8 ms·

Hydroponic farms, vertical farms, and agroecology could all do even better. Unsustainable food production is more of a contributor than personal consumption (th

Hydroponic farms, vertical farms, and agroecology could all do even better. Unsustainable food production is more of a contributor than personal consumption (though people's obsession with meaningless green lawns is also ridiculous). I wish the article did a better job of exploring various agricultural solutions - drip irrigation is just a baby step when compared to something like hydroponics. Hydroponic production uses anywhere (and I'm just trying to remember the various claims I've seen in both studies and articles without going back to them) from 75%-90% less water than conventional ag, beating drip irrigation off the low end. Agroecology challenges the monoculture system that (I think) caused this over-consumption. By planting thirsty crops like corn and polluting the existing aquacultures with the pesticides needed to preserve an area lacking any sort of biodiversity, monocultures have created a fragile food supply that increasing prices (and terrible subsidies) continue to highlight. Agroecology, on the other hand, encourages a system of farming that takes into account the cultural/social context of a region while suggesting methods (grounding those suggestions in data) of production that respect local ecology and agricultural practices for increased production.

trhway 11y ago
Efficiency? What efficiency?! CA farmers are increasing nut trees acreage because nut trees require a lot of water, and thus nut prices are going up in the current drought, and thus the farmers are rushing to increase the production of such profitable product. (Heard on NPR)
- abandonliberty 11y ago
  Simple: Charge appropriately for water.
- thaumaturgy 11y ago
  Here's a print version of the NPR story you're talking about: http://www.npr.org/2015/08/06/430077437/the-twisty-logic-of-the-drought-grow-thirsty-crops-to-dig-deeper-wells http://www.npr.org/2015/08/06/430077437/the-twisty-logic-of-... I looked it up because I thought there was no way that it could be true, you must've missed some important detail. But no, the article says exactly what you said it does. What a perfect example of the intersection of the free market and the tragedy of the commons.
  - liber8 11y ago
    Its not a tragedy of the commons. Charge market prices for water and this goes away.
    - thaumaturgy 11y ago
      It's almost the definitive example of the tragedy of the commons. How do you propose charging market prices for privately pumped well water?
      - icebraining 11y ago
        Privatize the groundwater?
    - mapt 11y ago
      It's a tragedy of the commons until you charge market prices for water. Privatization, regulation, collectivization, adaptive fees / "market pricing" - these are solutions proposed to situations which resemble the tragedy of the commons, in order that we can avoid the worst case scenario associated with continued individually-incentivized over-exploitation. The term refers to situations where these incentives operating on a common good line up in a way which is potentially self-destructive to the system - not strictly to situations where they've already destroyed the system.
    - cortesoft 11y ago
      Yes, if you start charging for the 'common', then you can avoid the tragedy of the common. They would first have to outlaw pumping your own water in order to start charging market price for it.
    - anigbrowl 11y ago
      It's a tragedy of the commons because groundwater is legally a common resource that anyone can exploit as they see fit. You can't charge market prices for it without changing that picture and declaring that someone else (eg the state) has a property interest in the groundwater, at which point it's no longer in the commons.
- animefan 11y ago
  CA farmers are increasing nut trees acreage because nut trees require a lot of water, and thus nut prices are going up in the current drought It simply isn't possible for things to happen the way you describe them. Prices are a function of supply and demand. When you say "nut trees require a lot of water, and thus nut prices are going up in the current drought" this implies that supply of nuts went down during the drought. Otherwise, consumers would have no reason to care about the amount of water required to produce nuts. Given this, "CA farmers are increasing nut trees acreage" must be an incomplete picture. Even if some farmers are increasing acreage, there must be others who are decreasing by even more, otherwise prices would be going down, not up.
  - encoderer 11y ago
    Or, yields have dropped in the drought so farmers are forced to increase acreage? Probably that?
    - animefan 11y ago
      That could well have happened, but that's not my point. I was critiquing a certain mechanism, which claimed that an increase to input costs could, in itself, cause in increase in supply.
