In this series, we're sitting down with Swette Center affiliated faculty to catch up on food systems, innovation, and what makes a good meal. See the rest of the series on our Faculty Profiles page.
Read on for an interview with Jay Famiglietti, Global Futures Professor in the School of Sustainability and Director of Science for the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative.
How did you become interested in food systems issues?
In my work, we use satellites and develop computer models to map out how water availability is changing around the world. In 2002, we started working with a NASA satellite called GRACE (The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment). As data started coming in from GRACE, I began building maps of changing water storage around the world, and it became really clear that some of the places on land that were losing the most water were the world's major aquifer systems, and the reason that they were losing water was for food production. That was really my foray into food systems.
Share a glimpse of your current research, and how it applies to food systems transformation.
We have the message from the satellite data, and we’ve been getting it for 20 years now. It’s telling us that groundwater depletion has been happening for decades, especially in well-known, major food producing regions like the Central Calley of California; the southern part of the Ogallala Aquifer in the high plains of Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. And it’s not just the United States—this is a global problem. But taking that next step means that we need to engage with stakeholders and government agencies to communicate what’s going on to the general public. That's when I think a transformation will happen. We have to transform how we engage with the food industry, because we all need to eat, and that requires enough water to feed us for thousands of years, not just the next twenty. Our satellite data is opening the door to very important efforts towards science, communication, stakeholder engagement, and co-developed research.
What is an innovation in the food systems world that you're excited about?
There are two things that I’m currently excited about. We use a lot of water for food production—around 80% of our total water usage. As a result, satellite maps show that much of the world is drying out. This really points to the fact that we have to do things more efficiently. So I’m excited about anything that drives that change. One thing that I think is really important is doing irrigation more efficiently, in particular moving away from flood irrigation and transitioning to drip irrigation. There are lots of development in this space—there’s now a surface drip irrigation company called N-Drip that's all gravity driven and relatively inexpensive, which can help us save a lot of water. Even if this allows us to save just a few percent, we use so much water that a few percent would be huge.
The other innovation I’m excited about is satellite observations, and there are a number of private sector companies that have now entered the satellite and remote sensing space. They're a little bit more nimble, which allows them to capture things at much higher resolution. The high resolution maps they’re producing are very important for understanding how much water is available for irrigation and for farming. One of these maps indicates surface temperature, and another one visualizes soil moisture which is what plants actually use in the upper few centimeters of soil. When we take that data and combine it with some of the NASA satellite data that we use, we're able to put together a detailed picture that can really help us understand which plants are under stress, which parts of fields are more productive, and how to make irrigation more targeted and efficient. There's still a big obstacle, though, in connecting with farmers to get them to actually use it. But regardless, the rapid development in that space is very encouraging.
What is your favorite weeknight meal?
It’s changed so much in the last year. It used to be pizza, and over the years I really figured out how to optimize our pizza production. But in January, my wife and I decided to move away from meat and dairy consumption, both for health and environmental reasons. Since then, we’ve been about 95% vegan. Now, my go-to meal is black beans and rice, and I find that it's a great comfort food.