Solar Irrigation in Africa

This brings home how easy it is to increase productivity throughout West Africa with a modicum of direct investment.  Just managing water by lifting it as needed and distributing through drip irrigation is a revolution.

Communal efforts to retain water from the rainy season are also a priority.  Grassy berms can obviously work as well as treed belts.  These are all productive and useful.

Managed drip based irrigation during the dry season is obviously possible in combination with the aforementioned water conservation.

My key point is that this is nothing a large landowner with financial resources would not do in a heartbeat.  In the case were few have a hectare of land it becomes a community responsibility to organize this.

The real insight to take home, it that this is completely within the power of the owners themselves and good example is been shared through the internet today.  What works well in one village is no longer staying there.

It will still take time, Micro finance is wresting control of the economy back into the hands of the families and it is obvious that these lands can produce several times what they produce today, properly managed and financed.  It will not take generations thanks to internet sharing.

Solar Irrigation Boosts Local Incomes In Africa

by Staff Writers

Stanford CA (SPX) Jan 14, 2010

http://www.solardaily.com/reports/Solar_Irrigation_Boosts_Local_Incomes_In_Africa_999.html

http://www.solardaily.com/images/solar-powered-drip-irrigation-system-bg.jpg

 Burney and her co-authors noted that only 4 percent of cropland in sub-Saharan Africa is irrigated, and that most rural, food-insecure communities in the region rely on rain-fed agriculture, which, in places like Benin, is limited to a three- to six-month rainy season.

Solar-powered drip irrigation systems significantly enhance household incomes and nutritional intake of villagers in arid sub-Saharan Africa, according to a new Stanford University study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The two-year study found that solar-powered pumps installed in remote villages in the West African nation of Benin were a cost-effective way of delivering much-needed irrigation water, particularly during the long dry season. The results are published in the Jan. 4, 2010, online edition of PNAS.

"Significant fractions of sub-Saharan Africa's population are considered food insecure," wrote lead author Jennifer Burney, a postdoctoral scholar with the Program on Food Security and the Environment and the Department of Environmental Earth System Science at Stanford.

"Across the region, these food-insecure populations are predominantly rural, they frequently survive on less than $1 per person per day, and whereas most are engaged in agricultural production as their main livelihood, they still spend 50 to 80 percent of their income on food, and are often net consumers of food."

Burney and her co-authors noted that only 4 percent of cropland in sub-Saharan Africa is irrigated, and that most rural, food-insecure communities in the region rely on rain-fed agriculture, which, in places like Benin, is limited to a three- to six-month rainy season.

"On top of potential annual caloric shortages, households face two seasonal challenges: They must stretch their stores of staples to the next harvest (or purchase additional food, often at higher prices), and access to micronutrients via home production or purchase diminishes or disappears during the dry season," the authors wrote.

Promotion of irrigation among small landholders is therefore frequently cited as a strategy for poverty reduction, climate adaptation and promotion of food security, they said. And while the role of irrigation in poverty reduction has been studied extensively in Asia, relatively little has been written about the poverty and food security impacts in sub-Saharan Africa.

Benin demonstration sites

To address the lack of data, Burney and her colleagues monitored three 0.5-hectare (1.24-acre) solar-powered drip irrigation systems installed the Kalale district of northern Benin. The systems, which use photovoltaic pumps to deliver groundwater, were financed and installed by the Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF), a nongovernmental organization.

"As with any water pump, solar-powered pumps save labor in rural off-grid areas where water hauling is traditionally done by hand by women and young girls," the authors said. "Though photovoltaic systems are often dismissed out-of-hand due to high up-front costs, they have long lifetimes, and in the medium-term, cost less than liquid-fuel-based pumping systems."

Solar-powered pumps also can be implemented in an easily maintained, battery-free configuration, they added, "thereby avoiding one of the major pitfalls of photovoltaic use in the developing world."

In November 2007, the research team began a close collaboration with local women's agricultural groups in two villages in rural Benin. In Village A, which draws surface water from a year-round stream, researchers worked with residents to install two identical solar-powered pumping systems.

In Village B, which relies on groundwater irrigation, water was pumped from 25 meters (82 feet) below the surface. Each solar-powered pumping system was used by 30 to 35 women affiliated with an agricultural group. Each woman farmed her own 120-square meter (1,292-square foot) plot. The remaining plots were farmed collectively to fund group purchases and expenses.

