbing day for me if the mountains are embellished the oceans are similarly thin and it turns out if you take all the water on our blue planet roll it up into a sphere it comes out to the size of a ping-pong ball a ping-pong ball but it doesn't stop there even though this is small ninety seven and a half percent of the water on our planet is saltwater we can't drink it we can't irrigate our crops with it the two-and-a-half percent that's freshwater is the size of this small blue marble now if I took this marble I should put it up here on Greenland because 99% of our freshwater is frozen in glaciers mostly Greenland and Antarctica the 1% that's left is the size of a muster see this mustard seed recycles and recycles and sustains life on the planet we use about a gallon of water every day in the water we drink and in the food we eat we use about another 20 gallons a day in washing things washing our clothes and domestic use but we use several hundred gallons of water every day indirectly in the food we eat that amount Dwarfs all the other uses in the United States we dedicate 70% of our water resources to agriculture I have spent much of my professional life studying how to improve water efficiency in agriculture and I'm joined in this effort by hundreds of colleagues around the world the challenge is enormous we can grow food without fossil fuels but we cannot grow food without water we think about our carbon footprint we ought to be thinking about our water footprint and even more importantly we ought to be thinking about our global food print the type of food that we eat has a bigger impact on the environment than the cars we drive eating a hamburger is equivalent in water use to taking an 80 minute shower to understand where water goes it's useful to review the Earth's water cycle as you can see from the globe 70% of the planet surface is oceans 30% is land so the water cycle starts with one fundamental thing the Sun shines on the oceans and water this is an amazing process all the salts are left behind the it's distilled water coming out of the ocean anybody that has boiled a pot of water on their stove to dryness knows it takes an enormous amount of energy to evaporate water the Sun does this every day for free no fossil fuels no fancy apparatus here's an amazing fact more Sun shines on the earth in an hour than all of the people use in a year so this water vapor from the ocean blows over to the land falls on the land as rain and soaks into the ground it eventually runs back to the oceans in the rivers we have a few thousand years of experience in ways to reuse this water we built dams we drill wells we pump the water back up to the surface it's still liquid water the microbes in the soil have purified it we drill more Wells we use it again eventually it slips out of our grasp and runs back to the ocean this is all liquid water there's two faiths the second one is shown here now let's plant some seeds the Brutes grow from the seeds and the water that used to go into the ocean is short cycled back to the roots of the plants the Sun is hot the same energy that falls on the ocean falls on the plant leaves to stay cool and hydrated they evaporate water it goes into the air back to the ocean falls as rain and become saltwater again we have far less control over this water vapor than we do over the liquid water that we can reuse without a continuous supply of water vapor the plants dehydrate and food production stops we irrigate to keep the plants hydrated we have developed an amazing array of instruments to precisely tell when and how much to irrigate crops they get just what they need no more no less in some older systems 50% of the water evaporated from the soil surface and didn't get into the plants went back to the ocean in some of our modern systems we now have subsurface drip irrigation that can deliver 90% of the water right to the plants every drop is precious we call these efforts more crop per drop even with our best efforts we can't keep up we can't grow the food we need to feed a hungry planet so we access aquifers deep in the ground these aquifers are called fossil aquifers because they formed a long time ago they're difficult to recharge we drill deep wells and pump that water up to the surface and irrigate the plants these aquifers are being depleted far more rapidly than our fossil fuel reserves so how much crop can we get her drop let's take a look at these wheat plants over here wheat and rice are the biggest crops for direct human consumption on the planet they the two crops provide the vast majority of our calories we cross disis de sweet was developed here at Utah State University my colleagues and I hybridized tall high yielding wheat with very short week to get a short high yielding wheat we did this with NASA funding because we wanted to work with NASA to develop a life support system for space that we could grow our own food and space independent of the planet we've grown this wheat many times on the international space station and some of the astronauts turn out to be amazing photographers this is a picture of this week at harvest on the International Space Station that picture in the background is not a photoshopped image of my globe we grow this wheat