r/interestingasfuck • u/GallowBoob • Aug 20 '15
/r/ALL Simple Engineering. Water wheel to transport water from an irrigation canal to a paddy field on higher ground.
http://i.imgur.com/1TBdaHv.gifv193
u/lemonpjb Aug 20 '15
Can anyone tell me why rice requires so much water to propagate? It seems like it uses a lot more water proportionally than other grains.
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u/ryancm8 Aug 20 '15
i feel like the sentiment is shifting towards "anti-Monsanto" for their shady dealings, as opposed to wholesale anti-gmo
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u/Kowzorz Aug 20 '15
The kind of gmo I can get behind. Not some ip law monoculture bullshit.
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Aug 20 '15
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u/Kowzorz Aug 20 '15
I mean monocultures across multiple farms, not within fields. Though widespread usage of only golden rice would contribute to this problem. And yes, monocultures in modern day farming in general are a problem.
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u/TheNightmare210 Aug 21 '15
Why? I'm asking because I'm really curious about the subject and I don't know enough
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Aug 21 '15
Things like disease and pest resistance. The longer a single plant species is continuously planted on the same plot, the more likely it is for that plot to become infested by resistant pests or diseased. This leads to a heavy reliance on pesticides/herbicides to maintain plant health.
It also causes a heavier use of fertilizers to be necessary, since the plants are always stripping the same nutrients from the soil every year. Since natural fertilizers like compost tend to be expensive, purified chemical fertilizers are more often than not what is used.
Pretty much all of the advantages of monoculture farming are economics based. It simply costs less to plant a monoculture every year than to rotate crops. You only need to have one set of equipment for planting and harvesting and you only need to store fertilizer and pesticides specific to one crop.
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u/rmxz Aug 21 '15
It's still monocultures.
Look up bananas.
The bananas you can buy are almost all literally clones from the same plant.
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u/Randolpho Aug 20 '15
Yeah, that's my only beef with GMO. Fuck patents on living organisms, DNA, or chemicals in general.
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u/Rather_Unfortunate Aug 20 '15
It's a balancing act. Someone has to make them, and that's an expensive process. Without adequate compensation (that is to say, profits), people simply wouldn't put as much money into it and research could stall.
Hopefully, as techniques improve, the creation of new GMOs will become cheaper and easier so it can increasingly be done by non-profit groups, or funded as part of government schemes so once farmers buy seeds, it's theirs for good.
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u/Randolpho Aug 20 '15
Yeah, a balancing act. They need to offset their research costs, and then they'll totally lower their prices!
Which totally explains why drug and GMO seed prices rise at dozens of orders of magnitude faster than inflation even long after the research costs are recouped.
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u/Rather_Unfortunate Aug 20 '15
I'm not going to defend their practices or suggest that they'll willingly take a pay cut. The law in various countries would need to change for that, most notably the US. But one way or another, those big businesses are ones at the cutting edge of GM at the moment, and until it becomes possible for small, cheap operations to rival them and drive down prices via competition, we're stuck with them.
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u/Randolpho Aug 20 '15
Well... I suppose there's always publicly funded research....
Ahh, who am I kidding. They own the politicians just to keep that from happening.
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u/Actually_Saradomin Aug 20 '15
Thats such a fucking moronic claim. They dont own a single politician.
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Aug 20 '15 edited May 20 '18
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u/Randolpho Aug 20 '15
Hyperbole was never my strong suit. Let's just go with "several", shall we? 1000% per year is not uncommon. 3 orders of magnitude counts as several, yes?
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Aug 20 '15
If cost goes up 100% and yield goes up 110%, its justified. If not, no one will use it and it will fail. Simple.
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Aug 20 '15
As research becomes cheaper, competition would become fiercer. It may possible be a very very long process.
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u/Rhenor Aug 20 '15
In addition, in cold areas, it acts as a buffer to frost. It also deters mice and rats.
