Irrigating orchards of thirsty almonds and pistachios used 3.8m acre-feet of water in 2010, 54% more than a decade earlier.
Irrigating qat is also a drain on water reserves that are anyway drying up fast.
Mr McTiernan's lawyer, however, promptly sent the DayTimers to a forgery expert, who declared a number of the entries suspect; and Mr McTiernan bought seven NASA satellite images (at $2,500 per image) to help prove to the authorities that Mr Scott had not, in fact, been irrigating.
In America, the assumption is that, if recycled at all, reprocessed effluent is used strictly for irrigating golf courses, parks and highway embankments, or for providing feedwater for industrial boilers and cooling at power stations.
And in Guyana and Suriname, coastal farmers irrigating with water from river estuaries have had to stop: because of the rivers' weak flow, it was sea-water.AP Roads, power and outputThe losses, of course, extend much wider than farming.
Diesel alone, which powers the pumps irrigating Egypt's farms, accounts for $7.5 billion in subsidies and is sold to consumers at the equivalent of 16 cents a litre, whereas most Europeans pay $2 or more.
Yet Wyoming water authorities rarely grant abandonments; if history is any indication, Mr McTiernan has a one-in-five chance of winning.Mr Scott testified in a hearing before Wyoming's water authority, the state board of control, that he had been irrigating all along.
One of these schemes the Shaoshan Irrigation System diverts some of the upper waters of the Lian Stream, thus irrigating the dry hill land, and also controls flooding in the river's lower reaches; the irrigated area has been converted from single-crop to double-crop rice land.
The sustained use of a water resource for irrigating agricultural land in an arid region requires that the applied water not damage the soil environment.
The earliest efforts of mechanical engineers were aimed at controlling the human environment by draining and irrigating land and by ventilating mines.
The Kalabalala Tank, which was formed by an earthen dam 24 metres (79 feet) high and nearly 6 km (3.75 miles) in length, had a perimeter of 60 km (37 miles) and helped store monsoon rainfall for irrigating the country around the ancient capital of Anuradhapura.
