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Approximately 27% of the water used in Utah comes from the Colorado River and 60% of Utahans benefit from the river. 82% of Utah water goes to farmers. Signific

Approximately 27% of the water used in Utah comes from the Colorado River and 60% of Utahans benefit from the river. 82% of Utah water goes to farmers. Significant amounts of that water usage is to grow Cotton and Alfalfa. Two water intensive crops that are largely exported out of the country. In my opinion we have absolutely no business growing these crops in a desert, especially just to ship them out of the country. Unfortunately the Governor of Utah makes his money (you guessed it) growing Alfalfa in a desert, and he recently gave an impassioned speech about how those of us asking for certain types of agriculture to stop in our desert don't understand how important farming is.

mcot2 5y ago
And Utah wants to build a pipeline to divert even more water.
fooey 5y ago
In Southern Utah, which is part of the Mojave Desert, the farmers still doing plain old flood irrigation. It's so staggeringly wasteful it's hard to understand
- User23 5y ago
  Are there good figures on how much of that water is “wasted” and how much ends up replenishing groundwater reservoirs? Utah isn’t that close to the Pacific so that water has a lot of opportunities to do something other than flow into the ocean.
  - fooey 5y ago
    I don't know any numbers, but we're over 100 all summer, so I imagine it mostly evaporates. Flood irrigation here is just as bad as if they were doing it in Phoenix or Las Vegas
    - brewdad 5y ago
      Many of the old neighborhoods and a few remaining urban farms are flood irrigated in Phoenix. The small city park in my old neighborhood was also flooded once a week to keep the grass green all summer.
  - ajross 5y ago
    Virtually all agricultural irrigation evaporates. It doesn't even run off into local streams (which you can verify by, heh, the lack of local streams in the Utah desert), much less seep into the ground. Underground aquifers fill over decades and centuries, and in this environment, almost always laterally, not from seepage from rainfall. I think the demand for proof needs to go the other way, honestly. Presumptively this water is pretty clearly "wasted".
    - D13Fd 5y ago
      I think the question is how much less water would be used with a modern irrigation system rather than flood irrigation.
      - tfigment 5y ago
        Ostensibly you could grow hydroponically and have very little waste but order of magnitude cost increase in power needs. Every other solution falls in between I guess.
        ashtonkem 5y ago
        Electricity is orders of magnitude easier to move than water, and its price is dropping too.
    - User23 5y ago
      > Virtually all agricultural irrigation evaporates. It doesn't even run off into local streams (which you can verify by, heh, the lack of local streams in the Utah desert), much less seep into the ground. The evaporation figures I can find range from 30% to 50%, which is hardly virtually all. I've never been to the Utah desert, but in the California desert I've dumped out water and watched it disappear into the ground. The absence of streams only indicates that seepage and evaporation together get all of the water that would otherwise flow in them. > Underground aquifers fill over decades and centuries, and in this environment, almost always laterally, not from seepage from rainfall. I think the demand for proof needs to go the other way, honestly. Presumptively this water is pretty clearly "wasted". Unconfined aquifers will fill as fast as rainfall can seep in, which depending on the area can be a lot less than decades. How is letting the Colorado flow into the Pacific more of a "waste" than using that water to grow food and letting the excess seep into the water table and fall as rain on the other side of the Rockies?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- woolcap 5y ago
  nit-pick, but only a tiny portion of Utah is in the Mojave desert. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojave_Desert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojave_Desert
