6 ms·

Another toll of the drought: Land is sinking in San Joaquin Valley

50 points by 11thEarlOfMar 11y ago

1971genocide 11y ago
I am in the UK and I brought almond hair oil - at the back it said "almonds grown in California". How does this make any sense ? Its not even almond but almond OIL. Knowing what I know now I look at the bottle and wonder how many thirsty Californian babies did I just kill buying this. Its the same feeling you get when wearing Nike shoes that you know were made in some sweatshop.
- JPKab 11y ago
  Just for perspective: There isn't any kind of issue where people aren't getting water to drink, but yes, growing almonds is fucking stupid in a drought ridden state.
  - 1971genocide 11y ago
    The thing is growing almond is okay if its to meet local demand. But growing it in a state that is experiencing drought and then shipping it halfway across a ocean is just way out of wack. Is there a lack of area with water in the rest of the world ?? Why cannot almonds be grown somewhere in the second largest continent of africa ? Its much closer to me than bloody California.
    - kbenson 11y ago
      Because it's profitable? If the true cost of growing almonds was actually paid by the farmers (including water cost, which is the real problem, it doesn't really cost anything to the farmers compared to it's true cost to the surrounding area), they would cost more to buy, reducing demand, cost more to grow, reducing profit, and more than likely be grown in other areas. Farmers are just optimizing for a system with cost inputs where the cost of some inputs (water) are paid by others (CA residents, via ecological and water supply problems). The quicker we can shift this cost to the true user (farmers) the quicker the system will stabilize.
    - bdcravens 11y ago
      Could you not say the same thing about programmers and San Francisco?
  - kbenson 11y ago
    And like many things, it's due to misaligned incentives causing a cascade affect. The farmers aren't stupid, they are simply optimizing for a system where water has little to no cost and almonds (and pistachios, I hear) are extremely lucrative. Each farmer is making a sane decision for themselves to maximize their profit based on their capabilities, and to not do so at this point just means the same end result, but with less profit for that farmer and slightly more for their competitors. It's not really any different than the environment (pollution had no direct cost), except that a) consumers started caring, making a market for responsible treatment of the environment, and B) governments are starting to get involved, putting caps on pollution, trying to assess actual environmental affect, and in some cases making companies offset it (a market, yet again).
  - YZF 11y ago
    It's also hurting bees and other parts of the ecosystem. Endless mono-culture all flowering at once. Local bees can't survive and they need to truck in bees to pollinate. A few months ago I was driving past an overturned truck (those trucks from the other article) full of bees. A month later it was a truck full of salmon but that's a different story...
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    > growing almonds is fucking stupid in a drought ridden state. I've seen this sentiment a few times, and it's never made sense. Crop growth isn't determined solely by water availability. There's plenty of water in Florida, but the climate there is likely less almond-friendly than the California climate. In a toy world with just those two states, you'd have to pick your preference: climate control in Florida, or water importing in California. Saying they're both just something an idiot would try to do is giving up on the whole idea of growing almonds in particular and of comparative advantage generally. Maybe California's exceptional climate justifies doing a certain amount of work you wouldn't have to do to grow crops somewhere else. I've also seen two more sensible points about almonds and California water: - It's difficult to make property rights in water work, because two people drawing from two wells into the same aquifer both just lower the level of the aquifer everywhere. Off the top of my head, you'd need tradable allotments, like ocean fisheries, rather than property lines which I believe are what we currently use. - If you own a field and want to grow alfalfa (hugely water intensive), you can just let the field lie fallow if the price of water goes too high. You'll lose that year's alfalfa crop. But, if you own an almond orchard, you can't abandon it just because it'll cost more money to water it than you can make back selling the almonds -- if you don't water your orchard, all of the trees will die, and you won't own an almond orchard anymore. Since the California precipitation cycle is much longer than one year, it might be good policy to discourage crops that require maintenance on a yearly basis.
    - mirimir 11y ago
      So why isn't there liability for damage caused by subsidence?
    - hussong 11y ago
      Seems like a false dichotomy, you could also just have zero almonds and grow something else.
      - thaumasiotes 11y ago
        >> Saying they're both just something an idiot would try to do is giving up on the whole idea of growing almonds in particular
  - SilasX 11y ago
    Actually, there kind of is. The drought has given restaurants intellectual "covering fire" for not bringing out passive-aggressively small cups for drinking water. I know, "minor inconvenience" and all, but it's pretty ridiculous that it's come to that, as if that somehow is at all noticeable for urban water consumption.
- ipsin 11y ago
  It's peculiar to me that I've heard so much attention on almonds as a water-intensive crop, and so little about beef, given that they're comparable in terms of water cost per pound or per calorie, and both are major Californian products. I'm not a vegetarian or an animal rights activist, but my urge to add this disclaimer might have something to do with why that's so.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
    Cattle can be moved to water, if necessary, or herd culled. They're restored fairly quickly. Beef cattle are butchered at about one year of age, dairy cattle live about 6 years. Milk is typically produced somewhat locally, in that it's a heavy bulk liquid which is expensive to transport. Trees are far more difficult to herd than either cattle or cats, and orchards have lifespans in the decades, with some historic California orange groves up to 300 years old. Most nut and stone-fruit trees have a 30-50 year ife. Moreover, there's a period of 4-7 years depending on tree crop during which an orchard is nonbearing, so if you remove an orchard, there's a significant hit. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/32b6yl/drought_water_use_and_ag/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/32b6yl/drought... http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/tax-policy/Documents/depreci8study_fruitnuttrees.pdf http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/tax-policy/Documents... The upshot is that it's much more difficult to rapidly adjust tree-crop water use than cattle, whether dairy or beef. Though on a gallons per unit protein basis, almonds do rate as more efficient as I understand.
