Submitted by granger327 t3_xzuioy in dataisbeautiful
Comments
IHaveABoat t1_irpdfd1 wrote
Where is this? Near Farmington?
LosNava t1_irpioqy wrote
Wow. That’s my hometown. Lol at seeing it in the wild.
darthsnick t1_irpprrf wrote
Need them green chilies. Yum!
jaLissajous t1_irpsi59 wrote
See, this is legitimately an example of Data being Beautiful. Thank you! :D
mwebster745 t1_irpt4do wrote
Based on the map I'm guessing it's up north near where the animas and San Juan Rivera merge near Farmington NM. That would make that huge irritated area NAPI (Navajo Agricultural Products Inc) basically a massive farm owned by the Navajo nation. Just drove through there last week, very impressive.
mwebster745 t1_irpt7b5 wrote
I think so, I think it's NAPI
der_innkeeper t1_irpu6b4 wrote
The Data may be Beautiful, but the implications are crap.
Reddit_-_username t1_irq6udu wrote
Genuinely curious, what's bad about growing food in new Mexico?
Tuckers_Salty_Nips t1_irq7vo7 wrote
We're using too much water/ the climate is changing and the rivers are drying up
Equivalent_Poetry339 t1_irqakmu wrote
Yo this just gave me PTSD. I work as a data analyst for John Deere precision ag and I had to either map or re-name every one of those damned farms and fields in operations center. Took me almost a week. I had printouts of this that I’d fill in as I went to keep myself on track.
And yes, this is NAPI near Farmington, it is easily the biggest farm in New Mexico.
RogerSaysHi t1_irqhrvp wrote
We'd have been better off investing in rail and desalinization than farming in the desert. It was one thing to move so many people into a place that couldn't support them, it's a completely different ballgame to try to irrigate the desert.
cultofwacky t1_irqos3p wrote
Was in Farmington last month, neat seeing the area here
TheBadBull t1_irqpg9p wrote
For scale, the biggest of those circles are just over 1 km wide
boredatschipol t1_irqv0mb wrote
Point irrigation systems, as I understand them, are about as water efficient as open air irrigation can be. The alternatives being green \ glass house or hydroponics setups. What I would be interested in is the source of water for the irrigation and how sustainable that is. If its over pumping a restricted aquifer then yes, implications are bad
der_innkeeper t1_irr63d5 wrote
Water the desert and making it bloom is probably a very bad idea.
Well_shit__-_- t1_irrb4ew wrote
I’m sure that’s why humans have kept doing it for 7000 years
der_innkeeper t1_irrfdw1 wrote
Small scale is one thing. Moving when the rains stop is what happens, normally.
Draining aquifers and rivers to make it happen for 10 or 100x the normal population is not normal or sustainable.
granger327 OP t1_irob53l wrote
This is derived from 30m resolution rasters of annual irrigated status as detected by IrrMapper, a system to automatically detect irrigation from Landsat satellite images. I read annual Irrmapper GeoTIFF of this area and accumulated them using rasterio and numpy, and wrote the cumulative images to a .gif with PIL.