      - dragonwriter 11y ago
        > I was critiquing a certain mechanism, which claimed that an increase to input costs could, in itself, cause in increase in supply. That was not the claim. The claim was that an decrease in supply of one input (water) could drive market conditions which lead to an increase in consumption (in the course of production) of another input (land use).
      - kbenson 11y ago
        What you're missing is that water is not an input cost for many of these farmers. The farmers that have cheaper access to water are increasing production of these same water intensive crops, because they are more lucrative. The problem is in assuming a level playing field in the market, which it isn't entirely, due to how water is dealt with in CA.
- thephyber 11y ago
  It doesn't happen in a vaccuum. There is game theory at work here. Farmers and ranchers don't just use muni water sources. Yes, water is common when you look at the water table, but muni water districts tend to use reservoirs and farmers must use water rights (which are built into the California Constitution, BTW). Nut farmers may be in a position to use more water (I doubt all of them are), but that doesn't mean that all California farmers are able to do the same. California rice farmers, for example, (farming rice in an arid near-desert should almost be a crime) have been netting more money by leasing their water rights than working their crops for years now.[1] [1] http://www.mercurynews.com/drought/ci_26181042/high-bidding-farmers-battle-water-auctions http://www.mercurynews.com/drought/ci_26181042/high-bidding-...
  - thrownaway2424 11y ago
    I don't think it's very fair to call Glenn County a "near-desert". It drains a huge mountain watershed via the Sacramento River and in many places in that county the main hazard to agriculture is the high water table. The depth to water table in the flat part of the county is only 10-20 feet.
    - thephyber 11y ago
      When I say "desert", I am talking about the technical definition, which is based off of the amount of precipitation.
      - thrownaway2424 11y ago
        OK, does your private definition of "desert" include a county that averages 20" of rainfall per year and is regularly flooded? Growing rice in arid flood plains has been practiced for a very long time. If you think that Glenn, Butte, and Tehama counties are deserts I strongly urge you to visit them, especially in the early spring. There's just water everywhere.
allendoerfer 11y ago
That, plus increased efficiency in the use of food (less waste). I wish there would be a good way to link related stories on HN, because what you describe is what I was referring to in a comment to a story about plastic-ball-based sun roofs for water reservoirs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10052633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10052633
cmsmith 11y ago
If we're willing to invest in engineered solutions like hydroponics and vertical farms, then there is no need to be growing crops in California in the first place. The advantage of California agriculture is that you can grow crops outside year round. If you're growing inside, then you might as well grow where the water/people are.
- whyenot 11y ago
  > The advantage of California agriculture is that you can grow crops outside year round. It's a little more complicated than that. When it comes to produce, I think you are right being able to grow year round is a huge advantage. But, many of the nuts and stone fruit grown in California would actually do better if were cooler (better fruit set, fewer pests). What is very compelling about California agriculture is the dry, low humidity summers that prevent crop damage and at least in the central valley, quite possibly the best agricultural soil on the planet. Of course the federal and state water projects also help a lot by increasing access to water and historically have been a huge indirect government subsidy to CA agriculture. > If you're growing inside, then you might as well grow where the water/people are. California has a population approaching 40 million.
  - jackfoxy 11y ago
    > quite possibly the best agricultural soil on the planet I think the Salinas Valley in California is even a stronger contender for this title than the Central Valley.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > If you're growing inside, then you might as well grow where the water/people are. Well, no, you want to, ideally, grow where the water is but the people aren't. Because otherwise agricultural use and human use are competing for space in the same high-demand areas, and driving the prices up for each other. It may be even be worth moving some water to where the people aren't to support growing to permit this, given the normal tendency for people to also be where the water is.
SilasX 11y ago
