8 ms·

I can tell when someone gets their California agriculture hot takes from popular media, because it's always almonds. Half of California water (period, not agri

I can tell when someone gets their California agriculture hot takes from popular media, because it's always almonds. Half of California water (period, not agricultural water, water) use is for growing alfalfa to feed to cattle. An industry where we have no comparative advantage, unlike almonds. But the water is cheap. California almond production could also be a great deal more frugal, Israelis use about 1/20th the water per almond. Their big innovation is buried irrigation, California almond ranchers spray water on the ground and it mostly just evaporates. But water is cheap. Abolish the water rights system and auction the water at a reasonable price. Almonds would stay, alfalfa would diminish or disappear. But "conversion of water into money" aka farming is good. People like to eat.

adrianN 5y ago
Conversion of fossil water that will be gone if we keep going is not good. People in the future like to eat too.
whoknowswhat11 5y ago
Or tax water at 0.25 cents per gallon. Someone buying 8 oz at the airport won’t notice. Water is scarce because in a lot of cases water is free
- samatman 5y ago
  Eight bucks just for the water to draw a bath? No thanks. Residential and city use is a) a drop in the proverbial bucket (20% of California water use) and b) comes from a completely different system. For the most part it's drawn from snowmelt in the Sierras, and even when drought gets pretty bad it's been sustainable. Fingers crossed it will stay that way. Really it's farmers who should pay for water, and hard limits on aquifer withdrawal. They'll hate it but there's not enough to go around and I don't see an alternative. Also worth pointing out that California is an enormous place and what applies to the Central and Imperial Valleys doesn't apply to, say, the San Joaquin Delta. There's no good reason to stop growing rice in the latter, because the acre-feet of water which go into doing so are just going to flow directly into the Bay otherwise. Maybe we could pay for more of it to be diverted into the Central Valley if there was some sort of profit in it. Water auctions, say.
  - inetknght 5y ago
    > Eight bucks just for the water to draw a bath? No thanks. That's the cost of living in a desert.
    - whoknowswhat11 5y ago
      It’s a made up number - no one normal uses this much water in a bath
      - admax88q 5y ago
        They pretty clearly confused 0.25 cents with $0.25
        samatman 5y ago
        Yep that's what happened. In my defense, it's common "greengrocerese" to list a price that way. If limes are shown as "0.10¢ ea." on a handwritten card, you're not getting ten for a penny. I still think taxing residential water is irrelevant, and that the difference between buying water at auction from the state and paying a tax for that water to the state, is that auction is better because price discovery tends to be.
        whoknowswhat11 5y ago
        The idea here is to set what appears to be a ridiculously low tax that applies to everyone. No carvouts so reduces arguments about fairness. This highlight the large water uses (usually free in the millions of gallons). If you aren't willing to say a gallon of water is worth a quarter of a penny - then we can usually stop talking about any supposed shortages. Retail / urban water use (ie, a bottle of water at the store, often 1/8th of a gallon - this tax is irrelevant obviously) already is wildly higher in cost than the "free" groundwater and river water folks are using.
  - whoknowswhat11 5y ago
    If you use 3,200 per bath you should be in jail. That is seriously a ridiculous waste of water per bath. That’s years worth of baths for most people - average cost per bath at 0.25 cents per gallon would be 7 cents. Realize farmers use water measured in ACRE feet
- bcrosby95 5y ago
  Even in the most water efficient cities people use 40 gallons per day. You're talking $10 per person per day just for water. A family of four would spend at least $1,200 per month on water. Even desalination is way cheaper than 25 cents per gallon.
  - ridgeguy 5y ago
    I think OP wrote .25¢/gallon, not 25¢/gallon.
  - whoknowswhat11 5y ago
    Water would cost $12 per month which is fair and lower than almost all existing urban water costs . A corner store sells water for $$ per gallon. The tax on a bottle would be small fraction of a penny
  - mattashii 5y ago
    40 gallons per day, aka roughly 180L. How would I even use that much water? My estimate for own use gets to about 120L, with fairly pessimistically high values: 20L /toilet flush, x 3 30L /shower, 5L /dishes, 20L /laundry x ~ 0.2 1L for drinking What in the world would I need to drain another 40L / 8 gallons into?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - koolba 5y ago
      Own a property with a lawn or garden.
      - FractalParadigm 5y ago
        Sounds like the easiest solution to that is to do-away with non-native plants (i.e. Kentucky bluegrass, which could be considered an invasive species in North America) and do something more along the lines of what the OP did in this Reddit post*[0], a wildflower alternative of all-native plants (and although it's only a small section this year, OP claims their parents have expressed interest in expanding it). It requires basically zero maintenance, and is incredibly beneficial to the local environment. [0]: https://redd.it/oph88p https://redd.it/oph88p *It's pointed out a few times that only a few of the plants are local native species, many aren't North American at all.
