The Department of Agriculture says the solution to California’s drought problems could come from fog farming.
Yes, harvesting “fog” is apparently a thing. Even Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack was taken aback when he first heard about it as something the Obama administration is funding under his agency’s conservation grant program.
One of the ways to “deal with drought” in conservation programs is to “capture fog more effectively,” Vilsack said, addressing a climate change summit Monday focused on agriculture practices. “I never knew you could capture fog,” he said. “But you can,” particularly in California, he said.
He said fog can be used to provide water for crops by using technology to condense the fog from a vapor to a liquid.
Vilsack also announced a new multimillion dollar effort to fund manure-powered energy plants to reduce the cost of farming in California and a number of other states.
The White House used the summit to underscore the need for Congress to fund the Department of Interior’s Land and Water Conservation Program, which it says Republican lawmakers allowed to expire. The program is used to fund habitat conservation programs for endangered species as part of the president’s climate change agenda.
Obama highlighted the fund in his weekly radio address on Saturday, saying, “Republicans in Congress let the fund expire despite strong bipartisan support.”