  - dylan604 5y ago
    While that may be accurate, it's still a lot of acerage that is specifically Mojave. At the same time, if I stand on the border of the Mojave in Utah, I'm still in a desert anywhere I go.
    - LeifCarrotson 5y ago
      Humans love taxonomy, nature does not. If you stand on the border of the Mojave, you probably have one foot in the Great Basin desert that covers the west half of the state. The parent probably simply described or generalized to the wrong desert. A climate map [1] shows that the only parts of the state which aren't desert are arid mountains; the Salt Lake area has a bit of lake effect snow but that's not in the Colorado River watershed. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/Utah_K%C3%B6ppen.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/Utah_K%C...
jimbob45 5y ago
There’s an argument to be made that states/nations should have some amount of self-sufficiency, or you risk running into the current issue where all of our Chinese import microchips are potentially compromised. I can see how Utah wouldn’t want to be entirely beholden to other states for its agriculture. That said, arguments like yours present a powerful reason not to waste resources on what is largely illusory security.
JohnWhigham 5y ago
Expecting all the modern amenities of life while living in the desert is just pure arrogance. I seriously don't know why governments subsidize it.
- Koshkin 5y ago
  Talk about sending people to Mars...
- kylecordes 5y ago
  You are right... but if I understood the above, it's not the modern amenities using up the bulk of the water, it's the agriculture.
  - treis 5y ago
    Because people don't really "use" water. When you flush the toilet or take a shower the water doesn't get destroyed. The vast majority of it gets treated and put back into the river. The water used in agriculture will mostly evaporate or become part of the plant. Little of it will make it back to the source.
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      People absolutely use water by this metric, but most of it goes to their lawn.
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      Evaporated water eventually falls as rain, though probably somewhere else.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  According to the stats above, modern amenities of life aren't the main consumer of the water: > 82% of Utah water goes to farmers. In 2021, we don't need to grow Alfalfa in the desert. Especially not when it's being exported out of state anyway.
slantedview 5y ago
The same is true in California, where almonds, which consume massive amounts of water, are grown, along with alfalfa which is largely exported. Also, stunningly, rice is even grown, which requires flooding fields with water. All of which is to say, our water problems are as much a political problem - due to overuse in farming - as anything.
- mullen 5y ago
  > Also, stunningly, rice is even grown, which requires flooding fields with water. Flooding fields is not required for rice farming. Its done to control weeds, not because the rice crop demands it.
1270018080 5y ago
The Salt Lake in Salt Lake City won't even exist in a few years. I think it's lost 50% of it's volume in the last 20 years.
krferriter 5y ago
We grow crops in the desert because there is so much sun there that the crops grow faster and to a higher consistent quality, and because there is much fewer pests that damage the plants.
- jszymborski 5y ago
  Right, but crop selection and farming practices matter. Replace water-intensive crop with something more appropriate. Replace flood irrigation with something like aquaponics which is leagues more water efficient.
- eldaisfish 5y ago
  If this is an argument, it is a very poor one and if this is a justification, it is entirely irrelevant. Deserts have ecosystems that are adapted to life with limited water. Trying to transplant a crop that evolved with plentiful water into an ecosystem with very little is a bad idea. Even worse is the capitalistic incentive to divert natural watercourse to farm in an arid region.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Downvotes because people can't handle the truth?