- dghughes 5y ago
  I always find it amazing how bottled water is seen as terrible yet bottles of pop/soda is never spoken about. Pop is 90% to 99% water and far worse for people than just water even the diet types.
  - spiderice 5y ago
    I think the answer is that there is no other reasonable way to deliver pop/soda besides bottles. Whereas we have infrastructure for water delivery. I'm a big bottled water drinker, but if I had to make an argument for why bottled water makes less sense than pop/soda, that would be it.
fh973 5y ago
And the alfalfa is exported to Saudi Arabia, which is effectively water export. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/california-water-drought-scarce-saudi-arabia https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/california-w...
- Justin_K 5y ago
  This is the other perfect example I couldn't find a link quick enough. This is for all intents Saudi sucking up water and putting it on a ship to cross the world, because they depleted their sources. Let's generate some more greenhouse gases to accelerate the temp increases.
- tzs 5y ago
  99.995% of the water use to grow alfalfa ends up in the local atmosphere, to go wherever the winds and/or diffusion takes it presumably eventually coming back out as rain or dew somewhere. Only 0.005% ends up actually in the alfalfa to be exported to wherever the exported alfalfa goes. Similar for almonds. I don't know the exact amount, but an upper limit is 0.03% of the water exported with the almond, and 99.97% left behind in the local atmosphere or local ground. That upper limit comes from counting the entire mass of the almond as water. There are legitimate grounds to criticize growing high water usage crops in regions that do not have enough water naturally, but exporting water is not one of them.
  - phendrenad2 5y ago
    I don't think the atmosphere is as "local" as you imply (diffusion of the water molecules should spread them out of state far faster than they can condense in-state).
  - nextaccountic 5y ago
    The issue here isn't physically exporting the water but exporting the externality. It's like investing in a heavily polluting industry is "exporting pollution" - the product itself contains trace of the pollution, but the local damage was done on behalf of the product. I mean, once used this water ain't getting back to the aquifer anytime soon! If it were, we wouldn't be talking about aquifer depletion and there wouldn't be any concern regarding its use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overdrafting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overdrafting
bradleyjg 5y ago
> Abolish the water rights system and auction the water at a reasonable price. This is a good idea but tough to do. Prior appropriation claims are legally considered vested property rights. A good start would be to change the rules in order to make the rights much more transferable. By Coarse’s theorem that should get you to much the same place. The money going to ex-farmers forever is a tough pill to swallow but better that than the status quo.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago
  We have a very similar problem in Texas. A vast, vast majority of water use (something like 85-90%) in Central Texas is diverted to grow rice, an obviously completely unsustainable crop in Texas given the climate. The farmers, as in California, believe that since they were there first they are entitled to the water and fight tooth and nail any time that someone threatens their usage. Perhaps some agreement that made the water rights expire on death of the farmer would be a compromise that no one would be happy with but possibly stomachable for everyone. Farmers would not get to ensure the livelihood of their children and the rest of Texas would have to wait 40 years, but it could be done without disrupting the current status quo too much.
  - bradleyjg 5y ago
    I’m not an expert on the subject but I don’t think Texas is in as much of a bind as California. There are two main water regulation systems in the US: riparian (eastern) and prior appropriation (western). There’s are lots of variations and details but at a very high level the riparian system does not create vested property rights in water and so can be freely tweaked by the government. Prior appropriation, on the other hand, does create vested property rights which are then protected by the 14th amendment. This makes reform much more difficult. Texas, being Texas, has an oddball hybrid system. My understanding is that it uses prior appropriation as an allocation method but riparian (state ownership) as a theoretical underpinning. Thus the Texas government should be able to modify the system without running afoul of the 14th amendment.
    - 5y ago
wiz21c 5y ago
> Abolish the water rights system and auction the water at a reasonable price. If you put a price on water, then soon enough, commercial interest will figure out that you can put a price on any water. Then they'll figure out that the price of water should be at the equilibrium of supply and demand. Then for those for whom the water will be too expensive will have to be subsidized, then in the end society will pay a private company to have access to water. Moreover, the externalities will still be uncounted. Water is a right, not a product. Like air. Create laws to manage it in a reasonable way. For example, prioritize local production over exported production (either through taxes or by subsidizing), make sure soils capture water correctly by helping farmers to handle their soil differently, use water quotas (do we need those 10 cuber meters of water for a swimming pool or for agriculture?), etc. Sounds like communism ? Sure. But water is a common.