    - WalterGR 11y ago
      What practical effect has this had on groves and herds in California, and on the California drought in general?
      - dredmorbius 11y ago
        I cover what little I know of that in the links above, see them for reference. On herds: not clear, though I believe they're somewhat reduced. Though alfalfa, not almonds, in support of cattle, are the largest single use (ag or otherwise) of water within California. As with herds, alfalfa cultivation can be switched on or off rapidly. My understanding is that the actual amount of supplemental water for cattle varies greatly throughout the state. For northern coastal California, irrigation (or "virtual water" in the form of supplied alfalfa) is less necessary.
kator 11y ago
Almonds, what about rice?
- tzs 11y ago
  Rice and almonds appear wasteful when measured by mass produced per unit of water used, but that's not a particularly useful measure for food. More useful is calories per unit of water and protein per unit of water. Rice measured by calories per unit of water is more efficient than lettuce, celery, tomatoes, spinach, cauliflower, lemons, raspberries, peaches, and broccoli. It's less efficient than carrots and strawberries. National Geographic has a nice interactive display of the efficiency of various crops as measured by three factors (water/weight, water/calories, and water/protein) here: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/05/150508-which-california-exports-crops-are-worth-the-water/ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/05/150508-which-cali...
SovietDissident 11y ago
Demonizing farmers for the water crisis is completely missing the issue. The fault lies at the feet of environmentalists and politicians who stopped building water infrastructure in proportion to the growing state population. LA is naturally a desert. SF cannot supply all of its water locally. Water infrastructure is necessary for humans to live in most regions of California and we have been living off infrastructure investments made 50+ years ago. This is a must-read to understand what's been going on: http://www.hoover.org/research/dry-winters-tale http://www.hoover.org/research/dry-winters-tale "Just as California’s freeways were designed to grow to meet increased traffic, the state’s vast water projects were engineered to expand with the population. Many assumed that the state would finish planned additions to the California State Water Project and its ancillaries. But in the 1960s and early 1970s, no one anticipated that the then-nascent environmental move-ment would one day go to court to stop most new dam construction, including the 14,000-acre Sites Reser- voir on the Sacramento River near Maxwell; the Los Banos Grandes facility, along a section of the California Aqueduct in Merced County; and the Temper-ance Flat Reservoir, above Millerton Lake north of Fresno. Had the gigantic Klamath River diversion project not likewise been canceled in the 1970s, the resulting Ah Pah reservoir would have been the state’s largest man-made reservoir. At two-thirds the size of Lake Mead, it might have stored fifteen million acre-feet of water, enough to supply San Francisco for thirty years. California’s water-storage capacity would be nearly double what it is today had these plans come to fruition. It was just as difficult to imagine that envi-ronmentalists would try to divert contracted irrigation and municipal water from already-established reservoirs. Yet they did just that, and subsequently moved to freeze California’s water-storage resources at 1970s capacities... In reaction to these ongoing disasters and fearing a fourth year of drought, the legislature and Governor Jerry Brown placed a $7.5 billion water bond on the November 2014 ballot. It passed, but only a third of the money will go to construction of reservoirs canceled in the 1970s and 1980s. Most of the bond’s provisions will fund huge new state bureaucracies to regulate access to groundwater and mandate recycling. The bond will essentially void more than a century of complex water law as the state moves to curb farmers’ ability to pump water from beneath their own lands. Bay Area legislators who helped draft the bill failed to grasp that farmers’ drilling and pumping is driven not by greed or insensitivity to the environment but by a doubling in the state’s population and a water infrastructure that has not kept pace. A better way to regulate overdrafts of the water table would have been to increase vastly the reservoir surface water for agriculture so farmers would have no need to turn on their pumps... Continuing drought means vast tracts of westside farmlands will turn to dust. California’s nearly $30 billion agricultural export industry—led by dairy, almond, and grape production—is in grave peril. Its collapse would crush the economic livelihood of the Central Valley, especially its Hispanic com-munity. When the five-million-acre west side goes dry, hundreds of thousands of people will lose their jobs in a part of the state where the average unem-ployment rate still hovers above 10 percent. Farmers will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to further deepen their wells and save what water they can. Everything they and their predecessors have known for a century will be threatened with extinction. Water use in California is being curtailed by those least affected, if affected at all, by the consequences of their advocacy. But environmental-ists, who for forty years worked to undermine the prudent expansion of the state’s water infrastructure, have a rendezvous with those consequences soon. No reservoir water is left for them to divert—none for the reintroduc-tion of their salmon, none for the Delta smelt. Their one hope is to claim possession of the water in the ground once they’ve exhausted what was above it... Now that no more reservoir water remains to divert, the exasperated left is damning “corporate” agriculture (“Big Ag”) for “wasting” water on things like hundreds of thousands of acres of almonds and non-wine grapes. But corporate giants like “Big Apple,” “Big Google,” and “Big Facebook” assume that their multimillion-person landscapes sit atop an aquifer. They don’t—at least, not one large enough to service their growing populations. I have never met a Bay Area environmentalist or Silicon Valley grandee who didn’t drink or shower with water imported from a far distant water project. And as the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir drains, Bay Area man-made stor-age lakes will necessarily follow. Another year of drought will deplete even Southern California’s municipal reserves sooner rather than later. When Silicon Valley tech lords and academics can’t take a shower and find them-selves paving over their lawns and gardens or letting their pools stand empty, perhaps they, too, will see the value of reservoir water for people rather than for fish. The new dust bowl may see a different generation of Joads abandon-ing California for a wetter—and more prosperous—Midwest."