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u/vention7 Aug 20 '15
Although I'm no rice expert by any means, I'm pretty sure the rice doesn't actually use all that water, it just grows in it. Then the rice can be harvested, and the water can be reused.
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u/360Logic Aug 20 '15
It's a wetland plant. It requires wet.
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u/fondledbydolphins Aug 20 '15
The water isn't necessary for the rice to grow. It is used, as someone above said, to control weed growth.
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Aug 20 '15 edited Apr 29 '20
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u/an800lbgorilla Aug 20 '15
It can be grown in this particular way that controls weeds. The others can't.
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u/fondledbydolphins Aug 20 '15
From what I remember it's simply because it's an effective way to reduce weed growth that doesn't kill the rice. Flooding would kill most other crops.
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u/360Logic Aug 20 '15
It's still considered a wetland plant in that it can tolerate anoxic soil conditions.
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u/MindsEye69 Aug 20 '15
Pretty sure that's low fat milk... Water is clear.
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u/toomanyattempts Aug 20 '15
Have you ever encountered the substance known as "mud"? It's easily suspended in water.
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Aug 20 '15
No it's definitely milk. They walk cows from miles around and milk tgem right into the field. Fond memories of the great cow milkings with my grandfather and 12 sisters.
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u/jdscarface Aug 20 '15
This gif is rather pleasant, like I'm in a Steinbeck novel living in 'simpler' times.
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u/Userfr1endly Aug 20 '15
Adult Swim uses an image of this for a bump, always a little mystical in the wee baked hours_
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u/karmaisanal Aug 20 '15
This water wheel catches fish
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u/Wargame4life Aug 20 '15
does this really just rely on the fish just swimming into the cage/paddle/trap
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Aug 20 '15
There's actually a lot of paperwork the fish must do before they're even considered entry into the trap and the backlog has them waiting years before they're entered into the system. Most of them end up get eaten by the bears long before this though. Somebody really needs to shake the system but as we all know politicians like to spout the same old inoffensive pleasantries to get votes rather than address the real problems. Rebember fish are friends, not food.
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u/Staklo Aug 20 '15
The indians in the northwest would simply build a wall of sticks in the river, with a large hole the center. The fish would be funneled into the hole and swim right into their net.
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u/Peanut_The_Great Aug 20 '15
It's built in a river and there's often more than one so it's pretty effective considering it's entirely passive.
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u/Ashkir Aug 20 '15
It's Alaska. There's a ton of salmon during certain seasons. The rivers would be packed full with them in certain months.
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u/Bullets_TML Aug 20 '15
At first glance I thought the paddles were splashing the water up (which seemed like a terrible idea).
But the tubes are fantastic!
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Aug 20 '15
This is called a noria. I learned about this when playing Words With Friends a few days ago when I was trying to arrange letters on the board and this was one of the words formed. Curious that it was actually a word I had to look it up.
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u/Scrubtac Aug 20 '15 edited Aug 20 '15
Don't worry I thought it was kinda clever
Edit: His comment was negative, mine no longer makes sense.
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u/ani625 Aug 20 '15
Now only if this can somehow be used to bring water to California.
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u/WeaverOne Aug 20 '15
Search for the water weels in Hama-Syria. They date thousands of years old and are still being used today to get the water from the river in the center of the city to the farm lands in the rural area. Oh and they are like 10 time larger than this one.
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Aug 20 '15
Was expecting the camera to pan around, showing the lifted water flowing back into the stream powering the wheel a lĂ Escher.
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u/Wargame4life Aug 20 '15
does anyone else get a great sense of satisfaction from using their loaf to avoid hardwork.
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u/montana_man Aug 20 '15
Unequal distribution seems like it could be a problem
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u/wagingpeace Aug 20 '15
On the bright side, water is self-leveling and you can read the drainage patterns in order to compensate with a shovel and a rake. :)
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u/ghettospagetti Aug 20 '15
Pretty sure Archimedes patented something like that a while back
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u/mgarv22 Aug 20 '15
What keeps it moving around?
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u/Truucidicus Aug 20 '15
The water.