- MichaelZuo 5y ago
  How would you protect any other mechanisms from being gamed to an even higher degree of inequality without using crushing force?
- theptip 5y ago
  I disagree. I think agricultural water is the perfect use case for a market. Perhaps this is just semantics, but I don’t think you can make an absolute water right; it’s scarce, and farmers are not guaranteed as much water as they want, nor are homeowners guaranteed a right to water their lawns in a drought. Markets are a good way of prioritizing allocation of scarce resources. But I think it’s sensible to have a high-level allocation where first we make sure that there is enough water for people to drink, and if you want to call that your “water right” then I’m on board. We also allocate a bunch of water to recreational and conservation/wildlife purposes, and again I wouldn’t want to auction off all of the national parks of course. But within the (very large) remainder that we allocate to productive usages, I see no reason to get in the way of the invisible hand. If almonds are higher yield than alfalfa then we should not divert water from almonds to alfalfa. A liquid (pardon the pun) market would make these allocations more efficient.
lrdswrk00 5y ago
Conversion of water into money is arbitrary; people need to eat. Food isn’t a luxury. It’s a biological necessity and it need not be coupled to financial markets. We’ll grow food because we must. Remember; fiscal economics were sold to a dumber general public by then poorer educated, yet rich, men. Anyone clinging to their ways as an economic philosophy is effectively letting people who hadn’t come up with indoor plumbing dictate who we are.
- username90 5y ago
  You can just use less water hungry crops for that, would also greatly reduce the risks of a drought. The reason it isn't done now is that water hungry crops pays better and farmers doesn't pay the real cost of the water.
- only_as_i_fall 5y ago
  Ok and what's the plan when California's groundwater is depleted?
  - lrdswrk00 5y ago
    That’s up to the people occupying California at the time. Humanity is doomed. I’m not saying we should accelerate it by leaning into YOLO. But along with accepting our own personal mortality we might consider it’s time to socially accept our species mortality. We don’t need to solve this problem right now and any work towards a solution isn’t guaranteed to last beyond our lifetimes, for numerous reasons outside our control. Science provides the best model for understanding what economic activity our environment can sustain. Maybe it’s time to be the exceptional and gritty people we tell stories about being and rather than solve California’s eventual problem, try to hold it off by reducing or eliminating markets for bullshit. Or we can pretend we’ll engineer our way out of a problem we have no idea how much time we really have to solve and cross our fingers like it’s a football game and feudal market economics thinking we’re simulating chaotic reality when it’s obvious political collusion and protectionism are occurring. I wonder which way we’ll go
    - 5y ago
kolbe 5y ago
Alfalfa is a rotation crop. No one grows alfalfa for the sake of selling it as feed. They grow it so they can grow something that makes money a year or two later without destroying their soil.
- mannykannot 5y ago
  In that case, one should add the water consumption of growing the alfalfa to that of growing the cash crop directly, and similarly add whatever value (monetarily or otherwise) the alfalfa has to that of the cash crop - in other words, consider them together as a unit of production. I have no idea whether this results in a currently-justifiable practice, but it is a simple fact that change is going to be forced on agriculture (and all of us, as its dependents), one way or another.
- theptip 5y ago
  Citation? This seems to directly contradict your claim: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/mar/08/saudi-arabia-alfalfa-california-drought-almarai https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/mar/08...
- watersb 5y ago
  I know lots of people who grow only alfalfa out here. Some are family members. They sell it as feed, or rent out a field. Small farms. Less than 600 acres. Not much water, here.
  - kolbe 5y ago
    My grandpa was from a similar area (the Tulelake basin), and before they had trouble with water rights, alfalfa was exclusively a rotation crop, but you are correct that when water becomes scarce, that it falls into a category of the only thing that can grow reliably. California is not a truly water scarce place kind of place--water is just political these days.
- mythrwy 5y ago
  That's not the case at all. Some fields remain alfalfa for long periods of time and it's a very lucrative crop.
mark_l_watson 5y ago
+1 exactly right. If we had to pay the real cost of beef, there would be much less eaten. The amount the the US taxpayer gives each year to the beef industry is staggering. Down with beef industry socialism - make them compete on the open market.
Justin_K 5y ago
The question I have is do we need the volumes of water intensive crops? When a large portion of those crops are exported, is it any different than bottling water and exporting it?