  - krferriter 5y ago
    This has nothing to do with capitalism as communally (or otherwise non-capitalistically) owned food production entities would also be highly incentivized to grow crops in the desert because it just works better, assuming adequate water supply from pipelines or rivers. This is observably true as many countries are using desert/dry land areas to grow crops more efficiently, including those more on the "socialized" spectrum of mixed economies. The thing we should do in this situation is increase our ocean desalination efforts (not to an extent that would counteract sea level rise, but it wouldn't hurt), alongside creating more water pipelines to achieve better distribution into areas which need it. We aren't going to stop crowing crops in desert conditions. It's too effective. We should build more water pipelines to bring water into regions like the California central valley and Colorado and Utah where water is more scarce but crop conditions are good aside from the water availability.
nohuck13 5y ago
> 82% of Utah water goes to farmers. Of the remaining 18%, ~ 8% goes to commercial/industrial use ~ 10% goes to municipal residential use (outdoor: 6%, indoor: 4%) [1] [1] https://le.utah.gov/interim/2012/pdf/00002706.pdf https://le.utah.gov/interim/2012/pdf/00002706.pdf
- chana_masala 5y ago
  i.e. taking shorter showers ain't gonna cut it
  - knuthsat 5y ago
    There was also a segment on water usage in Cowspiracy for California I think. Water usage in industry is massive. Individuals aren't to blame and shouldn't take any part of the burden. Similarily, CO2.
    - Nzen 5y ago
      While the effect of residents is small, the usage of other sectors is, ultimately, in service of residents. People raise cattle in response to or anticipation of demand. Those cattle use more water than if we raised chickens or wheat for seitan. I consider it unlikely that a top down campaign to ration beef, in service of water usage, would succeed without a change in residential culture. I am more apt to agree with Hank Green [0] that success in major social restructuring requires involvement at the individual level, too, because this encourages secondary behaviors that reinforce the restructuring. People who are voluntarily quitting hamburgers and steaks are more apt to write to their representatives or donate to NGOs that do in support of this issue, initially and to check in later on that promises are kept. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvAznN_MPWQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvAznN_MPWQ As another example, Alec, who publishes youtube videos as _Technology Connections_, recently published a video about using his house as a thermal battery [1] so he can offset his energy use to night time, rather than running his AC at peak hours. He suggests that utilities involve residents to widen this strategy, in favor of brownouts or other centralized tools for shedding load in extreme circumstances. A policy solution that did not burden individuals with brownouts, ex by overprovisioning generation, would fall back on their shoulders in the form of higher utility rates. I allege the same would be the case for adverse climate change or overallocated water usage. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f9GpMWdvWI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f9GpMWdvWI
anonAndOn 5y ago
The US exports massive amounts of water in the form of hay and alfalfa.[0] This practice may not survive once the reservoirs completely dry out. [0]https://alfalfa.ucdavis.edu/+symposium/proceedings/2019/Articles/Exports_Matthews_Article.pdf https://alfalfa.ucdavis.edu/+symposium/proceedings/2019/Arti...
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  Chinese and other overseas investors own those US desert farms. They were attracted here by the massively generous water rights they get automagically. ref: https://grist.org/agriculture/u-s-southwest-already-parched-sees-virtual-water-drain-abroad/ https://grist.org/agriculture/u-s-southwest-already-parched-...
  - maybelsyrup 5y ago
    Damn I want a dessert farm
