Agricultural Cluelessness: Nevada Farmers Hack The Drought By Switching Up The Crops : The Salt : NPR

NPR has a story on farmers in Nevada and drought:

Nevada Farmers Hack The Drought By Switching Up The Crops : The Salt : NPR

That this sort of thing is going on is no suprise, so I wouldn't have even linked this in here save for one of the comments, which is clueless.  It states:

Humans once farmed parts of what is now the Sahara desert! The arid
west simply has too many people living in it, for farming to be
sustainable for long periods of time!

The arid west may or may not have too many people living in it.  Those of us who grow up here and like our room probably largely agree with that, and tend to cringe when some newcomer comes in and tells us how he or she moved here as "I just love how empty it is", not realizing that the huge check they brought from the sale of their out of state home which will be used for the construction of a new one, and their presence in and of itself, operates against the very thing they declare they love.  Be that as it may, the statement that;  "The arid
west simply has too many people living in it, for farming to be
sustainable for long periods of time!" is amazingly ignorant.

People don't farm the west for the west.  The west hasn't had that sort of agricultural economy for a century or longer, if we're talking about crops.  Farmers in the US farm for the entire country really. Granted, there is local farming, but if a person feels that farming is the thing that's endangering the West due to the human population, they probably have the story reversed.

Framing in the Southwest, where this story is focused, has been going on at some level since for hundreds of years.  Modern farming implements and practices  may be having a negative impact, but the thing that's really unsustainable in the west are cities built without regard to the supply of water.  Water mining is really common, for cities, in the southwest, and that is something that ultimately defeats istself.

I guess the main thing that irritates me about a comment like this is the seeming ignorance of the person commenting on the huge modern farming infrastructure of our nation.  Fruits and vegetables on most people's tables come from hundreds or even thousands of miles away, and indeed quite a few come from south of the border.  The farmer in this photo may produce a crop that's just as likely to be served on a dinner table in New Jersey as it is in Las Vegas.  There is a local food movement, of course, but only a tiny percentage of Americans participate in it, and the assumption the writer made is almost surely off the mark.