adrianN 5y ago

Conversion of fossil water that will be gone if we keep going is not good. People in the future like to eat too.

whoknowswhat11 5y ago

Or tax water at 0.25 cents per gallon. Someone buying 8 oz at the airport won’t notice. Water is scarce because in a lot of cases water is free

samatman 5y ago
Eight bucks just for the water to draw a bath? No thanks. Residential and city use is a) a drop in the proverbial bucket (20% of California water use) and b) comes from a completely different system. For the most part it's drawn from snowmelt in the Sierras, and even when drought gets pretty bad it's been sustainable. Fingers crossed it will stay that way. Really it's farmers who should pay for water, and hard limits on aquifer withdrawal. They'll hate it but there's not enough to go around and I don't see an alternative. Also worth pointing out that California is an enormous place and what applies to the Central and Imperial Valleys doesn't apply to, say, the San Joaquin Delta. There's no good reason to stop growing rice in the latter, because the acre-feet of water which go into doing so are just going to flow directly into the Bay otherwise. Maybe we could pay for more of it to be diverted into the Central Valley if there was some sort of profit in it. Water auctions, say.
- inetknght 5y ago
  > Eight bucks just for the water to draw a bath? No thanks. That's the cost of living in a desert.
  - whoknowswhat11 5y ago
    It’s a made up number - no one normal uses this much water in a bath
    - admax88q 5y ago
      They pretty clearly confused 0.25 cents with $0.25
      - samatman 5y ago
        Yep that's what happened. In my defense, it's common "greengrocerese" to list a price that way. If limes are shown as "0.10¢ ea." on a handwritten card, you're not getting ten for a penny. I still think taxing residential water is irrelevant, and that the difference between buying water at auction from the state and paying a tax for that water to the state, is that auction is better because price discovery tends to be.
        whoknowswhat11 5y ago
        The idea here is to set what appears to be a ridiculously low tax that applies to everyone. No carvouts so reduces arguments about fairness. This highlight the large water uses (usually free in the millions of gallons). If you aren't willing to say a gallon of water is worth a quarter of a penny - then we can usually stop talking about any supposed shortages. Retail / urban water use (ie, a bottle of water at the store, often 1/8th of a gallon - this tax is irrelevant obviously) already is wildly higher in cost than the "free" groundwater and river water folks are using.
- whoknowswhat11 5y ago
  If you use 3,200 per bath you should be in jail. That is seriously a ridiculous waste of water per bath. That’s years worth of baths for most people - average cost per bath at 0.25 cents per gallon would be 7 cents. Realize farmers use water measured in ACRE feet
bcrosby95 5y ago
Even in the most water efficient cities people use 40 gallons per day. You're talking $10 per person per day just for water. A family of four would spend at least $1,200 per month on water. Even desalination is way cheaper than 25 cents per gallon.
- ridgeguy 5y ago
  I think OP wrote .25¢/gallon, not 25¢/gallon.
- whoknowswhat11 5y ago
  Water would cost $12 per month which is fair and lower than almost all existing urban water costs . A corner store sells water for $$ per gallon. The tax on a bottle would be small fraction of a penny
- mattashii 5y ago
  40 gallons per day, aka roughly 180L. How would I even use that much water? My estimate for own use gets to about 120L, with fairly pessimistically high values: 20L /toilet flush, x 3 30L /shower, 5L /dishes, 20L /laundry x ~ 0.2 1L for drinking What in the world would I need to drain another 40L / 8 gallons into?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - koolba 5y ago
    Own a property with a lawn or garden.
    - FractalParadigm 5y ago
      Sounds like the easiest solution to that is to do-away with non-native plants (i.e. Kentucky bluegrass, which could be considered an invasive species in North America) and do something more along the lines of what the OP did in this Reddit post*[0], a wildflower alternative of all-native plants (and although it's only a small section this year, OP claims their parents have expressed interest in expanding it). It requires basically zero maintenance, and is incredibly beneficial to the local environment. [0]: https://redd.it/oph88p https://redd.it/oph88p *It's pointed out a few times that only a few of the plants are local native species, many aren't North American at all.
dghughes 5y ago
I always find it amazing how bottled water is seen as terrible yet bottles of pop/soda is never spoken about. Pop is 90% to 99% water and far worse for people than just water even the diet types.
- spiderice 5y ago
  I think the answer is that there is no other reasonable way to deliver pop/soda besides bottles. Whereas we have infrastructure for water delivery. I'm a big bottled water drinker, but if I had to make an argument for why bottled water makes less sense than pop/soda, that would be it.

