[njarboe]

> All believable, but if we’re talking overall, NASA says satellite imagery shows the irrigated area for turf outweighing the next eight crops combined.

If you have ever driven across the Midwest you know this is incorrect. I could not find that statement in the linked article but did find this:

“Even conservatively,” Milesi says, “I estimate there are three times more acres of lawns in the U.S. than irrigated corn.”

Irrigated. Most crops are not irrigated. From the article:

"This means lawns—including residential and commercial lawns, golf courses, etc --could be considered the single largest irrigated crop in America in terms of surface area, covering about 128,000 square kilometers in all."

128,000 square kilometers is about 32 million acres. A lot for sure. One acre for about 10 people in the US.

But the total cultivated cropland (not counting tree farms) is about 650 million acres. 20 times the lawn total. Corn alone is 93 million acres.

Total [1]https://www.fsa.usda.gov/news-room/efoia/electronic-reading-...

[ttyprintk]

Yeah for the purposes of runoff, we're prioritizing irrigated area over non-irrigated because of the potential for control. There are plenty of problems in areas where irrigation is not necessary; arsenic in Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, etc.

I should have linked to the research rather than NASA, where author Milesi was interviewed:

https://www.isprs.org/proceedings/xxxvi/8-w27/milesi.pdf

>> All believable, but if we’re talking overall, NASA says satellite imagery shows the irrigated area for turf outweighing the next eight crops combined.

> If you have ever driven across the Midwest you know this is incorrect. I could not find that statement in the linked article

Link rot is kicking in.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160330015359/http://sciencelin...