The researchers also chose two control villages for comparison with Villages A and B. Women's agricultural groups in the control villages continued to irrigate by hand, allowing for comparison of the solar-powered drip irrigation systems to traditional methods.

"Household surveys were conducted in both treatment and control villages upon installation (November 2007) and following one year of garden operation (November 2008), and included detailed questions concerning consumption and agricultural production, as well as other socioeconomic, health and general questions," the authors wrote.

Striking results

The results were striking. The three solar-powered irrigation systems supplied on average 1.9 metric tons of produce per month, including tomatoes, okra, peppers, eggplants, carrots and other greens, the authors found. Woman who used solar-powered irrigation became strong net producers in vegetables with extra income earned from sales - significantly increasing their purchases of staples and protein during the dry season, and oil during the rainy season.

During the first year of operation, the women farmers kept an average of 18 percent by weight - 8.8 kilograms (19.4 pounds) per month - of the produce grown with the solar-powered systems for home consumption and sold the rest in local markets.

"Garden products penetrated local markets significantly," the authors found. "Vegetable consumption increased during the rainy season (the time of greatest surplus for the women's group farmers) for the entire four-village sample of households."

Survey respondents also were asked about their ability to meet their household food needs. Seventeen percent of the project beneficiaries said they were "less likely to feel chronically food-insecure. In short, the photovoltaic drip irrigation systems had a remarkable effect on both year-round and seasonal food access," the authors said.

Nutrition and sustainability

In terms of nutrition, vegetable intake across all villages increased by about 150 grams per person per day during the rainy season. But in villages irrigated with solar-powered systems, the increase was 500 to 750 grams per person per day, which is equivalent to 3 to 5 servings of vegetables per day - the same as the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Recommended Daily Allowance for vegetables - and most of this change took place in the dry season.

The research team also concluded that, despite higher up-front costs, using solarpower to pump water can be more economically sustainable in the long run than irrigation systems that run on liquid fuels, such as gasoline, diesel or kerosene.

"When considering the energy requirements for expanded irrigation in rural Africa, photovoltaic drip irrigation systems have an additional advantage over liquid-fuel-based systems in that they provide emissions-free pumping power," they added.

"Overall, this study thus indicates that solar-powered drip irrigation can provide substantial economic, nutritional and environmental benefits," the authors said.

"With the proper support, successful widespread adoption of photovoltaic drip irrigation systems could be an important source of poverty alleviation and food security in the marginal environments common to sub-Saharan Africa."

Other co-authors of the PNAS study are Rosamond Naylor, director of Stanford's Program on Food Security and the Environment and professor of environmental Earth system science; Lennart Woltering and Dov Paternak of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Niger; and Marshall Burke of the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California-Berkeley.

Eden Machine Pt II

The Eden Machine Part II

As I reported before Christmas some friends of mine who control the public company known as Lifespan LSPN.PK (lifespaninc.com) have decided that it is a great time to pursue the development of my atmospheric water harvester concept and are prepared to organize the necessary funding to make it all happen. As the first step in advancing this agenda, we have allocated the development task to a related company named USA Uranium Corp USAU.PK (name to be changed shortly). I stepped on as president just this last week.

My first step was to do something very unusual. I increased the number of authorized shares to one trillion shares. This is practically the only business proposition ever seen not financial in nature that is naturally capable of generating a trillion dollars in sales fairly quickly. The reason is simplicity itself. The Eden Machine can empower and enable the two billion people still eking out a subsistence living around the globe.

Remember the land boom that populated the United States in the nineteenth century when a mass migration of Europeans came over? Now imagine the same thing happening in Western China, the Persian Gulf Coast, the Sahel and the Southwest USA and Mexico.

It will be possible for two billion people to own land and create a livelihood for themselves and their families.

Thus I think that the declared potential to issue a trillion shares is appropriate to the scale of our ambition.

I formulated the original concept four years ago as part of writing my manuscript Paradigms Shift and then excerpted the key chapter as my third post when I initiated this Blog. You may want to read that particular post at:

http://globalwarming-arclein.blogspot.com/2007/02/global-terraforming-chapter.html

I have referred to the concept many times since. The problem can and has been solved expensively using classic technologies mostly as a drinking water system using household power. It is after all a variation on a refrigerator used to collect humidity.We have to go far beyond this, but we will give ourselves one break. We do not need to fuss with the water itself because it will go directly into the adjacent soils for irrigation purposes.