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - Integrape 5y ago
      I want to visit the Maybel Syrup Dessert Farm
  - lostapathy 5y ago
    While the US is unlikely to mess with the private property rights, export restrictions are easy to change.
- tzs 5y ago
  Very little of the water used to grow hay and alfalfa actually ends up in the hay and alfalfa to be exported. Most of the water ends up in the atmosphere via evapotranspiration. The amount exported is something like 0.005% of the evapotranspiration amount. Here are some numbers [1] for Idaho crops. There might be some differences in Utah but they should be in the same ballpark. > Not much water is exported with alfalfa hay. Potential irrigated alfalfa hay yield at elevations near 4000 feet is about 7.5 tons/acre. Hay harvested at 12% moisture removes 240 lbs water/ton hay, or 1,800 lbs/acre for a normal crop of alfalfa hay per year. > Evapotranspiration (ET) is the primary use of water by alfalfa and averages about 36 inches/year (900 mm) at Kimberly. The ET at peak periods of 0.4 inches/day (10 mm/day) can reach 4080 tons of water per acre and 45 tons per acre per day. [1] https://www.uidaho.edu/-/media/UIdaho-Responsive/Files/cals/centers/Kimberly/forage/Alfalfa-Irrigation-Facts-2013.pdf https://www.uidaho.edu/-/media/UIdaho-Responsive/Files/cals/...
xedrac 5y ago
A very small (single digit) percentage of Utah grown alfalfa is exported out the country.
CountDrewku 5y ago
>In my opinion we have absolutely no business growing these crops in a desert, You might as well just say people shouldn't be living in most of the western US then since a majority of it receives very little rainfall. It's very easy to call these people out when you're not directly affected. Yes just strip them of their major sources of income. No issue there.... You need a better plan than just telling the Governor to shut up and be ok with losing money.
- JshWright 5y ago
  Why should we subsidize the cost of them making money?
  - nradov 5y ago
    Most of those crops aren't directly subsidized. The problem is water rights which are legally tied to real estate. So there's no way to force farmers to pay market rates for water.
    - JshWright 5y ago
      The externalized costs are absolutely being subsidized.
- eloff 5y ago
  They should grow drought resistant crops that use less water, because what they're doing now isn't sustainable and will end soon. Maybe wheat, maybe some livestock grazing, maybe nothing at all in some parts.
- dylan604 5y ago
  So that's your opinion, and it's a perfectly valid opinion. We also need a better plan on how to use the water sooner rather than later, so we need to tell the Governor to get off his damn ass and do something productive rather than wasting water for his own damn benefit. If you can't see how that's just not conflict of interest, then we really can't have a proper conversation.
- 5y ago
TroisM 5y ago
> Approximately 27% of the water used in Utah comes from the Colorado River 63% goes to California for growing almonds and oranges? and 0% left for Mexicans? https://www.kold.com/story/25067593/colorado-river-flows-into-mexico-for-first-time-in-60-years/ https://www.kold.com/story/25067593/colorado-river-flows-int...
xyzzy21 5y ago
California is still worse. NO ALMONDS. They are water pigs and if you eat almonds you are aiding and abetting environmental damage at a grotesque scale.
polartx 5y ago
Incorrect. Per the Colorado River Authority agreement, Utah is allocated up to 24% of the rivers water. Utah is not even consuming it’s allocation. Due to the obviously increasing scarcity, Utah is pushing to increase its usage to meet its already agreed upon allowance. And that is because other states are greedily eyeing what is left in the banks and murmuring, “if Utah isn’t using their entire share, *we* should have it!”. And like Utah local leaders are supposed to, they are fighting for their local constituency interests, because that’s what we elect them to do.
e40 5y ago
We have removed conflict of interest completely from the conversations of today. Jesus, that's one huge conflict of interest, but no one in power and the voters just don't care. Depressing!!