fh973 5y ago

And the alfalfa is exported to Saudi Arabia, which is effectively water export. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/california-water-drought-scarce-saudi-arabia https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/california-w...

Justin_K 5y ago
This is the other perfect example I couldn't find a link quick enough. This is for all intents Saudi sucking up water and putting it on a ship to cross the world, because they depleted their sources. Let's generate some more greenhouse gases to accelerate the temp increases.
tzs 5y ago
99.995% of the water use to grow alfalfa ends up in the local atmosphere, to go wherever the winds and/or diffusion takes it presumably eventually coming back out as rain or dew somewhere. Only 0.005% ends up actually in the alfalfa to be exported to wherever the exported alfalfa goes. Similar for almonds. I don't know the exact amount, but an upper limit is 0.03% of the water exported with the almond, and 99.97% left behind in the local atmosphere or local ground. That upper limit comes from counting the entire mass of the almond as water. There are legitimate grounds to criticize growing high water usage crops in regions that do not have enough water naturally, but exporting water is not one of them.
- phendrenad2 5y ago
  I don't think the atmosphere is as "local" as you imply (diffusion of the water molecules should spread them out of state far faster than they can condense in-state).
- nextaccountic 5y ago
  The issue here isn't physically exporting the water but exporting the externality. It's like investing in a heavily polluting industry is "exporting pollution" - the product itself contains trace of the pollution, but the local damage was done on behalf of the product. I mean, once used this water ain't getting back to the aquifer anytime soon! If it were, we wouldn't be talking about aquifer depletion and there wouldn't be any concern regarding its use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overdrafting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overdrafting

bradleyjg 5y ago

> Abolish the water rights system and auction the water at a reasonable price. This is a good idea but tough to do. Prior appropriation claims are legally considered vested property rights. A good start would be to change the rules in order to make the rights much more transferable. By Coarse’s theorem that should get you to much the same place. The money going to ex-farmers forever is a tough pill to swallow but better that than the status quo.

SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago
We have a very similar problem in Texas. A vast, vast majority of water use (something like 85-90%) in Central Texas is diverted to grow rice, an obviously completely unsustainable crop in Texas given the climate. The farmers, as in California, believe that since they were there first they are entitled to the water and fight tooth and nail any time that someone threatens their usage. Perhaps some agreement that made the water rights expire on death of the farmer would be a compromise that no one would be happy with but possibly stomachable for everyone. Farmers would not get to ensure the livelihood of their children and the rest of Texas would have to wait 40 years, but it could be done without disrupting the current status quo too much.
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  I’m not an expert on the subject but I don’t think Texas is in as much of a bind as California. There are two main water regulation systems in the US: riparian (eastern) and prior appropriation (western). There’s are lots of variations and details but at a very high level the riparian system does not create vested property rights in water and so can be freely tweaked by the government. Prior appropriation, on the other hand, does create vested property rights which are then protected by the 14th amendment. This makes reform much more difficult. Texas, being Texas, has an oddball hybrid system. My understanding is that it uses prior appropriation as an allocation method but riparian (state ownership) as a theoretical underpinning. Thus the Texas government should be able to modify the system without running afoul of the 14th amendment.
  - 5y ago

wiz21c 5y ago

> Abolish the water rights system and auction the water at a reasonable price. If you put a price on water, then soon enough, commercial interest will figure out that you can put a price on any water. Then they'll figure out that the price of water should be at the equilibrium of supply and demand. Then for those for whom the water will be too expensive will have to be subsidized, then in the end society will pay a private company to have access to water. Moreover, the externalities will still be uncounted. Water is a right, not a product. Like air. Create laws to manage it in a reasonable way. For example, prioritize local production over exported production (either through taxes or by subsidizing), make sure soils capture water correctly by helping farmers to handle their soil differently, use water quotas (do we need those 10 cuber meters of water for a swimming pool or for agriculture?), etc. Sounds like communism ? Sure. But water is a common.