Actually, judging by the countermeasures taken during the drought, the real problem is restaurant patrons being given water that they didn't ask for and might not drink. (Even though the effect of automatically-provided water is to nudge people away from drinks that require plants and therefore more water to produce...)
IndianAstronaut 11y ago
>Unsustainable food production is more of a contributor than personal consumption I wonder when we will finally admit that we need to watch what foods we consume. Casava instead of rice, soy instead of meat, etc.
- adventured 11y ago
  Long before we'll get most people to watch what they eat, we'll have inexpensive, tasty, 'lab grown' meat that uses drastically less water to create. That'll be commercially available within 15-20 years. Soy as a replacement will never end up being a necessity, technology and ingenuity will once again fix our problems.
bro-stick 11y ago
California farmers are moving in that direction, at various speeds but not to minimal footprint, efficient production. What I'd like to see is a produce supply chain that uses the least resources and organically delivers for look and taste while depending less on monocultural GMO. It's entirely possible with applied ingenuity.
- 13thLetter 11y ago
  > What I'd like to see is a produce supply chain that uses the least resources and organically delivers for look and taste while depending less on monocultural GMO. You are aware there have to be tradeoffs along those various axes, right? In particular, if you rule out the use of GMOs you're shooting yourself in the foot with regards to achieving other goals in a short timeframe.
thrownaway2424 11y ago
A reasonable agricultural solution is to stop growing food in California. There are many fewer farms in the eastern part of the country than there once were because the settlement of California, fossil fertility, underground fossil water, and federally-subsidized surface water projects made agriculture in California dirt cheap. That put the east coast growers out of business. The eastern USA of course has undergone a huge multi-century boom and bust cycle, being naturally forested, then significantly cleared for European-style agriculture, and now again highly forested. If we just grew food where the water is, we wouldn't be having so much fuss over agriculture in the desert.
- Aloha 11y ago
  Believe it or not, California has plenty of water... in non drought years. That;s a aside. Food will continue to grow in California, because the support systems for wide scale farming are present, until the support systems develop elsewhere the farming won't move either.
seanmcdirmid 11y ago
I don't think California grows a lot of corn, or any for that matter. It is more into specialized fruits and nuts..and cows of course.
- unoti 11y ago
  I drive by a lot of corn fields out here. California produces 16% of the nation's sweet corn, #2 in the nation. http://www.seecalifornia.com/farms/california-corn.html http://www.seecalifornia.com/farms/california-corn.html
  - seanmcdirmid 11y ago
    Ah I didn't realize it. I've never driven through a corn field on California, or I've never noticed it like in the Midwest. And it's all to feed the cows of course.
    - maxerickson 11y ago
      The "number 2 in sweet corn" is a little bit cherry picked, sweet corn is the corn grown for humans and is just a little bit of the total corn grown (~1%). It's much nicer fresh, so it isn't surprising that a huge state grows quite a lot of it. The numbers at the provided link reveal the picture, talking about California having ~200,000 acres of grain corn and the US having 87 million acres of corn. (As an aside, in my limited experience, Europeans might not know that corn on the cob as eaten in the US is always sweet corn, and that modern varieties barely need to be cooked, pretty much just heated through. Methods vary, but just a minute or two of boiling is pretty common.)
nitrogen 11y ago
...people's obsession with meaningless green lawns... I suspect there's a reason why green is a common favorite color; it's a sign of life and vitality. Have there been any studies of mental health in areas without many green lawns? Of course, there are less thirsty plants that can provide greenery.
erikb 11y ago
All the other points might be correct, but green lawns aren't meaningless. Green helps people to calm down and focus. That's why chalk boards for schools use a dark green tone. Having some grass in front of your kitchen might be a way of us to stay sane. If the price is okay in an environment were water is very rare is a good question, though. There might be other sources of green plantation that doesn't use as much water.
- giltleaf 11y ago
  There are other plants that are green that aren't non-native, aren't water hungry, and can contribute meaningfully to other aspects of quality of life (not just human life, but biodiversity as well)