mcot2 5y ago

And Utah wants to build a pipeline to divert even more water.

fooey 5y ago

In Southern Utah, which is part of the Mojave Desert, the farmers still doing plain old flood irrigation. It's so staggeringly wasteful it's hard to understand

User23 5y ago
Are there good figures on how much of that water is “wasted” and how much ends up replenishing groundwater reservoirs? Utah isn’t that close to the Pacific so that water has a lot of opportunities to do something other than flow into the ocean.
- fooey 5y ago
  I don't know any numbers, but we're over 100 all summer, so I imagine it mostly evaporates. Flood irrigation here is just as bad as if they were doing it in Phoenix or Las Vegas
  - brewdad 5y ago
    Many of the old neighborhoods and a few remaining urban farms are flood irrigated in Phoenix. The small city park in my old neighborhood was also flooded once a week to keep the grass green all summer.
- ajross 5y ago
  Virtually all agricultural irrigation evaporates. It doesn't even run off into local streams (which you can verify by, heh, the lack of local streams in the Utah desert), much less seep into the ground. Underground aquifers fill over decades and centuries, and in this environment, almost always laterally, not from seepage from rainfall. I think the demand for proof needs to go the other way, honestly. Presumptively this water is pretty clearly "wasted".
  - D13Fd 5y ago
    I think the question is how much less water would be used with a modern irrigation system rather than flood irrigation.
    - tfigment 5y ago
      Ostensibly you could grow hydroponically and have very little waste but order of magnitude cost increase in power needs. Every other solution falls in between I guess.
      - ashtonkem 5y ago
        Electricity is orders of magnitude easier to move than water, and its price is dropping too.
  - User23 5y ago
    > Virtually all agricultural irrigation evaporates. It doesn't even run off into local streams (which you can verify by, heh, the lack of local streams in the Utah desert), much less seep into the ground. The evaporation figures I can find range from 30% to 50%, which is hardly virtually all. I've never been to the Utah desert, but in the California desert I've dumped out water and watched it disappear into the ground. The absence of streams only indicates that seepage and evaporation together get all of the water that would otherwise flow in them. > Underground aquifers fill over decades and centuries, and in this environment, almost always laterally, not from seepage from rainfall. I think the demand for proof needs to go the other way, honestly. Presumptively this water is pretty clearly "wasted". Unconfined aquifers will fill as fast as rainfall can seep in, which depending on the area can be a lot less than decades. How is letting the Colorado flow into the Pacific more of a "waste" than using that water to grow food and letting the excess seep into the water table and fall as rain on the other side of the Rockies?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
woolcap 5y ago
nit-pick, but only a tiny portion of Utah is in the Mojave desert. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojave_Desert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojave_Desert
- dylan604 5y ago
  While that may be accurate, it's still a lot of acerage that is specifically Mojave. At the same time, if I stand on the border of the Mojave in Utah, I'm still in a desert anywhere I go.
  - LeifCarrotson 5y ago
    Humans love taxonomy, nature does not. If you stand on the border of the Mojave, you probably have one foot in the Great Basin desert that covers the west half of the state. The parent probably simply described or generalized to the wrong desert. A climate map [1] shows that the only parts of the state which aren't desert are arid mountains; the Salt Lake area has a bit of lake effect snow but that's not in the Colorado River watershed. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/Utah_K%C3%B6ppen.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/Utah_K%C...

jimbob45 5y ago

There’s an argument to be made that states/nations should have some amount of self-sufficiency, or you risk running into the current issue where all of our Chinese import microchips are potentially compromised. I can see how Utah wouldn’t want to be entirely beholden to other states for its agriculture. That said, arguments like yours present a powerful reason not to waste resources on what is largely illusory security.

JohnWhigham 5y ago

Expecting all the modern amenities of life while living in the desert is just pure arrogance. I seriously don't know why governments subsidize it.

Koshkin 5y ago
Talk about sending people to Mars...
kylecordes 5y ago
You are right... but if I understood the above, it's not the modern amenities using up the bulk of the water, it's the agriculture.
- treis 5y ago
  Because people don't really "use" water. When you flush the toilet or take a shower the water doesn't get destroyed. The vast majority of it gets treated and put back into the river. The water used in agriculture will mostly evaporate or become part of the plant. Little of it will make it back to the source.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    People absolutely use water by this metric, but most of it goes to their lawn.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    Evaporated water eventually falls as rain, though probably somewhere else.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
According to the stats above, modern amenities of life aren't the main consumer of the water: > 82% of Utah water goes to farmers. In 2021, we don't need to grow Alfalfa in the desert. Especially not when it's being exported out of state anyway.

slantedview 5y ago

The same is true in California, where almonds, which consume massive amounts of water, are grown, along with alfalfa which is largely exported. Also, stunningly, rice is even grown, which requires flooding fields with water. All of which is to say, our water problems are as much a political problem - due to overuse in farming - as anything.

mullen 5y ago
> Also, stunningly, rice is even grown, which requires flooding fields with water. Flooding fields is not required for rice farming. Its done to control weeds, not because the rice crop demands it.