There are three primary subsystems besides the control system. We have already recognized the need for refrigeration. We also need energy storage but it does not need to be mobile which will let us work up prototypes with our old friends the lead acid battery.

Then we need an energy source other than the power grid.The first big saving comes from the mere fact that the power used will not travel removing the whole issue of transmission losses.

With the water also not traveling we are designing a stand alone unit that can be placed anywhere, set up on location and then potentially walked away from for months at a time, except for occasional maintenance.

We have already decided that the optimum design objective is a device capable of collecting 100 liters a day at close to 100 percent humidity.

We formulated this around the knowledge that a full grown fruit tree will respire 50 to 70 liters of water per day. This makes it easy for operators to manage their units in situations needing full capacity for a full grown tree to a situation in which the machine is supporting a number of young trees.

We am expecting to use a solar array to generate the working energy and was in fact waiting for the cost of solar energy to come down to around $1.00 per watt.

This past year, Nanosolar announced just that price and are now shipping. However, for prototyping, any supplier will do initially. We will simply design the device so that various panels can be switched in and out as needed.

The solar panel could be put on a mast as the trees grow larger, but in the early stages a simple upright sheet should be sufficient and save on excessive hardware.

In some respects, this part of the system can be expected to follow the development of the original satellite antenna that went from six feet across down to eighteen inches and design can easily accommodate that sort of shift. Having them initially close to the ground also allows easy cleaning protocols and maintenance.

We also recognize that we need to store the solar energy during the day and consume it at night after the temperature has broken for maximum yield. The most likely battery system will be the vanadium redox battery. It weakness is low energy density, but this is offset by the capacity to cycle millions of time without ever wearing out the battery, The energy is also stored by pumping the active fluids into tanks after been acted on. There is also no particular limit to the speed of the process.

The energy can be collected and stored for twelve hours and then dispensed in two hours, which may be the optimal design. The fluid tank can act as an anchor to the static system as well. The cost of the membranes is still custom driven, because no mass market has been yet developed for them. We may be the necessary mass market.

The good news is that the Vanadium Pentoxide is a one time purchase that will be recoverable. We do not know yet how many pounds will be needed and I would be guessing if I suggested a hundred pounds.

More recently, I have devised an energy storage protocol that could substantially lower the battery expense and possibly eliminate the need for sophistication.

The stored energy is then released at night to operate a solid state cooling system which passes already night cooled air over it to induce the separation of the humidity. The dried air is then passed over the hot obverse side of the same panel to carry off the heat produced by the panel.

The Eden machine is designed to cheaply, efficiently and continuously generate water for human, agricultural or industrial utilization.We know where we wish to end up and I know that it is possible to produce an expensive working machine.

We are in the same position that Henry Ford had at the dawn of the automobile age. A wide array of design elements will be pursued with the objective of driving the manufacturing costs down in incremental steps to achieve our goal. We expect that our first customers will be back yards in LA and later, the Great Valley. After that we are good to go.

It would also be fun to manage a million acres in the Empty Zone of Saudi Arabia. Note that efficient application of the technology will commence in high humidity areas and progress toward more arid zones bringing their water with them in the same manner that the Amazon is watered. Once proper tree cover is established with absorptive soils, we can expect natural precipitation to largely take over most of the work load.

We also plan to be Nanosolar’s best customer before we are finished. Anyone that can attract 300 million in private investment to build a couple of factories has my attention, to say nothing of their two million dollar tool that produces the power equivalent of one nuclear plant per year.

Greatest Human Ecological Disaster

The global warming debate is driven by growing public unease throughout the world over our visible disregard for good husbandry practices in our industrial economy. It is expressing itself most clearly over the CO2 issue, even though this is most likely a red herring. The direct linkage to global warming is at least controversial, and I for one have a great deal of faith in the Earth’s carbon cycle and its ability to restore such imbalances.

More importantly, the ecological movement is about good husbandry. And strange as it may sound, it is not about conservation. Mankind has already transformed most of the environment to serve its needs thousands of years ago, and mankind’s task increasingly is to improve on this legacy. The only areas that we can rightly conserve are inimical to human habitation and even that often needs the fine hand of good husbandry practice.

