4 ms·

> Sure, if it's easy and cheap to test and sterilize irrigation water, then let's do so. The figures I've repeatedly seen say that ~$10-15mm worth of testing w

• yellowapple 8y ago
  The farmers (at least the ones growing lettuce) aren't the ones who are externalizing their costs, though. By imposing the expenses of testing and sterilization on them, they're bearing the costs that other farmers further upstream (literally) are externalizing by allowing their livestock to contaminate the water. If we're to try to fix this with regulation, that's where we need to start. Making lettuce farmers bear the brunt of this is like issuing a traffic ticket to a driver because he got pushed through a red light by someone else. Meanwhile, testing is only half the battle. Let's say the water is contaminated. Unless you're okay with not having water (and therefore not having crops), you'd need to sterilize that water somehow. You'd need a machine that can boil and re-cool the water; just boiling it isn't enough unless you want to pre-cook your crops before the leave the farm ;) (but you could certainly let it cool in a reservoir before sending it to crops). Or maybe you have some fancier machine that uses something like radiation to do the sterilization. Either way, that costs money. Big corporate farms can easily afford that. Small independent farms typically cannot. The idea that regulation like this can completely kill small-scale agricultural practices ain't far-fetched; this has quite literally happened again and again. I'm personally/intimately familiar with the case of Loyalton, CA, which used to have a thriving dairy (particularly milk and cheese) industry up until the middle of the 20th Century, when new pasteurization requirements made continued operation too expensive for all these small-scale dairies. As a result, they all switched to beef and alfalfa, and now that's all you see. So if we are going to go ahead and make testing and sterilization mandatory, then we'll definitely want to subsidize it (whether for all farms or just for ones below a certain size). Given that it'll save the country money in the long run, as you say, this should be easy to justify budget-wise.
  • rosser 8y ago
    In Arizona, at least, I'm pretty sure you could use a simple, passive (and, relatively, very cheap) evaporation-condensation cycle to radically cut down on almost any contamination, but that's almost not even the point. What is the point, which you correctly note, is that this is largely a case of people taking turns kicking their respective externalities down-stream (in this case literally), until it kills someone, exacerbated by ineptitude at the highest levels. To that end: how about any industry that has potentially harmful externalities be compelled to carry insurance against those things demonstrably causing harm, the premiums of which are determined significantly by how competent the policy holder's mitigation strategies are. Then we can, as needed, subsidize those mitigation strategies, applying the solution at the point of the problem, where it's not only going to be the least expensive, but also the most effective. Thus, if the rancher upstream of the lettuce farmer isn't taking care of his shit, he pays, not the farmer whose crops are contaminated by the rancher's negligence. The subsidy money ultimately goes not to incumbent insurance interests, but to the people and organizations creating new and better ways not to fuck ourselves up — which is, I think, something worth subsidizing a bit... Either that, or you pay for the damages your cost-cutting externality-imposition causes out-of-pocket, with strong statutory preferences for compensating victims over everyone else in the event of bankruptcy, because I suspect that would kill a whole lot of farms and businesses. EDITs: phrasing.
  • dbcurtis 8y ago
    In fact, one of the ways we got here to a world with gigantic animal feedlots is that people keep zoning away the locations where modest scale and more safely manageable feedlots can be built. A manure lagoon for 200 animals is much easier to manage safely than a lagoon for 8,000 animals. Yet, laws keep making it harder to build anything else.