1270018080 5y ago

The Salt Lake in Salt Lake City won't even exist in a few years. I think it's lost 50% of it's volume in the last 20 years.

krferriter 5y ago

We grow crops in the desert because there is so much sun there that the crops grow faster and to a higher consistent quality, and because there is much fewer pests that damage the plants.

jszymborski 5y ago
Right, but crop selection and farming practices matter. Replace water-intensive crop with something more appropriate. Replace flood irrigation with something like aquaponics which is leagues more water efficient.
eldaisfish 5y ago
If this is an argument, it is a very poor one and if this is a justification, it is entirely irrelevant. Deserts have ecosystems that are adapted to life with limited water. Trying to transplant a crop that evolved with plentiful water into an ecosystem with very little is a bad idea. Even worse is the capitalistic incentive to divert natural watercourse to farm in an arid region.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Downvotes because people can't handle the truth?
- krferriter 5y ago
  This has nothing to do with capitalism as communally (or otherwise non-capitalistically) owned food production entities would also be highly incentivized to grow crops in the desert because it just works better, assuming adequate water supply from pipelines or rivers. This is observably true as many countries are using desert/dry land areas to grow crops more efficiently, including those more on the "socialized" spectrum of mixed economies. The thing we should do in this situation is increase our ocean desalination efforts (not to an extent that would counteract sea level rise, but it wouldn't hurt), alongside creating more water pipelines to achieve better distribution into areas which need it. We aren't going to stop crowing crops in desert conditions. It's too effective. We should build more water pipelines to bring water into regions like the California central valley and Colorado and Utah where water is more scarce but crop conditions are good aside from the water availability.

nohuck13 5y ago

> 82% of Utah water goes to farmers. Of the remaining 18%, ~ 8% goes to commercial/industrial use ~ 10% goes to municipal residential use (outdoor: 6%, indoor: 4%) [1] [1] https://le.utah.gov/interim/2012/pdf/00002706.pdf https://le.utah.gov/interim/2012/pdf/00002706.pdf

chana_masala 5y ago
i.e. taking shorter showers ain't gonna cut it
- knuthsat 5y ago
  There was also a segment on water usage in Cowspiracy for California I think. Water usage in industry is massive. Individuals aren't to blame and shouldn't take any part of the burden. Similarily, CO2.
  - Nzen 5y ago
    While the effect of residents is small, the usage of other sectors is, ultimately, in service of residents. People raise cattle in response to or anticipation of demand. Those cattle use more water than if we raised chickens or wheat for seitan. I consider it unlikely that a top down campaign to ration beef, in service of water usage, would succeed without a change in residential culture. I am more apt to agree with Hank Green [0] that success in major social restructuring requires involvement at the individual level, too, because this encourages secondary behaviors that reinforce the restructuring. People who are voluntarily quitting hamburgers and steaks are more apt to write to their representatives or donate to NGOs that do in support of this issue, initially and to check in later on that promises are kept. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvAznN_MPWQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvAznN_MPWQ As another example, Alec, who publishes youtube videos as _Technology Connections_, recently published a video about using his house as a thermal battery [1] so he can offset his energy use to night time, rather than running his AC at peak hours. He suggests that utilities involve residents to widen this strategy, in favor of brownouts or other centralized tools for shedding load in extreme circumstances. A policy solution that did not burden individuals with brownouts, ex by overprovisioning generation, would fall back on their shoulders in the form of higher utility rates. I allege the same would be the case for adverse climate change or overallocated water usage. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f9GpMWdvWI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f9GpMWdvWI

anonAndOn 5y ago

The US exports massive amounts of water in the form of hay and alfalfa.[0] This practice may not survive once the reservoirs completely dry out. [0]https://alfalfa.ucdavis.edu/+symposium/proceedings/2019/Articles/Exports_Matthews_Article.pdf https://alfalfa.ucdavis.edu/+symposium/proceedings/2019/Arti...