trhway 11y ago

Efficiency? What efficiency?! CA farmers are increasing nut trees acreage because nut trees require a lot of water, and thus nut prices are going up in the current drought, and thus the farmers are rushing to increase the production of such profitable product. (Heard on NPR)

abandonliberty 11y ago
Simple: Charge appropriately for water.
thaumaturgy 11y ago
Here's a print version of the NPR story you're talking about: http://www.npr.org/2015/08/06/430077437/the-twisty-logic-of-the-drought-grow-thirsty-crops-to-dig-deeper-wells http://www.npr.org/2015/08/06/430077437/the-twisty-logic-of-... I looked it up because I thought there was no way that it could be true, you must've missed some important detail. But no, the article says exactly what you said it does. What a perfect example of the intersection of the free market and the tragedy of the commons.
- liber8 11y ago
  Its not a tragedy of the commons. Charge market prices for water and this goes away.
  - thaumaturgy 11y ago
    It's almost the definitive example of the tragedy of the commons. How do you propose charging market prices for privately pumped well water?
    - icebraining 11y ago
      Privatize the groundwater?
  - mapt 11y ago
    It's a tragedy of the commons until you charge market prices for water. Privatization, regulation, collectivization, adaptive fees / "market pricing" - these are solutions proposed to situations which resemble the tragedy of the commons, in order that we can avoid the worst case scenario associated with continued individually-incentivized over-exploitation. The term refers to situations where these incentives operating on a common good line up in a way which is potentially self-destructive to the system - not strictly to situations where they've already destroyed the system.
  - cortesoft 11y ago
    Yes, if you start charging for the 'common', then you can avoid the tragedy of the common. They would first have to outlaw pumping your own water in order to start charging market price for it.
  - anigbrowl 11y ago
    It's a tragedy of the commons because groundwater is legally a common resource that anyone can exploit as they see fit. You can't charge market prices for it without changing that picture and declaring that someone else (eg the state) has a property interest in the groundwater, at which point it's no longer in the commons.
animefan 11y ago
CA farmers are increasing nut trees acreage because nut trees require a lot of water, and thus nut prices are going up in the current drought It simply isn't possible for things to happen the way you describe them. Prices are a function of supply and demand. When you say "nut trees require a lot of water, and thus nut prices are going up in the current drought" this implies that supply of nuts went down during the drought. Otherwise, consumers would have no reason to care about the amount of water required to produce nuts. Given this, "CA farmers are increasing nut trees acreage" must be an incomplete picture. Even if some farmers are increasing acreage, there must be others who are decreasing by even more, otherwise prices would be going down, not up.
- encoderer 11y ago
  Or, yields have dropped in the drought so farmers are forced to increase acreage? Probably that?
  - animefan 11y ago
    That could well have happened, but that's not my point. I was critiquing a certain mechanism, which claimed that an increase to input costs could, in itself, cause in increase in supply.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      > I was critiquing a certain mechanism, which claimed that an increase to input costs could, in itself, cause in increase in supply. That was not the claim. The claim was that an decrease in supply of one input (water) could drive market conditions which lead to an increase in consumption (in the course of production) of another input (land use).
    - kbenson 11y ago
      What you're missing is that water is not an input cost for many of these farmers. The farmers that have cheaper access to water are increasing production of these same water intensive crops, because they are more lucrative. The problem is in assuming a level playing field in the market, which it isn't entirely, due to how water is dealt with in CA.
thephyber 11y ago
It doesn't happen in a vaccuum. There is game theory at work here. Farmers and ranchers don't just use muni water sources. Yes, water is common when you look at the water table, but muni water districts tend to use reservoirs and farmers must use water rights (which are built into the California Constitution, BTW). Nut farmers may be in a position to use more water (I doubt all of them are), but that doesn't mean that all California farmers are able to do the same. California rice farmers, for example, (farming rice in an arid near-desert should almost be a crime) have been netting more money by leasing their water rights than working their crops for years now.[1] [1] http://www.mercurynews.com/drought/ci_26181042/high-bidding-farmers-battle-water-auctions http://www.mercurynews.com/drought/ci_26181042/high-bidding-...
- thrownaway2424 11y ago
  I don't think it's very fair to call Glenn County a "near-desert". It drains a huge mountain watershed via the Sacramento River and in many places in that county the main hazard to agriculture is the high water table. The depth to water table in the flat part of the county is only 10-20 feet.
  - thephyber 11y ago
    When I say "desert", I am talking about the technical definition, which is based off of the amount of precipitation.
    - thrownaway2424 11y ago
      OK, does your private definition of "desert" include a county that averages 20" of rainfall per year and is regularly flooded? Growing rice in arid flood plains has been practiced for a very long time. If you think that Glenn, Butte, and Tehama counties are deserts I strongly urge you to visit them, especially in the early spring. There's just water everywhere.

allendoerfer 11y ago

That, plus increased efficiency in the use of food (less waste). I wish there would be a good way to link related stories on HN, because what you describe is what I was referring to in a comment to a story about plastic-ball-based sun roofs for water reservoirs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10052633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10052633

cmsmith 11y ago

If we're willing to invest in engineered solutions like hydroponics and vertical farms, then there is no need to be growing crops in California in the first place. The advantage of California agriculture is that you can grow crops outside year round. If you're growing inside, then you might as well grow where the water/people are.

whyenot 11y ago
> The advantage of California agriculture is that you can grow crops outside year round. It's a little more complicated than that. When it comes to produce, I think you are right being able to grow year round is a huge advantage. But, many of the nuts and stone fruit grown in California would actually do better if were cooler (better fruit set, fewer pests). What is very compelling about California agriculture is the dry, low humidity summers that prevent crop damage and at least in the central valley, quite possibly the best agricultural soil on the planet. Of course the federal and state water projects also help a lot by increasing access to water and historically have been a huge indirect government subsidy to CA agriculture. > If you're growing inside, then you might as well grow where the water/people are. California has a population approaching 40 million.
- jackfoxy 11y ago
  > quite possibly the best agricultural soil on the planet I think the Salinas Valley in California is even a stronger contender for this title than the Central Valley.
dragonwriter 11y ago
> If you're growing inside, then you might as well grow where the water/people are. Well, no, you want to, ideally, grow where the water is but the people aren't. Because otherwise agricultural use and human use are competing for space in the same high-demand areas, and driving the prices up for each other. It may be even be worth moving some water to where the people aren't to support growing to permit this, given the normal tendency for people to also be where the water is.