50 points by 11thEarlOfMar 11y ago

1971genocide 11y ago

I am in the UK and I brought almond hair oil - at the back it said "almonds grown in California". How does this make any sense ? Its not even almond but almond OIL. Knowing what I know now I look at the bottle and wonder how many thirsty Californian babies did I just kill buying this. Its the same feeling you get when wearing Nike shoes that you know were made in some sweatshop.

JPKab 11y ago
Just for perspective: There isn't any kind of issue where people aren't getting water to drink, but yes, growing almonds is fucking stupid in a drought ridden state.
- 1971genocide 11y ago
  The thing is growing almond is okay if its to meet local demand. But growing it in a state that is experiencing drought and then shipping it halfway across a ocean is just way out of wack. Is there a lack of area with water in the rest of the world ?? Why cannot almonds be grown somewhere in the second largest continent of africa ? Its much closer to me than bloody California.
  - kbenson 11y ago
    Because it's profitable? If the true cost of growing almonds was actually paid by the farmers (including water cost, which is the real problem, it doesn't really cost anything to the farmers compared to it's true cost to the surrounding area), they would cost more to buy, reducing demand, cost more to grow, reducing profit, and more than likely be grown in other areas. Farmers are just optimizing for a system with cost inputs where the cost of some inputs (water) are paid by others (CA residents, via ecological and water supply problems). The quicker we can shift this cost to the true user (farmers) the quicker the system will stabilize.
  - bdcravens 11y ago
    Could you not say the same thing about programmers and San Francisco?
- kbenson 11y ago
  And like many things, it's due to misaligned incentives causing a cascade affect. The farmers aren't stupid, they are simply optimizing for a system where water has little to no cost and almonds (and pistachios, I hear) are extremely lucrative. Each farmer is making a sane decision for themselves to maximize their profit based on their capabilities, and to not do so at this point just means the same end result, but with less profit for that farmer and slightly more for their competitors. It's not really any different than the environment (pollution had no direct cost), except that a) consumers started caring, making a market for responsible treatment of the environment, and B) governments are starting to get involved, putting caps on pollution, trying to assess actual environmental affect, and in some cases making companies offset it (a market, yet again).
- YZF 11y ago
  It's also hurting bees and other parts of the ecosystem. Endless mono-culture all flowering at once. Local bees can't survive and they need to truck in bees to pollinate. A few months ago I was driving past an overturned truck (those trucks from the other article) full of bees. A month later it was a truck full of salmon but that's a different story...
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  > growing almonds is fucking stupid in a drought ridden state. I've seen this sentiment a few times, and it's never made sense. Crop growth isn't determined solely by water availability. There's plenty of water in Florida, but the climate there is likely less almond-friendly than the California climate. In a toy world with just those two states, you'd have to pick your preference: climate control in Florida, or water importing in California. Saying they're both just something an idiot would try to do is giving up on the whole idea of growing almonds in particular and of comparative advantage generally. Maybe California's exceptional climate justifies doing a certain amount of work you wouldn't have to do to grow crops somewhere else. I've also seen two more sensible points about almonds and California water: - It's difficult to make property rights in water work, because two people drawing from two wells into the same aquifer both just lower the level of the aquifer everywhere. Off the top of my head, you'd need tradable allotments, like ocean fisheries, rather than property lines which I believe are what we currently use. - If you own a field and want to grow alfalfa (hugely water intensive), you can just let the field lie fallow if the price of water goes too high. You'll lose that year's alfalfa crop. But, if you own an almond orchard, you can't abandon it just because it'll cost more money to water it than you can make back selling the almonds -- if you don't water your orchard, all of the trees will die, and you won't own an almond orchard anymore. Since the California precipitation cycle is much longer than one year, it might be good policy to discourage crops that require maintenance on a yearly basis.
