The problem is that aquifers are really cool natural filters, and only refill as fast as groundwater moves through the soil. So they're a finite resource. Instead of depleting them, people who want to farm in deserts should probably start desalinating or whatever themselves instead of assuming subsequent generations will do it.

This is by far the dumbest post in this thread by a mile. It's funny saying AI will make people dumber when you've obviously don't understand this issue in the first place. Food security is human security. When you take a huge percentage of a countries grow able land out because it stops raining then food proces go up, often dramatically.

Desalination uses far more power than AI ever would.

Plants require a ton of desalinated water and Animals who eat plants as such require desalinated water too.

There are countries in middle east like UAE, Saudi arabia etc. which rely on desalination but they are relying it for the clean drinking water, not for the food generation. They import almost 90% of their food iirc.

The amount of energy required to desalinate all water and the environmental impacts to get that energy would literally be quite catastrophic and I am not even sure if it would be even feasible and food prices would literally skyrocket or food would simply be produced even more less by magnitudes of order.

Desalination isn't really much of an option for deeper inland and much higher than sea level areas. Tell me, which ocean is Dodge City KS going to pull from?

The energy required to transport water from the coast to our major agricultural areas would be astronomical, and the resulting brine waste would create its own environmental crisis. If we get to a point where we're forced to bypass natural water cycles entirely, our native ecologies will have already collapsed. At that point, we'll be trying to engineer our way out of a total ecological apocalypse as masses starve in bread lines.

and desalination is so efficient/cheap at scale already that it barely affects water prices in those countries (less than 10% already, further shrinking every year as methods improve)

> Plenty of countries completely rely on desalination already

Let's take Kansas... the largest producer of wheat in the US. https://www.statista.com/statistics/190376/top-us-states-in-...

Kansas wheat crop down 38% from last year https://youtu.be/QjrhAXzEGDc

Kansas cannot run on desalination plants ... there's no salt water. The gulf coast of Texas is 1000 miles away.

While aquifers do regenerate (Groundwater levels in the Kansas High Plains aquifer see first overall increase since 2019 https://kgs.ku.edu/news/article/groundwater-levels-in-the-ka... ) I'm going to point out that news article has seven years of declines previously.

The aquifer that Kansas draws upon is the Ogallala Aquifer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer ) and you can see the rate of depletion at https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/nation... - there are spots in Kansas where the groundwater dropped by 150 feet from before it was tapped with deep wells to 2015.

Yes, most of the earth is covered by water. Getting that water to Kansas and Nebraska and North Dakota, however, is a problem.

> Plenty of countries completely rely on desalination already

There are only 3 countries that do: Bahamas, Maldives, and Malta.

Other countries that depend heavily, but not completely: Qatar, Kuwait, UAE.

They are planned everywhere, if they are actually being built is a different story

Largely not. Data center people aren't idiots. They site their projects in places with water and power, or if not power then at least gas. I don't think you'd be able to point out a project that actually exists and is competing for a scarce local water resource.

There's some cosmic irony that this is happening when the people who came up with the derogatory term "soy boys" are in office, but I'm too depressed to laugh about it.

Perhaps someone in the industry can chime in, but I had read that the soybeans that the US primarily grows and previously sold to China were used for pig feed. In my mind I pictured it like "cow corn" -- humans technically can eat it, but it's chewy and not very good.

Are there different grades of soybean?

China has a tendency to shift to self-reliance or importing from more pliable neighborswhenever they execute policies like that. So even if they’re buying again, I highly doubt it is at the same rate it once was

I expect other nations are still consuming US soybeans. China stopped because it was particularly negatively targeted by US tariff policy.

But make no mistake, it has caused problems for farmers.

The report from my small hometown farmers is that everything, except for beef, is down right now while the prices of inputs like fertilizer are high. Some of the farmers in my hometown have already sold their land to megacorp farmers in response because they simply can't survive.

When China buys from someone else (Brazil - nobody else has significant soy bean surplus) that means whoever was buying from that someone else now needs to go to the US.

The US also uses a lot of soy beans internally. Prices are down, but farmers are still selling soybeans and with careful management are making money.

Are you forgetting the nitrogen? :)

Fertilizer is pretty fungible and is a global market, so even if the US is primarily supplied by Canada, and overall global demand remained constant, prices would go up since there will be supply reduction due to the Hormuz strait being closed.

It's the nitrogen fertilizer almost all of which is manufactured from methane + air.

Yes. Despite what others have said, yes. But, in general, because of the current global dynamics, fertilizer is more expensive wherever you're going to be getting it from. It just doesn't help that the US has picked a trade war with all allies at the same time, while also engaging in real wars that disrupt global supply chains of critical resources.