6 ms·

The cracked soil is a feature of being a desert, and since the entire point of this is that it's unsustainable to irrigate a desert that far from a major waterw

The cracked soil is a feature of being a desert, and since the entire point of this is that it's unsustainable to irrigate a desert that far from a major waterway, there isn't much to be done in the long term about what species thrive. That's the wages of climate change.

hedora 7y ago
This area didn’t start out as desert. It is some of the most fertile (remaining) land on earth. (Like the Sahara used to be.) It also currently, but unsustainably, produces a large fraction of all food on earth. Here’s an article from 2012 with some anecdotes if numbers aren’t your thing: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/magazine/californias-central-valley-land-of-a-billion-vegetables.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/magazine/californias-cent... Here is a table of crops: https://republicans-naturalresources.house.gov/newsroom/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=368934 https://republicans-naturalresources.house.gov/newsroom/docu... (it doesn’t seem to include exports, so the numbers are low-balled) It is clearly being over-farmed, but the solution to that is crop rotation and letting the fields periodically go fallow. Blanketing it with solar panels is likely irreversible.
- KirinDave 7y ago
  I'm quite aware of how much food California produces. I'm also quite comfortable with California not overfarming and just, you know, letting the rest of the country stop producing subsidized corn. I can't help but feel like it's a subtle contradiction to propose that without constant watering the soil in California will crack up and vanish and that's not going to happen with crop rotation but will happen with crop rotation (as if many farms in California aren't already forced to do this because of the nature of our groundwater). Are you also opposed to orchards? They're full of solar panels that make fruit rather than electricity.

hedora 7y ago

This area didn’t start out as desert. It is some of the most fertile (remaining) land on earth. (Like the Sahara used to be.) It also currently, but unsustainably, produces a large fraction of all food on earth. Here’s an article from 2012 with some anecdotes if numbers aren’t your thing: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/magazine/californias-central-valley-land-of-a-billion-vegetables.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/magazine/californias-cent... Here is a table of crops: https://republicans-naturalresources.house.gov/newsroom/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=368934 https://republicans-naturalresources.house.gov/newsroom/docu... (it doesn’t seem to include exports, so the numbers are low-balled) It is clearly being over-farmed, but the solution to that is crop rotation and letting the fields periodically go fallow. Blanketing it with solar panels is likely irreversible.

KirinDave 7y ago
I'm quite aware of how much food California produces. I'm also quite comfortable with California not overfarming and just, you know, letting the rest of the country stop producing subsidized corn. I can't help but feel like it's a subtle contradiction to propose that without constant watering the soil in California will crack up and vanish and that's not going to happen with crop rotation but will happen with crop rotation (as if many farms in California aren't already forced to do this because of the nature of our groundwater). Are you also opposed to orchards? They're full of solar panels that make fruit rather than electricity.