  - mirimir 11y ago
    So why isn't there liability for damage caused by subsidence?
  - hussong 11y ago
    Seems like a false dichotomy, you could also just have zero almonds and grow something else.
    - thaumasiotes 11y ago
      >> Saying they're both just something an idiot would try to do is giving up on the whole idea of growing almonds in particular
- SilasX 11y ago
  Actually, there kind of is. The drought has given restaurants intellectual "covering fire" for not bringing out passive-aggressively small cups for drinking water. I know, "minor inconvenience" and all, but it's pretty ridiculous that it's come to that, as if that somehow is at all noticeable for urban water consumption.
ipsin 11y ago
It's peculiar to me that I've heard so much attention on almonds as a water-intensive crop, and so little about beef, given that they're comparable in terms of water cost per pound or per calorie, and both are major Californian products. I'm not a vegetarian or an animal rights activist, but my urge to add this disclaimer might have something to do with why that's so.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  Cattle can be moved to water, if necessary, or herd culled. They're restored fairly quickly. Beef cattle are butchered at about one year of age, dairy cattle live about 6 years. Milk is typically produced somewhat locally, in that it's a heavy bulk liquid which is expensive to transport. Trees are far more difficult to herd than either cattle or cats, and orchards have lifespans in the decades, with some historic California orange groves up to 300 years old. Most nut and stone-fruit trees have a 30-50 year ife. Moreover, there's a period of 4-7 years depending on tree crop during which an orchard is nonbearing, so if you remove an orchard, there's a significant hit. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/32b6yl/drought_water_use_and_ag/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/32b6yl/drought... http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/tax-policy/Documents/depreci8study_fruitnuttrees.pdf http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/tax-policy/Documents... The upshot is that it's much more difficult to rapidly adjust tree-crop water use than cattle, whether dairy or beef. Though on a gallons per unit protein basis, almonds do rate as more efficient as I understand.
  - WalterGR 11y ago
    What practical effect has this had on groves and herds in California, and on the California drought in general?
    - dredmorbius 11y ago
      I cover what little I know of that in the links above, see them for reference. On herds: not clear, though I believe they're somewhat reduced. Though alfalfa, not almonds, in support of cattle, are the largest single use (ag or otherwise) of water within California. As with herds, alfalfa cultivation can be switched on or off rapidly. My understanding is that the actual amount of supplemental water for cattle varies greatly throughout the state. For northern coastal California, irrigation (or "virtual water" in the form of supplied alfalfa) is less necessary.

kator 11y ago

Almonds, what about rice?

tzs 11y ago
Rice and almonds appear wasteful when measured by mass produced per unit of water used, but that's not a particularly useful measure for food. More useful is calories per unit of water and protein per unit of water. Rice measured by calories per unit of water is more efficient than lettuce, celery, tomatoes, spinach, cauliflower, lemons, raspberries, peaches, and broccoli. It's less efficient than carrots and strawberries. National Geographic has a nice interactive display of the efficiency of various crops as measured by three factors (water/weight, water/calories, and water/protein) here: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/05/150508-which-california-exports-crops-are-worth-the-water/ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/05/150508-which-cali...

