Hey, I live in East Texas and for the life of me I can’t understand why we don’t have water facilities on the lakes, reservoirs for use vs all our water out here is ground water.
If the locals drew water from Lake Conroe and Lake Livingston we could take over all of California’s fruit and veggie business.
These ranches could be easily tilled and with ampull sunshine and water it could easily be done.
The guy across the way of one of my properties bought 16 acres during the drought. It’s at the bottom of a hill. He dug a 20 foot pond about 75 by 200 during the drought and now it is always 100% full and runs off where it always used to like usual. I repeat it is always full.
The ranch could just as easily grow California crops since almost all the trees are gone and it’s used for grazing cows, horses or harvesting hay.
I am so happy 50 years or so ago Texans had the foresight to build all these man made lakes. As a matter of fact I wish we would build more.
If you live in Texas you know when it rain it really really rains rains and pours.
Especially with all the flooding we’ve had this year, I wish we could build huge retention ponds, reservoirs or lakes and make better use of all that water when it does blast us. Sure it won’t stop a lot of flooding when it happens but it would be nice to safe this natural resource if we can.
That is a great idea-where you are, the temperatures are mild enough to grow a lot of the Cali stuff-I don’t know if people in Cali have a lot of stock ponds, but everyone who has horses or livestock of any kind here has one to store the runoff from higher areas of their property when the monsoon season comes..
I live in the hill country-it is too cold in the winter here for most Cali crops. It has always been the way of things to utilize the rivers and streams by damming them-no snail darter nonsense-and using the water for human and crop use-but it is only in the last 15-20 years that the water conservation people really brought the whip down on SA and cities like that. Before then, when people in SA were told to quit filling pools, planting St Augustine and elephant ears, a lot of people demanded that the city go and take all the water needed from the reservoirs in the hill country-just go commandeer it-we all got quite a laugh out of that-I’d almost have liked to see them try.
After awhile, they realized they were going to have to build more collection and storage reservoirs their own-now they are crying because they will have to pay to build them-they are never happy...
Not many big cities even allow gray water use-from kitchen, shower and washer-to water gardens, plants and lawns, much less encourage it. They aren’t big on rainwater capture, either-both have been what is done out here forever-so much for utilizing available resources...