MichaelZuo 5y ago
How would you protect any other mechanisms from being gamed to an even higher degree of inequality without using crushing force?
theptip 5y ago
I disagree. I think agricultural water is the perfect use case for a market. Perhaps this is just semantics, but I don’t think you can make an absolute water right; it’s scarce, and farmers are not guaranteed as much water as they want, nor are homeowners guaranteed a right to water their lawns in a drought. Markets are a good way of prioritizing allocation of scarce resources. But I think it’s sensible to have a high-level allocation where first we make sure that there is enough water for people to drink, and if you want to call that your “water right” then I’m on board. We also allocate a bunch of water to recreational and conservation/wildlife purposes, and again I wouldn’t want to auction off all of the national parks of course. But within the (very large) remainder that we allocate to productive usages, I see no reason to get in the way of the invisible hand. If almonds are higher yield than alfalfa then we should not divert water from almonds to alfalfa. A liquid (pardon the pun) market would make these allocations more efficient.

lrdswrk00 5y ago

Conversion of water into money is arbitrary; people need to eat. Food isn’t a luxury. It’s a biological necessity and it need not be coupled to financial markets. We’ll grow food because we must. Remember; fiscal economics were sold to a dumber general public by then poorer educated, yet rich, men. Anyone clinging to their ways as an economic philosophy is effectively letting people who hadn’t come up with indoor plumbing dictate who we are.

username90 5y ago
You can just use less water hungry crops for that, would also greatly reduce the risks of a drought. The reason it isn't done now is that water hungry crops pays better and farmers doesn't pay the real cost of the water.
only_as_i_fall 5y ago
Ok and what's the plan when California's groundwater is depleted?
- lrdswrk00 5y ago
  That’s up to the people occupying California at the time. Humanity is doomed. I’m not saying we should accelerate it by leaning into YOLO. But along with accepting our own personal mortality we might consider it’s time to socially accept our species mortality. We don’t need to solve this problem right now and any work towards a solution isn’t guaranteed to last beyond our lifetimes, for numerous reasons outside our control. Science provides the best model for understanding what economic activity our environment can sustain. Maybe it’s time to be the exceptional and gritty people we tell stories about being and rather than solve California’s eventual problem, try to hold it off by reducing or eliminating markets for bullshit. Or we can pretend we’ll engineer our way out of a problem we have no idea how much time we really have to solve and cross our fingers like it’s a football game and feudal market economics thinking we’re simulating chaotic reality when it’s obvious political collusion and protectionism are occurring. I wonder which way we’ll go
  - 5y ago

kolbe 5y ago

Alfalfa is a rotation crop. No one grows alfalfa for the sake of selling it as feed. They grow it so they can grow something that makes money a year or two later without destroying their soil.

mannykannot 5y ago
In that case, one should add the water consumption of growing the alfalfa to that of growing the cash crop directly, and similarly add whatever value (monetarily or otherwise) the alfalfa has to that of the cash crop - in other words, consider them together as a unit of production. I have no idea whether this results in a currently-justifiable practice, but it is a simple fact that change is going to be forced on agriculture (and all of us, as its dependents), one way or another.
theptip 5y ago
Citation? This seems to directly contradict your claim: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/mar/08/saudi-arabia-alfalfa-california-drought-almarai https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/mar/08...
watersb 5y ago
I know lots of people who grow only alfalfa out here. Some are family members. They sell it as feed, or rent out a field. Small farms. Less than 600 acres. Not much water, here.
- kolbe 5y ago
  My grandpa was from a similar area (the Tulelake basin), and before they had trouble with water rights, alfalfa was exclusively a rotation crop, but you are correct that when water becomes scarce, that it falls into a category of the only thing that can grow reliably. California is not a truly water scarce place kind of place--water is just political these days.
mythrwy 5y ago
That's not the case at all. Some fields remain alfalfa for long periods of time and it's a very lucrative crop.

mark_l_watson 5y ago

+1 exactly right. If we had to pay the real cost of beef, there would be much less eaten. The amount the the US taxpayer gives each year to the beef industry is staggering. Down with beef industry socialism - make them compete on the open market.

Justin_K 5y ago

The question I have is do we need the volumes of water intensive crops? When a large portion of those crops are exported, is it any different than bottling water and exporting it?