SovietDissident 11y ago

Demonizing farmers for the water crisis is completely missing the issue. The fault lies at the feet of environmentalists and politicians who stopped building water infrastructure in proportion to the growing state population. LA is naturally a desert. SF cannot supply all of its water locally. Water infrastructure is necessary for humans to live in most regions of California and we have been living off infrastructure investments made 50+ years ago. This is a must-read to understand what's been going on: http://www.hoover.org/research/dry-winters-tale http://www.hoover.org/research/dry-winters-tale "Just as California’s freeways were designed to grow to meet increased traffic, the state’s vast water projects were engineered to expand with the population. Many assumed that the state would finish planned additions to the California State Water Project and its ancillaries. But in the 1960s and early 1970s, no one anticipated that the then-nascent environmental move-ment would one day go to court to stop most new dam construction, including the 14,000-acre Sites Reser- voir on the Sacramento River near Maxwell; the Los Banos Grandes facility, along a section of the California Aqueduct in Merced County; and the Temper-ance Flat Reservoir, above Millerton Lake north of Fresno. Had the gigantic Klamath River diversion project not likewise been canceled in the 1970s, the resulting Ah Pah reservoir would have been the state’s largest man-made reservoir. At two-thirds the size of Lake Mead, it might have stored fifteen million acre-feet of water, enough to supply San Francisco for thirty years. California’s water-storage capacity would be nearly double what it is today had these plans come to fruition. It was just as difficult to imagine that envi-ronmentalists would try to divert contracted irrigation and municipal water from already-established reservoirs. Yet they did just that, and subsequently moved to freeze California’s water-storage resources at 1970s capacities... In reaction to these ongoing disasters and fearing a fourth year of drought, the legislature and Governor Jerry Brown placed a $7.5 billion water bond on the November 2014 ballot. It passed, but only a third of the money will go to construction of reservoirs canceled in the 1970s and 1980s. Most of the bond’s provisions will fund huge new state bureaucracies to regulate access to groundwater and mandate recycling. The bond will essentially void more than a century of complex water law as the state moves to curb farmers’ ability to pump water from beneath their own lands. Bay Area legislators who helped draft the bill failed to grasp that farmers’ drilling and pumping is driven not by greed or insensitivity to the environment but by a doubling in the state’s population and a water infrastructure that has not kept pace. A better way to regulate overdrafts of the water table would have been to increase vastly the reservoir surface water for agriculture so farmers would have no need to turn on their pumps... Continuing drought means vast tracts of westside farmlands will turn to dust. California’s nearly $30 billion agricultural export industry—led by dairy, almond, and grape production—is in grave peril. Its collapse would crush the economic livelihood of the Central Valley, especially its Hispanic com-munity. When the five-million-acre west side goes dry, hundreds of thousands of people will lose their jobs in a part of the state where the average unem-ployment rate still hovers above 10 percent. Farmers will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to further deepen their wells and save what water they can. Everything they and their predecessors have known for a century will be threatened with extinction. Water use in California is being curtailed by those least affected, if affected at all, by the consequences of their advocacy. But environmental-ists, who for forty years worked to undermine the prudent expansion of the state’s water infrastructure, have a rendezvous with those consequences soon. No reservoir water is left for them to divert—none for the reintroduc-tion of their salmon, none for the Delta smelt. Their one hope is to claim possession of the water in the ground once they’ve exhausted what was above it... Now that no more reservoir water remains to divert, the exasperated left is damning “corporate” agriculture (“Big Ag”) for “wasting” water on things like hundreds of thousands of acres of almonds and non-wine grapes. But corporate giants like “Big Apple,” “Big Google,” and “Big Facebook” assume that their multimillion-person landscapes sit atop an aquifer. They don’t—at least, not one large enough to service their growing populations. I have never met a Bay Area environmentalist or Silicon Valley grandee who didn’t drink or shower with water imported from a far distant water project. And as the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir drains, Bay Area man-made stor-age lakes will necessarily follow. Another year of drought will deplete even Southern California’s municipal reserves sooner rather than later. When Silicon Valley tech lords and academics can’t take a shower and find them-selves paving over their lawns and gardens or letting their pools stand empty, perhaps they, too, will see the value of reservoir water for people rather than for fish. The new dust bowl may see a different generation of Joads abandon-ing California for a wetter—and more prosperous—Midwest."