Day 6 - Thirsty food

Yesterdays post was all about the amount of bottles water that we consume in the UK each day and it got me thinking about how much water is used in certain crops.

I had heard anecdotally that almonds need thousands of litres to produce nuts, so much so that there are areas of California that have supposedly dropped by almost 10m over the last 30 years as the huge water reserves underneath are slowly being used up to irrigate all the almond crops.

You can see more on Wikipedia buy searching central valley land subsidence.

So my idea today was to try and capture some images of those crops that use the most water - there are a number of different studies and numbers out there and like all these things, they can vary greatly between study.

So I have used a publication from the WWF for some numbers.

I had fun photographing these. I used a small light box and some supporting lights along with a 90mm 2.8 Macro lens. I think if I had a do - over I would get some bags of the items as well and look to try and find a way to photograph them together in a way that looks good. This process has certainly taught me a number of lessons already about staging and lighting, so the project is doings its job! After all it would be unlikely that I would have been photographing the following subjects in any other situation.

Sugar - used all around the world and the product of Sugarcane, this crop uses a lot of water - for 1kg of sugarcane it takes between 1,500 and 3,000 l of water.

When we think of the refinement that is required the total water requirement for 1 kg of refined sugar is likely many times that.

When asked to picture rice what comes to mind are wide landscapes of rice paddies, all flooded with water with rice plants growing out in neat long rows.

So its no surprise that 1kg of rice takes between 3,000 and 5,000 litres of water to produce - a lot of this water is already there, but still is a significant water footprint for a crop that is used so much the world around

The king of water usage though is the humble Almond.

For a kg of Almonds it takes a whopping 9,000 l of water - one of the most water intensive crops in the world.

The almonds are my favourite - there are a couple of others too which i’ll share below, but the nut and the background work well together here and i’m happy with the results - interesting what the different light sources do to the auto white balance and the effects they have on the output, this is one I will return to in the future I think