hydroponically and if you haven't ever seen hydroponic we there it is the roots absorbing the water going up to the tops of the plant and if your student in the lab you know how much water this wheat takes every day we develop this for a fast rate of development this week is only three weeks old from transplanting to this stuff it'll be ready to harvest in five weeks that's almost twice as fast as wheat in the field surprisingly hydroponic wheat doesn't require any more water than field wheat in fact that often is less because there's no evaporation from the soil surface there's no leaks all the water goes through the plant even with perfect efficiency of every input it still takes a hundred gallons of water to grow enough wheat to make a loaf of bread a hundred gallons of water they emphasize this point my students built this simulated hundred gallon tank of water if we put a faucet on this and dripped it into this tank into a plot big enough to grow that wheat it would be empty the time about the time the wheat was ready to harvest this greatly exceeds all the other household units it uses even when it's perfect so why is this water you so enormous for plants plant physiology is a lot like human physiology so let's consider breathing we exhale water vapor to get oxygen these plants lose water in order to get carbon dioxide every square millimeter of the surface of these plants is covered with tiny pores called stomata those doesn't the word stomata comes from the Greek word for malls so these damata open till that carbon dioxide in and they automatically lose water vapor there's a hundred times more water vapor inside a leaf than there is carbon dioxide in the air and that's why the water use requirement is so enormous water has to come out to let the co2 in saving water by closing the store mates is a lot like asking people to save water by stopping breathing we can't do it humans have it easy there are six hundred times more oxygen in the air than there is carbon dioxide so that means plants need 600 times more water to grow for all the interest in global warming carbon dioxide is a trace gas point zero four percent if we took the air molecules in this auditorium and made them fluorescent we'd have a hard time finding the carbon dioxide molecules there is only four carbon dioxide molecules for every 10,000 air molecules it's one of the great wonders of the world that plants can find those carbon dioxide molecules and make our food make high-energy food to better understand the effect of diet on the environment let's analyze the land area required to grow the food for one person so we're joined with this scientist who has an advanced degree from the Playmobil Institute and because of our studies with NASA we've many times analyzed how much land he needs this green felt represents the land area he needs to grows on food it's a small amount of land if everything's perfect he grows the food 365 days a year he can sustain himself in this amount of land now we're going to send him into space after all we're trying to make a life support system for space he's got to have some shelter so we give him a house but the house covers some of the land every photon is precious so he's got to have a green roof on his house now he's ready growing his own food but he's going into the vacuum of space so we're gonna give him a transparent dome seal it up recycle every drop of the water grow the plants at just the right rate so the carbon dioxide and oxygen are in perfect balance call it Morton Thiokol put a big rocket under this off it goes into space he can go anywhere in the solar system and be self-sustaining long as he doesn't go too far away from the Sun what if he gets up one morning and says if you please I would like an egg for breakfast he can't do it we need additional land area to feed this chicken to make them to give him the egg what if he says I'd like a glass of milk for lunch we need even more land area to feed the cow if he eats the equivalent of 25 percent of his calories from animal products which is the national average it more than doubles the land area we'll get up each day my colleagues and animal science my colleagues and plant science and work to make water use efficiency in agriculture better but small changes in our diets can have a much bigger effect than years of our research please think about your global food print the next time you think about putting food in the garbage disposal please think about that mustard seed and those fossil aquifers and consider eating less meat this is the diet for a small planet thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 93,453

Keywords: Agricultural Engineering (Professional Field), Agricultural Science (School Category), ted, Agriculture (Professional Field), TEDx, Foodprint, Science, ted talk, tedx talks, Sustainable Diet, Education, ted x, United States Of America (Country), Climate Change, English, ted talks, #LiveMore, Technology, NASA, Wheat, English Language (Human Language), #AggieLife, Hydroponic, tedx, Agriculture, Sustainability, tedx talk, Survive, Water, Space, TEDxUSU, Agronomy, Crop Physiology, Global Issues

Id: qEbdv3bFKww

Length: 16min 32sec (992 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 19 2013