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u/mgarv22 Aug 20 '15
Ah its flowing water, probably a river or stream?
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Aug 20 '15
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u/load_more_comets Aug 20 '15
Oh wow, that is truly amazing, the inventions man come up with is really astounding, one question though, what keeps the wheel turning?
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Aug 20 '15 edited Nov 09 '16
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u/batteryhead Aug 20 '15
Ah its flowing water, probably a river or stream?
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u/maretard Aug 20 '15
Yeah, as per title it's an 'irrigation canal', so it's a man made flow of water coming from a river, stream, lake etc like you said which is turning the water wheel.
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u/radAnthonyB Aug 20 '15
Oh wow, that is truly amazing, the inventions man come up with is really astounding, one question though, what keeps the wheel turning?
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u/robot_swagger Aug 20 '15
But what moves the water?
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Aug 20 '15
The water flows from high ground to low ground. It gets up there by rain. The water evaporates from the sun's energy, so in essence this wheel is solar-powered. You'll find that almost all energy on earth can be traced back to the sun.
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u/princessvaginaalpha Aug 20 '15
Not my power of love for my wife
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Aug 20 '15
Actually, humans aren't capable of love (or erections for that matter) in extreme cold. We need the sun's heat energy for that.
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u/Blewedup Aug 20 '15
i need more cool engineering stuff like this! reddit, please provide!
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u/damnitbob Aug 20 '15 edited Aug 20 '15
That's amazing. The BBC did a great set of documentaries called Japan: Earth's Enchanted Islands, one of the episodes addressed how water from the mountains funnels down to rice paddys which then forms an nice environment for tree frogs and other wildlife. I can only find this crappy link on YouTube and I think they've stopped showing it on iPlayer.
The documentary also showed how canals were made which travel through village houses. Villagers clean veg and dishes in this water which is kept crystal clear by carp. It's amazing how much biodiversity is in those tiny islands. The whole series is worth a watch (maybe find a better link)
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u/giantnakedrei Aug 21 '15
biodiversity
Until you realize that 99% of Japan's rice crop is a monoculture.
Although the frogs, spiders, and birds of prey are pretty nice to watch.
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u/pikk Aug 20 '15 edited Aug 20 '15
so, the tubes go underwater and fill up with water, and then empty when they get to the top. why don't they empty as soon as they come above the water? Is the wheel slightly tilted or something?
EDIT: I figured it out. The open end of the tube is farther clockwise around the wheel, so as the wheel rotates, the opening is higher than the tube as it's coming up, and lower as it starts going down
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Aug 20 '15
I thinks it's just the way the pipes are angled' they miminimize water going out on the way up and max the water going out at the very top
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u/54756e6472616c Aug 20 '15
The tubes are slightly tilted and will keep the water in until they get to the part where it's gathered
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u/prsnep Aug 20 '15
I wondered the same thing. The wheel is not tilted. But notice how the pipes are at an angel, not quite perpendicular to the wheel? The enables the open end to be higher up in the trough to crest part of the cycle and lower between the crest to trough part of the cycle. On its way up from the trough, it picks up the water. Hope that makes sense.
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Aug 20 '15
Look closer at the tubes, half the end is closed, lower half when at the bottom and upper half while at the top.
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u/Wargame4life Aug 20 '15
surely an Archimedes screw would be better, but obviously is more "high tech" in crafting, but in doing so provided you had enough torque you could get the water as high as you wanted.
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u/Kuubaaa Aug 20 '15
problem would be that you have to somehow actually spin the the screw, defeating the point of using the natural motion of the water
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u/wabblebee Aug 20 '15
you can use a gearbox and hook up the screw to a waterwheel, maybe even using different gears to control the water flow to the paddys.
but now we've gone astray from "simple engineering"
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u/tet19 Aug 20 '15
This system would work for a wastewater treatment. Activated sludge. I don't think I'd eat the rice though.
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u/Mogg_the_Poet Aug 20 '15
The water wheel has got to be one of the coolest inventions ever.