With the true wild a policy of haven maintenance must be implemented to properly manage human exploitation. An ideal model of this is to overlay a checkerboard and designate every ninth square as a haven. Of course in practice, this must be negotiated and studied in detail to ensure proper sizing sufficient to the various needs. For example, it makes plenty more sense to preserve old growth forests as a corridor along river beds. Once stake holders understand what is at stake, it can sort itself out quickly.

Let us put this argument in reverse. Extinction is the direct result of a loss of habitat havens. Distributed havens of old growth forests sufficient to support the spotted owl ends threats to that species and as the forests recover their range naturally expands. If we learn to manage havens then our industrial scale exploitation can be recovered from.

Remember, the bison succumbed to the global shoe leather market. Had havens not existed in Canada, the current 500,000 animal herd would simply not exist. Today that herd is on the way back to its millions and people living today will live to see many millions of bison on the prairie because it is simply a better meat animal for that particular climate. I also expect to see the bison introduced into the steppes of central Asia, restoring the native bison hunted to extinction thousands of years ago. That is good husbandry.

It came as a complete surprise to me to learn that the areal extent of the terra preta in the Amazon basin equals that of France. If this is true, then the acreage and the corn and cassava culture would easily have supported massive populations equal to that of contemporaneous India and China. What really stunned me is the fact that if it was not for the soil itself, we would have no evidence whatsoever that such a culture even existed. The Amazon was a lousy place to build permanent structures that could be found in the jungle, although we now will be looking.

What I find most sobering is that tens of millions of individuals have lived theirs lives and passed leaving almost no trace of their existence. How often has this happened globally over the past 10,000 years? Societies do not build with stone unless they are highly organized so a lack of such evidence is very misleading. The so called Stone Age for example did an excellent job of leaving evidence of its existence behind, even though a better name would be the wood and bone age. I have no difficulty setting out to construct a very sufficient tool kit with those two items as the Indians in the Amazon do to this day.

When copper became available and later iron, both metals were too valuable to throw out, so the material was constantly recycled. Yet populations expanded and social complexity increased. The only evidence left would be in the form of pottery. You can also bet that even broken pottery had some commercial value and was largely recycled.

We all know that large populations existed in the Middle East and even Europe, simply because we have looked hard enough. The Sahara desert represents several million square miles and it was once populated and the climate was amenable to agriculture. At least they raised goats. Recall today that the southern edge of this desert currently houses 100,000,000 people in conditions almost as technically primitive as 6,000 years ago on perhaps ten percent of the Saharan littoral. The fools still raise goats.

It has been argued that the collapse of the Sahara was a natural disaster. I suspect that just the opposite is true. It was instead the greatest human caused ecological disaster ever. It is as if China or India disappeared abruptly. Of course we do not know to what extent the desert was fully covered with vegetation. Since an extensive lake system existed I am inclined to err on the side of a nearly one hundred percent coverage, however fragile and terribly susceptible to easy devastation by the grazing of goats.

It is just now in our power to restore this desert back to human agriculture and general fertility just as it is possible to restore the terra preta fields of the Amazon to agriculture. It would be nice to actually absorb that big chunk of solar energy hitting the Sahara and bouncing back out. And a Sahara restored can support a couple of billion people at least.

Athmospheric Water Harvesting

There has been some success in achieving water harvesting from the atmosphere. Efforts have been made to commercially produce a refrigerator like device that also polishes the resultant water making it potable. Obviously a very good idea that will ultimately succeed.

What really made it possible was the fact that the humidity in a living space rises to well over 30% due to water been respired by the occupants. Such a device would replace the direct and expensive haulage of bottled water. In any event it is a great proof of concept and can be done with today's technology.

When you go outdoors, the humidity levels are much more variable, ranging from 15% in the desert to a moderate 30 to 60% in most environments and 100% in some.

Obviously, an environmental level of 15% puts us out of business.. However, one does not start there.

A more appropriate starting point and the best example is the Sahel on the southern edge of the Sahara. There the humidity is a near constant 60% and the local temperature range is about 10 degrees too hot to promote rainfall.

Growing trees there would drop the temperature range that 10 degrees permitting the onset of natural rainfall. A lot of that could be done without any technology at all, and I am happy to report that there is a movement by the locals to begin the process.

Most important though is that once the tree cover is established the high humidity zone advances into the desert, permitting the advance of the tree cover. Just do not let the goats run wild.