SilasX 11y ago

Actually, judging by the countermeasures taken during the drought, the real problem is restaurant patrons being given water that they didn't ask for and might not drink. (Even though the effect of automatically-provided water is to nudge people away from drinks that require plants and therefore more water to produce...)

IndianAstronaut 11y ago

>Unsustainable food production is more of a contributor than personal consumption I wonder when we will finally admit that we need to watch what foods we consume. Casava instead of rice, soy instead of meat, etc.

adventured 11y ago
Long before we'll get most people to watch what they eat, we'll have inexpensive, tasty, 'lab grown' meat that uses drastically less water to create. That'll be commercially available within 15-20 years. Soy as a replacement will never end up being a necessity, technology and ingenuity will once again fix our problems.

bro-stick 11y ago

California farmers are moving in that direction, at various speeds but not to minimal footprint, efficient production. What I'd like to see is a produce supply chain that uses the least resources and organically delivers for look and taste while depending less on monocultural GMO. It's entirely possible with applied ingenuity.

13thLetter 11y ago
> What I'd like to see is a produce supply chain that uses the least resources and organically delivers for look and taste while depending less on monocultural GMO. You are aware there have to be tradeoffs along those various axes, right? In particular, if you rule out the use of GMOs you're shooting yourself in the foot with regards to achieving other goals in a short timeframe.

thrownaway2424 11y ago

A reasonable agricultural solution is to stop growing food in California. There are many fewer farms in the eastern part of the country than there once were because the settlement of California, fossil fertility, underground fossil water, and federally-subsidized surface water projects made agriculture in California dirt cheap. That put the east coast growers out of business. The eastern USA of course has undergone a huge multi-century boom and bust cycle, being naturally forested, then significantly cleared for European-style agriculture, and now again highly forested. If we just grew food where the water is, we wouldn't be having so much fuss over agriculture in the desert.

Aloha 11y ago
Believe it or not, California has plenty of water... in non drought years. That;s a aside. Food will continue to grow in California, because the support systems for wide scale farming are present, until the support systems develop elsewhere the farming won't move either.

seanmcdirmid 11y ago

I don't think California grows a lot of corn, or any for that matter. It is more into specialized fruits and nuts..and cows of course.

unoti 11y ago
I drive by a lot of corn fields out here. California produces 16% of the nation's sweet corn, #2 in the nation. http://www.seecalifornia.com/farms/california-corn.html http://www.seecalifornia.com/farms/california-corn.html
- seanmcdirmid 11y ago
  Ah I didn't realize it. I've never driven through a corn field on California, or I've never noticed it like in the Midwest. And it's all to feed the cows of course.
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    The "number 2 in sweet corn" is a little bit cherry picked, sweet corn is the corn grown for humans and is just a little bit of the total corn grown (~1%). It's much nicer fresh, so it isn't surprising that a huge state grows quite a lot of it. The numbers at the provided link reveal the picture, talking about California having ~200,000 acres of grain corn and the US having 87 million acres of corn. (As an aside, in my limited experience, Europeans might not know that corn on the cob as eaten in the US is always sweet corn, and that modern varieties barely need to be cooked, pretty much just heated through. Methods vary, but just a minute or two of boiling is pretty common.)

nitrogen 11y ago

...people's obsession with meaningless green lawns... I suspect there's a reason why green is a common favorite color; it's a sign of life and vitality. Have there been any studies of mental health in areas without many green lawns? Of course, there are less thirsty plants that can provide greenery.

erikb 11y ago

All the other points might be correct, but green lawns aren't meaningless. Green helps people to calm down and focus. That's why chalk boards for schools use a dark green tone. Having some grass in front of your kitchen might be a way of us to stay sane. If the price is okay in an environment were water is very rare is a good question, though. There might be other sources of green plantation that doesn't use as much water.

giltleaf 11y ago
There are other plants that are green that aren't non-native, aren't water hungry, and can contribute meaningfully to other aspects of quality of life (not just human life, but biodiversity as well)