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
Chinese and other overseas investors own those US desert farms. They were attracted here by the massively generous water rights they get automagically. ref: https://grist.org/agriculture/u-s-southwest-already-parched-sees-virtual-water-drain-abroad/ https://grist.org/agriculture/u-s-southwest-already-parched-...
- maybelsyrup 5y ago
  Damn I want a dessert farm
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Integrape 5y ago
    I want to visit the Maybel Syrup Dessert Farm
- lostapathy 5y ago
  While the US is unlikely to mess with the private property rights, export restrictions are easy to change.
tzs 5y ago
Very little of the water used to grow hay and alfalfa actually ends up in the hay and alfalfa to be exported. Most of the water ends up in the atmosphere via evapotranspiration. The amount exported is something like 0.005% of the evapotranspiration amount. Here are some numbers [1] for Idaho crops. There might be some differences in Utah but they should be in the same ballpark. > Not much water is exported with alfalfa hay. Potential irrigated alfalfa hay yield at elevations near 4000 feet is about 7.5 tons/acre. Hay harvested at 12% moisture removes 240 lbs water/ton hay, or 1,800 lbs/acre for a normal crop of alfalfa hay per year. > Evapotranspiration (ET) is the primary use of water by alfalfa and averages about 36 inches/year (900 mm) at Kimberly. The ET at peak periods of 0.4 inches/day (10 mm/day) can reach 4080 tons of water per acre and 45 tons per acre per day. [1] https://www.uidaho.edu/-/media/UIdaho-Responsive/Files/cals/centers/Kimberly/forage/Alfalfa-Irrigation-Facts-2013.pdf https://www.uidaho.edu/-/media/UIdaho-Responsive/Files/cals/...

xedrac 5y ago

A very small (single digit) percentage of Utah grown alfalfa is exported out the country.

CountDrewku 5y ago

>In my opinion we have absolutely no business growing these crops in a desert, You might as well just say people shouldn't be living in most of the western US then since a majority of it receives very little rainfall. It's very easy to call these people out when you're not directly affected. Yes just strip them of their major sources of income. No issue there.... You need a better plan than just telling the Governor to shut up and be ok with losing money.

JshWright 5y ago
Why should we subsidize the cost of them making money?
- nradov 5y ago
  Most of those crops aren't directly subsidized. The problem is water rights which are legally tied to real estate. So there's no way to force farmers to pay market rates for water.
  - JshWright 5y ago
    The externalized costs are absolutely being subsidized.
eloff 5y ago
They should grow drought resistant crops that use less water, because what they're doing now isn't sustainable and will end soon. Maybe wheat, maybe some livestock grazing, maybe nothing at all in some parts.
dylan604 5y ago
So that's your opinion, and it's a perfectly valid opinion. We also need a better plan on how to use the water sooner rather than later, so we need to tell the Governor to get off his damn ass and do something productive rather than wasting water for his own damn benefit. If you can't see how that's just not conflict of interest, then we really can't have a proper conversation.
5y ago

TroisM 5y ago

> Approximately 27% of the water used in Utah comes from the Colorado River 63% goes to California for growing almonds and oranges? and 0% left for Mexicans? https://www.kold.com/story/25067593/colorado-river-flows-into-mexico-for-first-time-in-60-years/ https://www.kold.com/story/25067593/colorado-river-flows-int...

xyzzy21 5y ago

California is still worse. NO ALMONDS. They are water pigs and if you eat almonds you are aiding and abetting environmental damage at a grotesque scale.

polartx 5y ago

Incorrect. Per the Colorado River Authority agreement, Utah is allocated up to 24% of the rivers water. Utah is not even consuming it’s allocation. Due to the obviously increasing scarcity, Utah is pushing to increase its usage to meet its already agreed upon allowance. And that is because other states are greedily eyeing what is left in the banks and murmuring, “if Utah isn’t using their entire share, *we* should have it!”. And like Utah local leaders are supposed to, they are fighting for their local constituency interests, because that’s what we elect them to do.

e40 5y ago

We have removed conflict of interest completely from the conversations of today. Jesus, that's one huge conflict of interest, but no one in power and the voters just don't care. Depressing!!