How does farming irrigation help?

Question

How does irrigating a farm help an individual, society and the environment?

Answer 1

plants need water. people need plants

Answer 2

Some of the world's biggest irrigation projects have been really major busts. When too much water is allowed to soak up the land, we get, in some places, salinity, salt that had been well hidden deep in the soil moving up through the  soil until the soil becomes a veritable salt flat, not usable for any crop.

In some areas what has surfaced has been much worse than ordinary salt.

The same land with careful, top down, limited irrigation can remain a fantastic resource, a breadbasket.

But some irrigation, even when applied moderately, will quickly exhaust the available plant nutrients in the soil. It is not that they wash those nutrients out though that too is possible, but the soil itself starts off poorly endowed with nutrients, and the soil decomposition is too slow to maintain fertility when plants have enough water to remove it.

When we have lots of water, then, it is still necessary to spread that water judiciously, to get good results, spread it out over a lot of land so that that land can provide the other things plants need.

Irrigation often means a change in agricultural style that has been hard to adapt to. The classical question is 'Who is going to have to wear the rubber boots?' But also, a lifetime of learning how to get the best out of dry land  farming comes to nothing. The learning of a lifetime is all gone. One has become less an expert than many who have never been on a farm. The learning of a lifetime has become an impediment.

Answer 3

It helps a society with increased yields, helps the environment by reducing carbon dioxide, and helps the individual by increasing profits.

Answer 4

Irrigation helps the individual farmer by allowing him to grow a crop in areas where no crop could be grown without it. It allows him to have higher yields in some areas, and acts as good insurance in case of a drought in some areas. Since the farmer supplies the food, raw materials for clothing and building material, irrigation helps society by assuring that they have these things. It helps the environment by having ground cover on land that would be barren without it, controlling erosion.  Irrigation helps the environment by having green growing plants growing and removing CO2 from the atmosphere and replacing it with O2.